- 7 weeks ago
A 284ft wooden skyscraper built from 1,200 bespoke pieces tests fire safety limits in Milwaukee. A decaying Amsterdam crane track transforms into elegant glass offices. And a needle-thin tower stacks 28 apartments onto a 21ft-wide plot in Melbourne.
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00:00How do you build a luxury high-rise out of 1,200 pieces of wood that won't go up
00:07in flames? Nobody to date had tried to build mass timber at any kind of height
00:13at least in the US. How do you save a piece of decaying inner-city dockland by
00:20creating cutting-edge offices the length of a city block? I told them I like to
00:26build on the track. I said you can't demolish history. And how do you pull
00:31off constructing the tallest building on the smallest footprint in the world? We
00:38sort of thought, well, why not 20, why not 30, why not 40 stories? You know, how high
00:41could we actually go? Welcome to a world where anything is possible.
00:49The space where innovation and creativity collide.
00:53This isn't just impressive, it's revolutionary. Where the only limit is
01:00human imagination. This wasn't just ambitious, it was audacious. No one had
01:07ever attempted anything like it. Unpacking the miracles and mysteries of
01:14construction. Sometimes buildings can change the world. And this is one of them.
01:24To ask, how did they build that?
01:31When was the last time you saw a skyscraper made of wood?
01:34I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous. There's a reason skyscrapers aren't made from wood. Just like
01:40there's a reason cars aren't made from, say, cookie dough. But harness the latest technology,
01:45and it turns out anything would be possible.
01:52As populations grow and space runs short, we're no longer building out. We're building up.
01:59And after a century of skyscraper construction, we're pretty sure what they should be made of.
02:07There are, generally speaking, two types of tall buildings.
02:10Office buildings are built out of steel, and tall residential buildings are typically built out of
02:16post-tension or cast-in-place concrete. They're materials we've grown to trust and rely on for very
02:23good reasons. The Great Fire of Chicago in 1871 saw over 17,000 buildings burnt to the ground.
02:33300 people lost their lives. And that changed regulations, so all buildings had to be built with
02:40fireproof material. Along with strength and flexibility, this made concrete and steel pretty
02:48much perfect building materials. Shaping the way cities have been built across the U.S. But there is a cost.
02:57Producing concrete and steel is responsible for about 15 percent of the world's CO2 emissions.
03:02So it's massively important for our future that we find alternatives.
03:08In the 2010s, Tim Gachman is eyeing up a plot ripe for development and makes a move that could do exactly that.
03:17We wanted to build a luxury high-rise apartment building in Milwaukee. The initial designs were concrete.
03:25But in 2017, I read an online article about a mass timber tower, and that got our imagination going.
03:35What if you could build skyscrapers out of wood? It's readily available, renewable, cost-effective,
03:42and beautiful. Doing it with box standard timber would be challenging, to say the least.
03:48It's highly flammable. You need huge lengths of super straight timber, and it isn't reliably strong.
03:55But in Europe, they were building with a material called mass timber.
04:04Mass timber construction has been around probably since the early 1990s.
04:08The idea being that there aren't a lot of very large trees, so sometimes it's challenging to incorporate
04:13heavy timber. But if you can take smaller trees, glue them together, manufacture them,
04:18you can create these mass timber, larger elements for construction. Imagine, if you will, a sort of super timber.
04:26It's made by gluing together multiple layers of wood under pressure. So what you end up with
04:32is even stronger than regular timber. In fact, it can even be stronger than steel.
04:38Despite the fact that no one makes mass timber at this scale in the US, and it doesn't pass the fire
04:44codes for tall buildings there, Tim decides it's a really good idea to build a 284-foot-tall luxury
04:52apartment skyscraper in the heart of downtown Milwaukee. It'll be called Ascent Tower.
04:58That's if they can convince everyone a wooden skeleton will be strong enough and won't be a fire risk.
05:07Having figured out how to create a solid foundation for the tower that also allows for six levels of
05:13parking, they'll need to organize the 1,200 individually made pieces of this mass timber jigsaw puzzle,
05:22ready to slide into place. And they'll need to be prepared because in theory, it could go up pretty quickly.
05:31Then it will be covered in glass, creating an extraordinary and unique tower.
05:39That's if the authorities will let them build it.
05:42Nobody to date had tried to build mass timber at any kind of height in the US.
