Building Australia's Tallest Skyscraper

[Music] our cities have a problem despite craving it we're struggling for green space and architects and engineers have had to get creative repurposing old infrastructure and slotting parks in where they can it's a pressure that's given rise to this one of the most ambitious skyscrapers ever conceived twisting into the sky melbourne's tree-covered southbank by beulah tower is born out of that very real desire for a better connection to nature in our built up areas but making australia's new tallest building a reality is far from easy and the team is dealing with extreme height tough sight conditions remote working international media attention and the small matter of successfully growing plants in the sky this is the complex inspiring and record-breaking story of how the world's first ever super tall vertical garden is being built melbourne's skyline could be transformed by a new state-of-the-art building six proposals have been shortlisted after a call went out for ideas from around the world cast your mind back to 2018 and you might recall an architecture competition in australia that caused quite a stir australian developer beulah had acquired a site in the heart of melbourne's south bank and wanted to create a building with a difference something that stood out among the sea of skyscrapers that had already emerged so in order to bring our ambitious vision to life we launched an international architecture competition three years ago inviting some of the world's most innovative architects it really is unlike anything australia has ever seen pairing local firms with six of the world's most famous architects the competition produced some of the boldest proposals australia had ever seen and made international headlines after an intense debate among the judges and the internet green spine won the contest designed by un studio and cox architecture the mixed-use towers would feature dramatic planting across their levels and become the tallest skyscrapers in the country i think what sets the green spine apart from the others it's mainly the ability to connect people with nature throughout the biophilic architecture and the interface between the public street level and the podium were the key standouts and that was one of the key considerations during the judging process the design team travelled the world to learn lessons from similar projects steadily developing their plans to integrate commercial space apartments a podium that includes retail units and a new cultural square into 165 stories of green space across the two towers the renamed south bank by beulah tower would become the first vertical garden to exceed 300 meters and reach supertall status now building a pair of twisting skyscrapers and covering them in plants was never going to be easy but combine the challenge of getting those plots to thrive at such a height with the project's slender profile and the fact that it's being built in an area that used to be marshland and you have a pretty major feat of engineering on your hands the ground conditions at the site of this project are very challenging we're talking around 20 meters plus of excavation um into the kud island silt material the way we overcame the challenge was to design what we call diaphragm walls so these walls are essentially extremely thick concrete walls 1200 to 1500 millimeters thick and then there's also an extremely thick slab at the base level which is in the order of two meters of stick of concrete we looked at two different options for the basement design one of those was a what we call a bottom up or anchored design the other option we looked at was a top-down construction methodology you have to plunge down all of your columns and wall elements from the ground floor and then you pour the ground slab you then excavate material beneath you have to leave some large temporary openings in the slab to actually get the material out you then excavate down two levels you do it again so the slab that you build at each level you're excavating down actually restrains the criminal walls the east towers slender height to width ratio of 13.5 to 1 presents some particularly onerous challenges its twisting form is being achieved by the use of walking columns now normally columns line up between floors to carry loads through a building and down to the foundations but here each column will have to be slightly offset to the one on the floor immediately below creating the building's twist while still maintaining a pathway for loads to travel through if you think that sounds complicated it's just the style we've got a central core running up throughout the heart of the tower we've got shoe walls at all the residential floors linking the central core to the perimeter columns then at every plant floor we've got a series of we've got we've got a belt wall around the perimeter and additional outrigger walls in this strong direction the way i think about it is like if you're going skiing your body imagine that is the core and your arms is like the outrigger walls or your shield walls your poles that you're supporting they're your columns you're engaging the full perimeter of the building touching on the damper you know in this particular instance is the tuned mass stamper that has also presented bueller with the opportunity to create that into an art sculpture you know as engineers you often think oh yeah they'll just add some pretty ugly looking piece of steel at the top um but really this this steel can actually be or this mass can actually be quite a magnificent looking update green spaces on buildings are nothing new but the scale and ambition of south bank by bueller's design is pretty unprecedented they'll be over and a half kilometers of vertical gardens and sky parks extending as high as 365 meters above street level an international team of landscape architects has run wind testing and sunlight analysis all to choose species that can thrive in a city that's famous for its extreme summers cold winters and the occasional feeling of four different seasons in one day to keep everything green without the need for an army of gardeners constantly working their way through the building every garden bed will be connected to an autonomous irrigation system that's capable of monitoring soil conditions and delivering water and nutrients directly to the roots of each plant the idea is the system should require pretty minimal human maintenance once complete that's my kind of gardening bringing together a complex design between two architects landscape specialists and several consultants on a challenging site would be tough in any circumstances but thrown into the mix is the fact that much of the design evolution over the past three years has actually happened remotely making things even tougher one of the components alone of the key challenges of being a super tall slender tower and then the twisting nature of the vertical garden is obviously another key challenge but both of those combined together you really can't solve that without a computational approach if we can build that into a centralized computational model we can make sure that we're you know getting the best outcomes from both of those key areas of the design one workflow that we were able to embed into this was the ability to quickly visualize the design through our computational workflow that could be in a 3d model environment where the client could obviously see quick visualizations of the structure but then we also took that further where we could extract the information into the 2d format very efficiently as well and let's not forget this is a project that's still in its early journey of its final design um and we're doing a lot of high-end analysis a lot of high-end modeling so bluebeam's a platform and a software that we find very efficient very effective in communicating that type of information so we can connect straight from our computational design model automate plan generation and that can be updated very quickly through the process so if we make a few key changes to our requirements or to the architectural's design we can update that information very efficiently into our bluebeam platform so it's a really key benefit for us early especially early in the project to get those efficiencies getting the formal green lights in april 2020 south bank's now seen as a major part of melbourne's post covered economic recovery by the state government of course we'll have to wait and see how construction unfolds to know whether this ambitious project can live up to its expectations and renders [Music] but for whatever lies ahead south bank by beulah is seemingly on track to make a pretty big impact not just by injecting new life into this part of melbourne and becoming the country's tallest building but by changing how we think about design in our cities improving what can be achieved if we look to make the most from the limited space that most of us now have available it's a healthy holistic philosophy one that integrates great design technology and ever-evolving lifestyle choices in a leafy lively 24 7 precinct so we are exploring every possibility to create the next evolution of skyscrapers [Music] this video was made possible by bluebeam you can learn more about bluebeam solutions at the link below and as always if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the definitive video channel for construction make sure you subscribe to the b1m [Music] you

