Megastructures: Modern Architectural Marvels | Complete Series | All Episodes | FD Engineering

[Music] to the height of a 50-story skyscraper but its walls are full of air it's made with 188 000 tons of concrete but all you can see is plastic it contains enough steel cable to build a suspension bridge but no one will be driving across it so what is it it's a tent the world's biggest tent [Music] imagine Desert Island beaches Las Vegas entertainment Turkish baths a Tropical Paradise just meters away from this welcome to Kazakhstan and the second coldest capital city in the world -3540 in the winter plus 35 40 in the summer so it's very hostile to build this space age pleasure Dome workers are battling some of the toughest conditions on the planet technically we were doing something in Astana that would be difficult to do in London I mean this is this is not easy construction it's actually very challenging we've worked two years behind schedule they can't afford any more delays a very very significant project and I think we may have got lulled into a false sense of security will the world's biggest tent ever be finished [Music] at a construction site in central Kazakhstan the early shift is arriving for work it bitterly cold minus 20 degrees Celsius despite throwing thousands of workers onto the project construction of one of the world's most radical buildings is two years behind schedule but one man is determined to get the job back on track engineering troubleshooter salami gorrell works for the Turkish Construction Company sembon when the experts talk of impossible semble causing Gorel the pressure is just the time everybody wants this building on time but in this weather conditions it's very very difficult even in a good year winter in central Kazakhstan is bone chilling and this winter has been unusually extreme when the wind starts you feel -55. very cool so called that for many workers it's a fine line between life and a freezing death I remember one day they said someone is frozen up there so the team went up and took him down such things happen the Frozen worker survived but salami faces a far bigger problem than the cold and that's kazakhstan's president nurse Sultan nazarbayev the president personally commissioned the building he's tired of waiting for it and has now demanded that it must be finished in time for his birthday in just 18 weeks time and in Kazakhstan when the president shouts everybody jumps the new building is part of the president's Vision to transform his country Kazakhstan is vast at 2.7 million square kilometers is the ninth largest country in the world it perches on the great step of Central Asia an area of semi-desert for centuries nomadic tribes herded their cattle across these remote grasslands living in portable homes traditional tents called Yurts for 71 years it was part of the Soviet Union but with Independence in 1991 this country began an extraordinary period of Rapid development the discovery of oil vast amounts of it gave Kazakhstan wealth the president knew just how he wanted to spend it he decided to build a new capital at a remote spot in the middle of the country Astana foreign he called in some of the world's leading Architects and told them to jump out went the Soviet monoliths in came extraordinary architectural fantasies that told more to Las Vegas than to Moscow new government Ministries a stadium a concert hall a glass pyramid of peace year a new architectural Wonder laid out on a master plan similar to Washington DC Stana is now one of the fastest growing capitals in the world and the people who move here are encouraged to feel close to their president in the heart of the new city at the top of the buy direct Tower newlywed couples can place their hands in a giant solid gold imprint of the president's hand make a wish but before you book your holiday to this extraordinary place there's one thing you should know [Music] Stana is the second coldest capital city in the world year round its average temperature is just three degrees Celsius in Winter better winds sweep down from Siberia plunging temperatures to 40 below the city remains Frozen for months after month [Music] so the president realized there was one thing missing from his new glittering metropolis and he had a vision is [Music] a president with a radical idea needed a radical architect is if you want something unique there are a few better places to come than to Norman Foster's practice in London where revolutionary architecture is the name of the game as we advance as a kind of evolution as designers we are able to gradually stretch the boundaries push the boundaries again and again with iconic structures like Francis Miller Viaduct London's gherkin and the Hearst headquarters in New York and when he was approached by the president of Kazakhstan he saw an opportunity to return to a revolutionary idea he'd been thinking about for over 40 years in the 1960s 70s and 80s Foster collaborated with one of the 20th Century's most Brilliant Minds Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect who pioneered the idea of using geodesic domes to create vast self-contained environments protected from harsh conditions outside meeting with Bucky was extraordinary because he was somebody who had really devoted his life to the idea of dwellings that that would be self-sufficient dome-shaped biospheres act like giant greenhouses by trapping the sun's heat they can create a warm environment for everything inside one of Bucky's most radical ideas was to cover 50 blocks of downtown New York with a dome the Dome over Manhattan was a very evocative project and it was really drawing attention to the uh the potential for creating large-scale enclosures creating microclimbers modifying the climate Bucky was and still is a mentor in that in that sense over 40 years after they first met on the steps of Kazakhstan Foster saw the potential to realize his mentor's ideas on a massive scale and create an iconic engineering first for the president's new