05:47In fact, building codes don't exist for a tower like this.
05:54The class of construction that this building would fall into would be limited to five floors of timber
06:00framing and up to 85 feet in total height. This building needs to be almost 200 feet taller.
06:08So that means convincing the city to change the rules. If you can prove that you're as safe or safer than those
06:16more well understood construction typologies, then they can allow you a path to approval.
06:23So the good news is it's not impossible.
06:26But the path to approval means proving that the wood won't burn.
06:33Effectively, we took different samples of different mass timber members,
06:38and they put them in a furnace so that they could measure how quickly did that char rate grow.
06:44If it burns too fast, the whole project could go up in flames.
06:48What we have here is one of nine glue laminated columns that was placed into a burn chamber,
06:56and then was subjected to fires for three hours of approximately 1100 degrees Fahrenheit.
07:02And what they found was that the center of the column remained at 75 degrees Fahrenheit.
07:06That temperature is important because that's the temperature at which the wooden side is still
07:09structurally viable. So from a structural engineering perspective, there's enough area left on the
07:15inside after this charge to hold up the structure. It's great news, and there's more to come.
07:22Amazingly, they found that mass timber is more predictable in a blaze than steel.
07:32Char actually protects and insulates the material. So the inside of the wood is at a reasonable
07:37temperature, maintains its structural integrity. Naturally, plants contain something called lignin in
07:43their cell walls, and that's what gives wood its strength. It also turns out that lignin is extremely
07:50heat resistant. So burnt wood on the outside protects the timber inside. It's a big win for the team.
08:00Now they just need a mass timber manufacturer who can take on the job.
08:04There wasn't really capacity in the US to produce this volume of mass timber at one time. And so
08:14ultimately, our partners led us to fabricators in Austria, which is actually generally where this
08:20technology sort of emerged in the late 80s and early 90s. This construction method is so precisely
08:27prepared that a mass timber home like the German Huff House can be assembled in a matter of days.
08:35You are meticulously designing every last detail of the entire building beforehand. Applying this
08:43technique to ascent could see the building fly up, provided they get every detail right. Whether it's ducks,
08:51risers, pipes, shafts, you can imagine if those are not in the right spot, there's going to be some
08:56challenges, there's going to be some rework, there's going to be some problems.
09:01In October 2020, work starts on the concrete foundation. And even here, the upside of mass
09:08timber starts to show. One of the big benefits of mass timber is that it weighs so much less than if
09:15you were reusing traditional materials. So the foundations don't have to be as strong to do the job.
09:22We had to drive 100 fewer piles than we would have if this had been a concrete
09:26building, which immediately saved a month on the project schedule.
09:31Now they can start building upwards. Because the first six stories are entirely open to the elements,
09:38they decide to keep it old school. The bottom six stories of ascent are parking structures.
09:44If you thought hypothetically, could you have done it out of mass timber? The answer is yes,
09:48structurally. However, when you're talking about parking, particularly being in Milwaukee,
09:52we have cold winters, it would be additional cost, additional maintenance over the life of the
09:57structure that versus a post-tension concrete structure. Then in June 2021, the fun begins
10:06as the team turns its attention to the timber tower.
10:09Building with mass timber can be over 25% faster than regular construction. But to pull that off,
10:19everything needs to be planned with military precision. Including dealing with the 1,273 pieces of mass
10:28timber that are on their way to the US. One big problem with downtown sites is space. Where do you put
10:39all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle?
10:41In Milwaukee, the team building America's first wooden skyscraper is working out where to hold over
10:531,000 unique pieces of mass timber before they're moved to site. We're so close to the port of Milwaukee,
11:01so the port could actually hold the pieces. Which means on site, they're only dealing with the next
11:07piece of the puzzle. They could actually bring a semi that day of the exact parts and pieces they
11:12need, drop them off out front, have the crane pick them up, and then put them on top on the level they
11:17were working on. A team of up to 50 workers constructed the six concrete floors. For the remaining 19,
11:26it's a different matter altogether. We had a 12-man crew for the entire duration of the mass timber,
11:35and that consisted of five carpenters, five iron workers, and two laborers.
11:41But installing the two and a half thousand beams and columns does take some pretty serious screws.
11:48So this is a 16 and 7 eighths screw, and this was one of the more typical screws that we had.