Channel: The B1M

Views: 699,911

Keywords: B1M, TheB1M, Construction, architecture, engineering, The B1M, Fred Mills, building, melbourne, melb, southbank, STH BNK, beulah, skyscraper, design competition, supertall, green, trees, vertical garden, design, unstudio, sydney, australia, bluebeam, procore, autodesk, digital construction, cities, Victoria Australia

Id: u39z8JZbfWk

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AutoModerator]

Hi and welcome to r/solarpunk! Due to numerous suggestions from our community, we're using this automod message to bring up a topic that comes up a lot: GREENWASHING. It is used to describe the practice of companies launching adverts, campaigns, products, etc under the pretense that they are environmentally beneficial/friendly, often in contradiction to their environmental and sustainability record in general. On our subreddit, it usually presents itself as eco-aesthetic buildings because they are quite simply the best passive PR for companies.

ethicalconsumer.org and greenandthistle.com give examples of greenwashing, while scientificamerican.com explains how alternative technologies like hydrogen cars can also be insidious examples of greenwashing.

If you've realized your submission was an example of greenwashing--don't fret! We are all here to learn, and while there will inevitably be comments pointing out how and why your submission is greenwashing, we hope the discussion stays productive. Solarpunk ideals include identifying and rejecting capitalism's greenwashing of consumer goods.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Mossinajarreborn]

Skyscrapers with plants on them are not green!

Wasting material to make new buildings instead of using the ones we already have is not solar punk!

[u/pm_me_pigeon]

Fuck this shit. Building a new concrete building fucking up the environment more, then throw a pothus on it and trying to say its actually green. Fuck that