Shanghai Tower Despite its short existence as a structure on this planet, the Shanghai Tower has already become an architectural marvel. Located in China, it is the tallest building in the country, the second-largest in the world, it executes a 120 degree turn as it ascends from the bottom to the top and it makes use of nearly four dozen sustainable technologies at the same time. This report will detail where precisely the building is located, when it was built, who designed the structure, who constructed the structure, the engineers that were involved, the technical details of the project, the temporary measures that were used to construct the building and why the building is considered (or should be considered) one of the architectural marvels of the world. While there are other impressive buildings and structures out there, the Shanghai Tower certain deserves its own mention and it is also most certainly among the elite man-made structures in the world.

Analysis

Structure Involved & Key Information

As indicated already, the Shanghai Tower is in China. To be more specific, the structure is in the Pudong District. There is an area within the Pudong District that is known as the Luliazui Finance and Trade Zone and that specific area is where the tower is located. Construction of the tower began in late 2008 and was just completed last summer, in 2015. The firm that was behind the architecture was an American company by the name of Gensler. However, the architect that led the designing of the building was Chinese, that being Jun Xia. There were a total of three engineering firms involved in the projected. Those firms were Consentini Associates, IDEA Ecological Solutions and Thornton Tomasetti. The main contractor that was involved in the construction of the tower was Shanghai Construction Group.

Technical Details

The technical details that deserve mention when it comes to the Shanghai Tower are numerous and they all deserve their own mention. The total area of the site is about 7.5 acres. This comes out to about 30,370 square meters. The tower itself is a total of 2,073 feet tall, which is about 632 meters. The amount of area that is above grade is about 410,000 square meters (4.4 million square feet) and the amount of area below grade is about 166,000 square meters (about 1.8 million square feet). The building contains a number of different real estate types and they include offices, luxury hotel space, entertainment venues, retail and cultural venues. The podium of the building is 36.9 meters, or about 121 feet tall. About five stories of the podium are above grade. The area of the podium is about 46,000 square meters, which is not quite half a million square feet. The podium area has retail, banking, restaurants, conference areas, meeting spaces and banquet facilities. The areas below grade include more retail area, nearly two thousand parking spaces and service/MEP functions. As noted earlier, the Shanghai Tower is the tallest building in China and it is the second-tallest in the world. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the only structure that is taller than the Shanghai tower at this time.

Significant Temporary Construction Structures

The building of the tower was no small thing. However, there was certainly a system to it. For the core of the tower, a repeated "slip-forming" process was used. This process was repeated over and over as each floor came together. The shape of the building was based on wind tunnel tests as compared by one of the main engineering firms involved, that being Thornton Tomasetti. The extensive work done on that subject before the building was even erected led to a structure that reduced the wind loads on the building by nearly a fourth, right at 24%. There was also the use, again in advance, of parametric software. It was found that traditional computer-aided tools would have been cumbersome when it came to designing such a building. However, the parametric software allowed Gensler to create a system that helped balance performance, maintenance, constructability and overall design aesthetics and details. The use of lasers on the construction site were used to measure and verify tolerances. In total, there were 20,589 wall panels made and there were more than seven thousand different shapes out of that larger hole. While building the structure, a third of all of the area was always reserved for "green" space. As will be covered later in this report, sustainable energy and other technologies are a staple of...

Just one example of how the construction crew had to account for "green" areas is that there are gardens littered throughout the building. Each of those areas require their own resources and structures to be in place.
As far as the real challenges that the construction company and personnel had to face, the height of the building alone presented a challenged because that alone presents problems relating to its safety, stability and performance. Further, any and all imperfections with the building can lead to additional stresses and permanent deformations while the building is in its service stage. Given that, it was a challenge of the construction personnel to keep the strain and stress of all of the different components within acceptable and permissible ranges. There was also the concern of non-uniform and/or excessive settlement around the foundation. If that had happened during construction, it would have made the entire building less stable. There was also the challenge of estimating and otherwise accounting for wind loads on the building. While the design of the building was specifically meant to keep this in mind, it was still nonetheless a factor while the building was being erected. Further, a building this tall has major potential issues with things such as simple shear type, flexural type, flexural-shear type and so forth. As such, there was the use of eight independent strengthening floors to help mitigate this as a problem. To help keep swaying to a minimum, there was the use of tower and inter-story drifts under wind, earthquake and temperature shifts during and after construction was completed. As a bit of a safety mechanism, the movements of the building can be checked in two horizontal directions and the rotation around the center can also be calculated.

Another extraordinary and unique facet of the construction of the Shanghai tower was the length of the bored piles used to support the building. Indeed, the piles for the Shanghai tower are considered to be "super-long" as they are larger than fifty meters in length. Making such long piles is not the easiest thing to pull off as maintaining and upholding quality is less than easy in many instances. However, the constructors of the Shanghai Tower dealt with this by using the adoption of post-grouting and this allowed the pile tip resistance and the pile shaft friction to be increased by a significant amount. The sand layers in the tower's foundation are sixty meters thick and there are a total of 831 reinforced concrete bore piles. The constructors used C50 grade concrete and there had to be continuous pours of more than sixty hours, which is two and a half days in a row. That pour led to the creation of an area that was 61,000 cubic meters and a mat that was six meters thick. That concrete pour by itself broke a world record given that it occurred in one single pass rather than being broken up into segments of lesser time or the volume of concrete being poured.

The management of the project broke everything into three main phases, those being the tower's steel reinforcement work, the construction of the concrete core and then the framing of the floors, in that order. Management vis-a-vis the construction of the tower also came in the form of actions from the local and national politicians in China and the Pudong area. For example, there were street cracks observed in January 2012 in the Pudong area. Of course, this was during the construction of the tower, which had begun in 2008 but did not finish until 2015. Ultimately, the very heavy weight of the tower as it was being constructed was deemed to be at least one of the main causes. However, further analysis revealed that too much water being pumped out of the area was a bigger issue and the Chinese government helped counteract this by pumping in about 60,000 tons of water into the aquifers.

Justification for being considered "Great Structure"

Based on what has been stated already, the Shanghai Tower is clearly a "great structure." However, the prior items mentioned will be mentioned again here and there are other things that have not already been covered that deserve mention to further the case for this structure. There are really three "other things" that can be brought up to help solidify this structure as being among the world's greatest and most amazing. The first is the renewable and sustainable nature of the building. The second are the architectural tricks and tactics that were used to better the structure. Finally, there…