11:57Each floor requires around 1,200 of these screws to hold it together.
12:03Some of the screws were so long, they'd only be able to drive 10 screws before the battery would
12:10need to be swapped out. In order to keep the project on schedule, the team comes up with a clever solution.
12:17The guys came up with these charging stations that were essentially mobile.
12:23Despite needing over 12,000 battery recharges for the drills, to fasten the 122,000 screws,
12:33the building races up. What we found is that it took seven months to build 19 floors of mass timber
12:41with less than a quarter of the labor. So the level of acceleration in the construction was spectacular.
12:50By winter 2021, Ascent is quickly approaching its 290-foot limit, when the team grabs the chance,
13:00not just to be a first for America, but for the world.
13:06Once we found out that we were within about three feet of the world record, I went to the development
13:11team and I said, on the top floor of the building, we should make the roof do this.
13:15And there it is. The final piece is set on December 17th, 2021, just in time for the holidays.
13:27For construction manager Chris and his team, it's been a transformational experience.
13:32You know, it's something that I'll never forget and Ascent is living proof that you can build a high
13:39rise out of timber. And in doing so, perhaps it'll change the way other buildings are made in the U.S.
13:46Who knows where a rekindled love affair with wood could lead?
13:51Our goal is to build the best building possible and decrease the use of concrete and steel.
13:58Over 25 stories with 259 luxury apartments and a pool on the seventh floor,
14:05this manages to be high in living with a low carbon impact.
14:11Both concrete and steel have astonishingly large carbon footprints. Mass timber goes somewhat
14:18the opposite way in that it is in fact a carbon sink rather than a carbon producer.
14:25It may have taken time to embrace the idea of a timber tower,
14:29but Ascent gives a glimpse into what the future may hold.
14:35There are so many benefits from a sustainability perspective that
14:38it just makes sense to utilize mass timber, so to be a part of that is really an honor.
14:57They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that's certainly true for buildings.
15:01What might start out as an eyesore can, with time, blossom into the most
15:06unexpected beautiful bloom, like an industrial duckling transforming into a swan. Case in point,
15:12this once ugly dockside relic now stands as a stunning vision of the future.
15:16This is Kranspor, a transparent office, the length of a typical Manhattan block,
15:28built on top of old shipyard crane tracks in the Netherlands. It will take 10 years to create,
15:36means fighting off a demolition order and cost 37 million U.S. dollars. But it's a shining example
15:43of what derelict docks around the world could become.
15:46Because most of the city ports that were once the arteries of trade throughout the world,
15:54are now relics of a bygone era.
15:57After World War II, supertankers transformed shipping. But their massive size required
16:06deep water channels. Old dockyards just couldn't keep up, leaving them abandoned and crumbling.
16:13By the early 1980s, the maritime city of Amsterdam is full of decaying dockyards.
16:20All that remained were rusting machinery and rotting buildings. In the mid-90s,
16:26after years of being a derelict industrial zone, the city has plans to clear the docks.
16:33But local architect Truda Hoykus has a different idea.
16:39I took my bicycle. It was a Sunday. It was August. It was very warm, 30 degrees. And there was a track
16:48with two cranes on it. Where the city sees a rotting, disused port crane line,
16:54Hoykus spots something special. It was magic. I thought, no, it's not, it's not true. I have to build on it.
17:07I will do it immediately.
17:08The rebirth of Amsterdam's crane track, known as Kranspor, will be understated and elegant.
17:18With three stories of modern glass offices sitting over the river, it will honor the past and the
17:24future. Though there will be many hurdles to overcome. First, they'll have to remove the two
17:32disintegrating cranes without destroying the entire structure. And they'll have to repair the ancient
17:38foundation submerged five feet below in the riverbed. Then they need to work out how to put a 5,000 ton
17:48office building on top of legs designed to carry a fraction of that weight. Finally, they'll wrap the
17:56office in heat trapping glass, preserving energy as well as history. But none of this is going to be easy.
18:04This is monumental. An extraordinary vision, not just of reclamation, but of preserving a vital piece
18:12of Amsterdam's past. Kranspor is set for destruction at the end of 1997. First, we had to fight against
18:24the permit of demolition. It was a race against time. Kuda marches to Amsterdam city council to make her case.