capital this was going to be a symbol um and ideally something that had not been done before to explore exactly what sort of structure would work best Foster called in civil engineering company Bureau happened where senior engineer Mike cook is not quite so keen on domes a dome well designed should be in pure compression and that's a pretty efficient way to use material but it still has the threat of buckling a dome is a good way to cover a large space but the weight on the roof pushes down on the supporting struts compressing them and that compression means the struts have to be thick and heavy or else they buckle astana's remote location means that construction materials will have to be shipped long distances across Central Asia so keeping weight to a minimum is essential and it turns out there's an even lighter way to build a roof in structures like suspension bridges the cables carrying the load are in tension because they're being pulled instead of pushed the cables can't Buckle so they can be very light let's form a suspension bridge into a roof you get a tent a very big tent the clues in the name I suppose tent tent for tension and tension is is the most efficient way you can carry Force inner material this is five times as efficient in terms of the ratio of the of the steel to the volume and the area enclosed so with that level of efficiency Foster quickly settled on a tent for his design team led by Nigel dansey the challenge was to turn that simple idea into a thing of beauty once we had the idea of doing something with the Mast and having a masters really a beacon that that's something that we really felt very strongly about within weeks they'd fleshed out a design for an iconic angled tent inside they devised a vast Leisure complex that would fulfill the president's dream to give his people a sheltered year-round entertainment Paradise laid out on six floors inside and outer concrete ring there's a vast car park on the ground floor from there you can head up to two levels of Western shops designer boutiques and a cinema [Music] Rising Above This are two floors of entertainments a spa Center restaurants arcades rides and a monorail at the top there's a tropical water park complete with a wave pool and two beaches [Music] all this under the Buckminster Fuller inspired energy efficient tent when it's freezing outside it will be a pleasant Summer's Day in here in December 2006 the president gave the design his approval and unveiled it to the world naming it Han shatir which means the leaders or Royal Marquee the crowning Glory of his new capital at Astana and despite its unique and complex design he was told he would have it in just one year oh dear within days of the president officially approving the design the diggers roll in construction of the world's biggest tent begins stage one is to build the foundations and the immense concrete ring that will anchor the tent into the ground 195 000 cubic meters of soil are excavated concrete piles are sunk 10 stories deep into the Earth construction Crews cut Bend and wire together nine thousand kilometers of Steel reinforcing rods [Music] the steady stream of Lori's poor 188 000 tons of concrete into the foundations and lower floors but this is a complex project on a vast scale and it's soon apparent that the promise of building this structure in a single year really was mission impossible I don't think we quite understood what we let ourselves in for it really is a very significant big project it's over a hundred thousand square meters in total area and it's 145 meters tall so it's a it's a very very significant project and I think um we may have got lulled into a false sense of security in November the winter weather kicks in as temperatures plunge there's a danger that the concrete will freeze before it has a chance to sand [Music] so workers have to improvise using powerful burners to keep it warm as they mix it work Slows To A Snail's Pace stage one is taking months longer than predicted matters are about to get a whole lot worse the next stage is to build and erect the tent pole two thousand ton steel structure that will rise 150 meters into the air unfortunately it seems that no one can agree how they're going to do it time to bring in the troubleshooter salami girl first design of Foster and partners was a vertical Mast it was something we thought about quite long and hard when something is vertical I love it the single Mast would be simpler I said why don't we make it with a concrete chimney looking thing we can use slip form Technologies and I could finish it in 24 days you know it wasn't something that we um dismissed immediately but it was something that was a very unusual thing to want to do it was too symmetrical then I don't know why they tilted the heads in fact the Tilt is crucial to the design because the main buildings of Astana are lined up on a central axis will mark one end of this axis the idea of tilting it started to address the fact that we wanted to create an entrance out the front addressing their axes the Foster's final design called for the tent pole to be tilted at 15 degrees a single tent pole would be unstable so the engineers opted for a tripod nice three-legged stall stable building it without any further delays was a challenge that salami was determined to solve being an engineer of 58 years old I said I should do it the designers thought it could be slowly built up in sections piece by piece from the ground up using vast amounts of scaffolding salami came up with a much faster but highly unconventional alternative starting with building the whole tripod flat on the ground had the idea that he wanted to do everything on the ground assemble everything and then lift the whole tripod with its Mast already attached up into the sky in one one Brave move that is something we probably wouldn't have wanted to propose a major concern was that salami's approach would require a vast crane far bigger than anything available in remote Astana shipping one in would take