121-Story Shanghai Tower - China’s First Superskyscraper

Designers of the 121-story Shanghai Tower, with its record-tall composite steel-and-concrete structure, are helping craft China’s first superskyscraper building code.


by Nadine M. Post, ENR, 07.21.2010
Sheer Innovation
Photo: Shanghai Tower Construction & Development Co. Ltd.
If finished in 2014 as planned, the 121-story Shanghai Tower will be China’s tallest building.
During a nine-course meal at a Chinese restaurant in New York City on July 10, Wang Da Sui, design master of China and part of a panel of experts approving the structural scheme for the 632-meter-tall Shanghai Tower, confirmed that the innovative architecture of the twisted and tapering skyscraper—sheathed in sheer glass like a Baccarat crystal—is a guinea pig for crafting China’s first supertall-building code. The code, for structures 300 m and taller with “serious irregularity,” requires performance-based design and extra-stiff frames and puts strict limits on building acceleration. Wang, who also heads the code committee, said the code will be published in about a year “or later.”

Sitting to Wang’s left at the restaurant Jade was the dinner’s host, Dennis C.K. Poon, managing principal for the tower’s structural designer, New York City-based Thornton Tomasetti (TT). Shanghai Tower, on deck to become China’s tallest building, the world’s second-tallest building and the world’s tallest composite structure, “already incorporates some of the spirit of the new code,” said Poon.

Wang, chief engineer with East China Architectural Design & Research Institute Co. Ltd., was in New York City as part of a delegation of six from China. The group also included representatives of the skyscraper’s quasi-governmental owner-developer, the Shanghai Tower Construction & Development Co. Ltd., and the local designer of record, the Architectural Design & Research Institute of Tongji University (Group) Co. Ltd.

The men had flown in the day before from Newfoundland, Canada, where they took part in motion simulations, conducted by project wind engineer RWDI, at the Centre for Marine Simulation on St. John’s. The simulations confirmed the expert panel’s recommendation for a tuned mass damper to increase occupant comfort. “It will be the largest TMD in the world,” said Ge Qing, design director for the owner.

At Jade, between the jellyfish and the lobster, the discussion turned to structural challenges inherent in engineering something never attempted: a record-height steel-and-concrete frame in a seismic zone, founded on “very poor” soft soil and sheathed in a thin glass skin. All agreed the tower’s scale makes the usual issues of differential movement loom larger.

“We had to predict the behavior” of the composite supercolumns, as the concrete shrinks and creeps initially and over time, “without having a large body of knowledge” in the profession and academia on composite structures, said I. Paul Lew, a senior vice president with TT, which is No. 153 on ENR’s Top International Design Firms list. “We will have to monitor the building to see if our assumptions bear out,” he added.

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Posted by ProTech at 7/26/2010 5:12 PM
Categories: News
Tags: procore dealer web based construction software protech china's first superskyscraper nadine post shanghai tower china skyscraper world' tallest skyscraper
 

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