18:33I told them I like to build on the track. Oh no, it's out of the question. Why? Because we are going to
18:43demolish it. I said, you can't demolish history because it's a part of the harbor. It's the part of
18:51Amsterdam. They thought she's crazy. It takes over four years of lobbying before the city agrees
19:01on the condition that Truda can find someone to fund her vision. After that, we made a huge model.
19:10And ING real estate said, okay, we are going to build. The budget to bring the crane tracks into
19:17the 21st century is 37 million US dollars. But not all of it can be saved.
19:26The cranes were in a bad condition. They were not maintained. So it's erosion, rust.
19:36The risk of wind blowing them off was too, yeah, that was too risky.
19:43Too dangerous to try and disassemble. The team looks to an old school method to take them down,
19:49dynamite. A single mistake here would have been devastating. Cranes crashing into the ports.
19:57Or worse, demolishing the concrete structure itself.
20:01In Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the team transforming an old crane track on the River Eye into a state
20:11of the art office building has called in explosive experts to carefully remove the cranes on top.
20:17Explosives are actually a precise tool when used right. There's an old technique where they hollow out
20:23the area to be demolished, then pack it with metal to focus the blast.
20:27The team must work out where to place the explosives to within an eighth of an inch.
20:32They lay the charges, clear the area, then...
20:42I was on a bit of a distance and I saw the two cranes like in slow motion.
20:49Yeah, it was strange to see.
21:02It was also sad. The beautiful cranes like enormous birds fell down. There was just silence.
21:12As the dust settles, the team assesses the rest of the structure.
21:23We know the concrete was in some places not in too good condition. You can see on its surface,
21:30it's a bit of a white spot, but you don't know how deep it is within the concrete itself.
21:36The symptoms point to one thing. Concrete cancer, also known as ASR, alkaline silica reaction,
21:46occurs when stone and sand in concrete react with cement, absorbing water,
21:52causing it to crack and break apart over time.
21:57That was a very scary moment because we didn't know if we could preserve the whole building.
22:04One of the politicians called me. Hey, Trudy, what about Cransport? Oh, it's fine. I'm just
22:13talking with a big fella, but it was not true at all. I lied because I don't want to lose their
22:20faith in the project. So I lied. The only way to know if the project can go ahead is to see how deep
22:30the concrete cancer goes. Drilling through concrete this dense requires serious firepower.
22:38A deep diamond tip drill is key. And it's not just concrete. It's also reinforced with steel,
22:46which helps the structure to hold more weight. If you cut that steel, the whole thing could buckle.
22:53To ensure that doesn't happen, the team brings out another tool from their arsenal. Ground
23:02penetrating radar. By using that, you can know where the reinforcement is and then you also know
23:08where to drill and where not to drill. Over the next three weeks, they take 24 samples,
23:15carefully managing to avoid damaging the steel rebar inside, which are then analyzed. Thankfully,
23:25it's good news. The investigation showed that the structure, it was, well, quite okay.
23:31The source was underneath the rail for the grain track. And so it was removed. If the impact would
23:38have been worse, the transport project would have been dead. While they repair the concrete cancer,
23:46the engineers move on to the next challenge. When you build on top of this structure, 270 meters
23:54and three floors high, the wind is going to push against the building, which of course we had to do
24:03something about the foundation. Along with the weight of the new building, the additional area
24:10being hit by the wind will put some pretty serious extra forces on the foundation. Submerged five feet
24:17underwater, the team constructs a cofferdam around the building and pumps the water out so they can be
24:24assessed. We could walk on the ground of the river die, which was very fascinating. There on the riverbed,
24:35they uncover the pile caps. Pile caps take the weight of Kranzpore's massive columns and spread it across
24:42deep piles in the river eye. But Kranzpore is about to get a lot heavier and that's a problem.
24:49The reinforcement in those pile caps was not sufficient to deal with the new loads on the structure.
25:00If the caps aren't strengthened, they might split under the weight. We had to make a steel corset
25:07around the foundation itself because otherwise it could split. Then the plan is to encase them in fresh
25:16concrete and even that's not easy. Layering new concrete on old is incredibly difficult. It's not
25:23like glue. You can end up with two blocks that aren't bonded and if river water gets in between,
25:29the whole structure could break apart. To make sure it was a right connection between the two parts of it,
25:36the new and the old part. We washed it with high pressure water to make sure every bit was clean,
25:43you know. Once they've got rid of all the river slime, they have to roughen the concrete surface
25:51to give the new concrete something to latch onto. The men were all dirty, you know, when they came out.