months and cost a fortune but never underestimate the troubleshooter can you imagine you should rent a 800 pound Crane in 30 trucks load them bring here in two months bring them back in two months so we said let us make our own crane of course it will be no ordinary crane salami's plan is to use a brilliantly inventive combination of hinges Railway track and some very high-tech winches the tripod will be assembled horizontally with two legs attached to Giant hinges called pin joints one leg to a short stretch of track meanwhile salami's team will build a 60 meter tall tower on top of which he will put his specialist winches known as strand jacks the Jacks will pull up the tripod on its hinges with the third leg sliding down the track into its final position it's never been done before no one knows if it will work my mission is to fulfill I mean too satisfied Foster and partners just to do it with another winter approaching salami's steel team must work fast specialist welders cut and weld 2 000 tons of steel tubing shipped him from Turkey into three giant legs [Music] on top of the legs they're building a giant ring 20 meters in diameter this will support the cables that hold up the roof and on top of the tripod is the giant mast the whole structure is 150 meters long equivalent to a 50-story building lying on its side now the challenge is pull it into the air concentrating all of the energy into that big event means that big event concentrates all the risk there's a very real danger of a catastrophic failure that would set the project back by months that come well with the Press [Music] the present to lift the tower 16 strand Jacks will grip the cables and pull up the giant tripod 50 centimeters at a time inside each strand Jack an upper Chuck tightens to grip the cable a lower Chuck releases its grip and a hydraulic piston pushes upwards lifting the tripod the lower Chuck tightens the upper Chuck releases and the Piston retracts the whole process is then repeated Time After Time to make sure the load is evenly distributed all the Strand Jacks must work in perfect synchronization the day of the left Dawns salami's plan swings into action the top of the lifting Tower City's secret weapons [Music] the hydraulic strand Jacks have been brought in from Switzerland they're costing one million dollars to rent so salami's plan had better work initially everything was sitting on supports you know but once you start pulling all the forces should come to those pin joints you know well the pin joint has a base plate which is sitting on concrete foundation the concrete has to withstand forces of up to 2500 tons very very big forces so there's always that danger that some some someone missed something you know some bolt gets over stressed as the lift begins it's a critical moment and the cables take the load of the tripod we just lift it up there were a thousand five hundred ton horizontal forces coming there nothing happened you know we were just airborne to stop the Tower falling over as it begins to raise the tripod cables anchor it to the concrete rim of the building little by little the Strand Jacks inch the tripod ever higher Rises majestically into place [Music] [Music] the whole tripod is in position the third leg is welded to its base the Moment of Truth arrives will the structure stand up when they release all the wires [Music] the president of Kazakhstan was here that day crane very exciting heart beating you know the load was transferred from the mobile crane to the structure it was a great uh piece of Showmanship to have that event but we did it By ignoring the conventional way of doing things salami has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and he's got the tripod safely erected before another extreme winter sets in but by the spring the project is 16 months behind schedule with some major challenges still to come of workers has arrived on site the task facing these specialist engineering climbers most dangerous part of the whole project stalling the high tension cobweb of cables that will support the outer skin of the world's biggest tent so it's unfair to call it a tent really you know it is a precisely engineered tension structure whatever you call it it needs a roof once again the responsibility of making sure work progresses as quickly as possible Falls to salami girl we had bundles of cables 38 millimeter in diameter the longest was about 140 120 meter long shortest around 95 meter long on the backside the cables that will support a lightweight roof each weigh up to two and a half tons and have to be pulled up in pairs while pulling them there was a task to connect the the blocks that connect the double cable make it as a pair at every 70 centimeters you know getting everything exactly right it's time consuming considering 190 pairs if we can make one pair daily then we need 190 days and we didn't have so much time clearly relying on a single team of expert climbers was going to put the project many more months behind schedule we should increase the number of the teams plus the the number of the lifting cable pulling devices so salami brings in nearly 300 extra workers adding another nine teams and equips them with winches stripped out of old Russian cranes it's risky work for old equipment and inexperienced climbers but the job instantly picks up speed [Music] we have done let's say 10 pairs every day so we have done it within almost 20 days [Music] salami's calculated risk pays off the net of cables is quickly completed and the next crucial stage can get started tensioning cope with the weight of snow that will fall in Winter the whole roof needs to be able to move just the right amount early on in the project we made this model really simple model there is either wind during the snowfall or after the snowfall and that's going to build a heavy deposit of snow on one side and that causes this this defamation but if you allow this rocking to occur or some movement at the top it actually helps reduce the buildup of stress