25:58It was not a nice job to deal with, but we had to do it. As the engineers finish stabilizing the
26:06structure, Truda is reassessing her design. I was looking at it and I thought, what's missing? What's
26:14missing? It's missing space. It's not interesting to put a volume on it. You have to make a volume
26:26floating. But floating the office building will concentrate the weight onto specific points,
26:33rather than spreading it across the structure. So we had to reduce the weight to 50%.
26:46In Amsterdam, the team behind the redevelopment of an old Dockland crane track must have the weight
26:53of the new office building that will float above it. It's a massive challenge, starting with the steel
27:01structure. H beams are super efficient. They're strong without using more steel than needed,
27:10which makes them lighter. In September, the team installs the first H beams. But on their own,
27:18these won't reduce the weight enough. They have to find more and turn to the floors, because these are
27:25usually made from reinforced concrete. And that's seriously heavy. So we found this hollow floor with
27:34steel beams. And then you reduce a lot of amount of weight. Sections of this lightweight flooring are
27:41prefabricated offsite. When they arrive, the construction team is amazed. It was possible to handle with one man,
27:51one floor, never any heavier than 50 kilograms. It's like a Lego system. It's done in a couple of months.
28:07In April 2007, the team is ready to put the finishing touches on this featherweight facility.
28:13130,000 square feet of glass. Well, glass is great because it solves the weight problem,
28:21but it creates another problem. Sun coming into the building. Wrap a building in glass and you basically
28:28build a giant greenhouse. Sun light gets in and heats everything up, but that heat has nowhere to escape.
28:35To prevent the building from becoming a heat trap, the team turns to an innovative new building technique.
28:41To deal with that problem, we have the special double skin facade. It's fritted glass with a screening on it
28:52to protect the building from the sun, but to have enough daylight coming in. It's an ingenious system
29:00where the gap between the two layers of the facade acts like a buffer, preventing heat gain in the summer
29:07and heat loss in the winter. It's also the finishing touch to Kranspor's reinvention.
29:16In 2007, Truda's redeveloped office is complete and the ugly duckling has become a swan.
29:26Kranspor proves you don't have to flatten history to move forward. You can build right on top of it.
29:31Narrowly avoiding demolition? Kranspor has a new purpose.
29:40It was our fight to retain this building. When I visited for the first time, it wasn't wasteland or
29:49enormous land. Now you see students, creative industry and housing.
29:56It's incredible to work at Kranspor. When I first saw the building, I was like, wow,
30:02you don't see this quite often. I actually thought it was awesome.
30:06A developer told me, you are too stubborn. And he was right. Never give up.
30:16Kranspor, it's an icon. It's an act of sustainability to preserve. You have to know where you come from.
30:26You can't make future that's not rooted in the past. Amsterdam doesn't exist at all without the water.
30:49Melbourne, Australia is buzzing, bustling and above all, busy. So when they wanted to create a stunning
30:55residential building in the city's business district, there were two simple rules. You can't build out,
31:00so you got to go up. It's 2010 and Melbourne developer Peter Hart is looking to fulfill a
31:09childhood dream. Ever since I was young, I've been interested in tall buildings. In my early 20s,
31:14I went to New York, went to the World Trade Center, went to the Rockefeller Center at the same time.
31:19I looked up and just loved the concept of tall buildings. Peter's love of towers agrees with the
31:27changing needs of a growing city. In order to combat urban sprawl, Melbourne actually came up with a plan
31:35for the future of the city in 2002. Part of their solution is encouraging high-density development in
31:43key areas like the city center. The challenge for a small developer is finding an affordable site
31:50to build big on. They're rare. When they come up, you've got to be ready to act. So when Peter finds
31:56an old pub on a tiny plot just 20 feet wide, he sees the opportunity to create something special.
32:04When I look at building sites as a developer, I look at the gaps. I look at what's not there.
32:09The problem is that to make the figures add up, Peter has to build big on the tiny plot. And that
32:15means one thing. The reason we built so tall is to maximize the land value. The taller it was,
32:21the more feasible it was going to be at the end of the day. So I had to think out of the box.
32:26Luckily, he turns to architect James Pierce, who loves nothing more than a challenge.
32:32The pub actually was a three-story building and Peter came into the office thinking it might be
32:39able to get a few more levels on it, about 10 stories. But we sort of thought, well, why not
32:4320? Why not 30? Why not 40 stories? You know, how high could we actually go?
32:47So once I bought the site, I had my own concept of what I wanted to do. I'm an engineer. My projects
32:53need architecture to make them work. So we sat down together at a cafe near the site with a piece of
32:58paper and a pencil and he drew the tower and I was sold.
33:04The building's success rests on something engineers call slenderness. How slender a building is
33:12determines how stable it is or not. The key to skyscraper design comes down to one thing,
33:20the ratio of height to width. For instance, the Empire State Building is about three times
33:25taller than its base width. That's pretty stable and balanced. But when you have something extreme,
33:31like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is nearly nine times taller than it is wide, that's really
33:38pushing the limits. Building slender brings with it its own set of challenges. And at about 290 feet
33:45high and 21 feet wide, Phoenix Tower is definitely going to be that. We put out our iPhones and we
33:53realize that the dimensions or the slenderness of an iPhone is about 11 to 1. And so you can get a
34:00good picture of what the tower's going to look like and it's pretty slender when you hold your phone up.
34:07And it will be a first because this has never been done on a site of this size.
34:13The 28-story high-rise will have a single apartment on each floor.
34:17The starting point, as with any building, will be laying a solid foundation.
34:24But with barely enough room to move, the challenge will be how to do it.
34:30Then they need to work out how to make the tower tough enough so despite being slender,
34:36it stands up and also leaves enough room inside for someone to live.
34:40Then they must provide on-site parking with no basement to put a garage. They also need to stop
34:48it from swaying in the wind. A particular problem with slender towers. And they need to make it look
34:55beautiful. It's a list as tall as the building. There were many risky construction techniques that made
35:03things very difficult. Despite the obvious constraints, on March 23, 2012, work begins
35:11demolishing the old pub. And the team is thinking about the challenges ahead.
35:18At the time, it was the tallest building on the smallest footprint in the world.
35:23Looking at the building, it just intrigued me as a real challenge.
35:27The first of which is how to construct the foundation. There's very large forces from the
35:35tall, skinny structure at the base. And thus, piles were needed. In fact, they were going to need to
35:41create 21 piles going 50 feet into the ground. But the tiny site throws up the first of many issues.
35:51The piling rigs are large. And the piling rigs really had a lot of trouble fitting into this site.
35:56It's beginning to look like the team has bitten off more than they can chew.
36:01We're up against the old buildings. And they're very fragile. And the risks look great.
36:07The foundation is everything. And just one mistake could compromise the stability of the entire building.
36:18In Melbourne, Australia, the team behind building the tallest tower on the smallest footprint
36:24must find a way to drill 21 foundation piles into a plot just 20 feet wide without damaging the surrounding buildings.
36:36The key to everything here was about sequencing work in that confined space.
36:40The machinery obviously needed to swing and rotate to drill the holes. So the sequencing of each pile was quite complex.
36:52In July 2012, after four months of careful maneuvering and piling, they face the next challenge.
37:01The skyscrapers are very sensitive in terms of their stiffness and strength.
37:05Most skyscrapers rely on a slender concrete column right down the middle, like a strong backbone holding everything upright.
37:14But there's a problem with doing that here.
37:18The reality is in this building, at 6.7 meters wide, the space is at a premium.
37:24A traditional core will take up too much room. So they turn the problem inside out.
37:33Basically, this whole building is one big core.
37:37Instead of a core wall in the middle, they use the building's exterior walls.
37:40And to make it even stronger, some of the interior walls will act as bracing.
37:44It's a clever engineering solution that allows them to maximize the floor space while giving the tower its strength.
37:50But now, they have to build it. The issue is constructing towers means using cranes.
37:58Pragmatically, there is no way a crane could have gone external of the building on that site.
38:05The only place the crane can fit is inside the structure.
38:11Which in itself presented a number of challenges, purely because of the size.
38:16With the crane taking up valuable space, they have to build around it, one floor at a time,
38:24using a clever system called JumpForm.
38:27They built these structures using huge molds, basically massive forms that they fill with concrete.
38:33Once it hardens, powerful hydraulic rams push the entire mold up to the next level,
38:39and they repeat the process over and over, all the way to the top.
38:46The engineering of this JumpForm was just amazing because as the building jumped up,
38:51they still needed to lower through that JumpForm precast panels and other elements
38:56that would make up the internal structure of the building.
39:00Floor by floor, the structure takes shape.
39:04And the team turns its attention to their next challenge.
39:07Where do you put 27 car parking spaces when there's no basement?
39:12Peter's determined that the team finds a way.
39:15At the very beginning of the project, we had a rather wild idea,
39:19which was that people might drive in onto a car lift and get lifted up to their apartment
39:24and then drive their car onto a balcony.
39:27Get out of your car and into your front door.
39:32The solution they settle on is just as nuts.
39:36The rear of the building was designed as a car stacker system.
39:39The cars are stacked mechanically and then delivered back to the base,
39:44turned in a turntable and exiting the building.
39:47This will be Melbourne's first fully automatic parking system,
39:51with spaces for cars stacked on 13 levels.
39:55It will also be designed and built in Germany, 10,000 miles away.
40:02They make their own steel in Stuttgart.
40:03They make their own motors up the road in Stuttgart.
40:05Everything comes out of Germany straight to here.
40:09While that's going on, in Melbourne, the structure reaches its full 290 feet.
40:14And the downside of using an external concrete core becomes evident.
40:19From an architectural point of view, it was what to do with those side walls.
40:23They should have some sort of texture or pattern to them.
40:26They can't just be plain.
40:27A graphic designer that we really love working with is a guy called Gary.
40:31So we invited him to have a think about what sort of pattern or graphic
40:35might go on the sides of the building.
40:37Gary's big idea is to create a weaving ribbon of blue steel running up the building.
40:44Though nobody's quite sure why.
40:46When you press Gary for what's the blue ribbon about,
40:49and he sort of shrugs his shoulders and he's not really sure.
40:52And we said, well, could it be like a city skyline sort of turned on its side?
40:57And he said, yeah, it could be that.
40:59So where the balconies stick out, the ribbon sort of grabs them
41:03so that it's not just purely stuck on the building, it's an integrated part.
41:06And it has some lighting behind it at night so that it sort of glows.
41:09In 2014, 23 months after the first piles were sunk, the phoenix is finally finished.
41:20The whole process was a great dream come true.
41:24It was a great success.
41:25Measuring 28 stories tall, the 28 luxury apartments also offer a state-of-the-art car parking system.
41:36Ingeniously built inside a 20-foot cylinder.
41:39I think it's the coolest mechanical device I've ever seen.
41:44You know, you park your car, you get out, you swipe and you go to your apartment.
41:48Little knowing that your car's going to be put away, it could be 10 stories in the air.
41:51And when you come back down, you swipe again and it presents itself to turned around, ready to drive out.
42:06If there's one thing about slender buildings, they move more than other towers in the wind.
42:11To compensate, the phoenix has an 8,000-gallon liquid-tuned mass damper,
42:17which for the most part seems to be doing its job.
42:19The only time I can recall one of the residents saying that they noticed the sway of the building
42:26was on some windy nights and there was a pendant light over a round dining table.
42:31You would actually see the pendant just very slowly moving.
42:35So when we're designing tall, skinny buildings, we shouldn't have chandeliers or hanging lights.
42:41We should have them all fixed.
42:42Above all, the slender phoenix with its distinctive blue steel ribbon
42:48makes a big impression on its much bigger neighbours.
42:52The funny thing about this building is when I'm walking along the street,
42:55I do hear people say, wow, look at that building.
42:59And then I almost want to say to them, I live there.
43:02We had always considered living in this building.
43:06We actually drove past it many times whilst it was being constructed.
43:10There's so much natural light comes in from all directions throughout the day.
43:14The fact that you get more than a 180 degree view down to docklands through to the parklands is quite amazing.
43:22I think the phoenix building has set an interesting challenge to the industry.
43:30How do we build difficult buildings in tight contexts that stack up economically?
43:38With his dream realised, Peter's not looking to take the credit.
43:42I won't be remembered as the developers, like you don't remember who commissioned the Mona Lisa.
43:50So I think the phoenix tower will survive, you know, as the architect's building and not mine.
43:55And I'm okay with that.
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