on this side instead of a moving Mast Mike cook has devised this moving hub The Hub is enormous 17 meters tall and 20 in diameter but despite its huge size and weight in high winds or heavy snow loads it can move 30 centimeters from side to side Palm sweating 75 meters above the floor of the hanshateer salami's assistant is inspecting the 12 pillars on which the Hub rests astonishingly these upper pillars aren't actually fixed to the tripod below they simply rest on bearings if you could pull them hard enough they would come apart luckily the Thousand ton load of the roof holds them down to make sure the Hub doesn't move more than 30 centimeters the entire cable net must be stretched to just the right tension that's the job of Alex Luca and his tensioning team foreign they attach the ends of each pair of cables to two hydraulic Rams when Alex turns on the hydraulic pump the Rams push on a plate that pulls the cables tight [Music] the nuts are then tightened and the process repeated on the next set of cables the cables on the harshit here are tightened to an unusually high level eighty percent of their maximum load the wires will be as stored as the cables on the suspension bridge with the cable net complete the stunning shape of the harsher tier takes its place on the Astana Skyline inside thanks to a temporary plastic roof work on the interior can finally get started everyone's racing to play catch-up before the president's patience Runs Out in Germany a team of designers from Vector foil tag has spent over a year designing the roof of the world's biggest tent it will consist of 836 transparent plastic cushions to make life extra difficult every other cushion is a different shape and each one has to fit precisely it's a 20 000 square meter three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle it looks good on the computer screens but for Vector foil Tech the key to success is installing the cushions in warm weather and it would be complete Madness to install their roof through an extremely cold winter their man in Astana with the job of putting the jigsaw together is Matt Wilson an expert climber who specializes in rope access engineering so the uh the containers are shipped from Beijing basically Beijing fit it with this very temporary shelving uh to fit the to sit the cushions on the cushions are unique to a single location on the building and they're folded in a particular way so that they're basically ready for when they're hung up onto the structure the roof cushions are made up of thin sheets of a material called ethylene tetrafluoroethylene or etfe for short three sheets of etfe are joined together one on top of another to form each cushion air will be blown into these to form a lightweight rigid pillow this is the Wonder material that makes Buckminster Fuller's dream of insulated biosphere as possible it's 100 times lighter than glass its surface like Teflon is non-stick so it doesn't need cleaning and etfe is tough when it's warm it stretches and can comfortably take the weight of five men it won't catch fire and it can be cut into any shape required but one thing etfe doesn't like is being installed in the cold despite this Matt Wilson has been instructed to waste no time replacing the temporary plastic sheets with the etfe cushions originally the cushions were going to be installed in summer but with construction so far behind schedule Matt's team of climbers has been working through the winter generally we would fit the the two short sides first working from the top down which usually provides very little problem because the cushions have a great deal of distance to stretch the material becomes less elastic in the cold weather which means when we stretch the cushions into the aluminum frame we have to basically give them more time so in summer where something might take so 10 to 15 minutes through winter we may take so two or three hours through an extreme winter even by local standards Matt has been under constant pressure from salami girl we have our German subcontractors teams who are not used to working in -30 minus 20 minus 15. the tires that are really difficult is when the ambient temperature is very cold and the wind is high we bought good close to the work for the workers the the cold is Extreme at times blankets some Heating units minus 37 and that's not with wind chill that was an ambient temperature the wind chill was it was off the scale on the uh on the meter that was reading it and most of the time then we're not able to work at all for salami Matt's team was working far too slow he had to find a way to get the roof finished more quickly so what we said let us also put our teams on top of this net ball shooter invoked the girl theorem there are loads of people at the job and get it done fast in order to avoid any accidents we have decided to install a safety net inside the radial cables so that people can walk on it the experienced climbers trained the new workers to install the cushions we have brought here our own teams which is 400 people they are they've been brought in to speed up the work that gets um frustrating if not a bit disconcerting foreign s per team and the team starting competing with each other you know it's the worst safety you've seen on the planet [Music] despite Matt concerns the teams Press On so this has to come down much further into the hooked profile on the alloy here sometimes Mac can hardly better watch they rip a lot of the edges and then the work I'm doing in terms of calculating things at the moment is calculating a repair schedule by Spring the cushions are in place but Matt Still fears the worst because now he must inflate the roof for the first time and it seems inevitable that installing the etfe in freezing cold will have damaged the cushions and caused dozens of leaks now we're ready to turn the supply on for the roof for the first time [Music] to an Air Supply a computer-controlled pumping system pumps Air at low pressure around the whole tent the fans blow in 60 000 cubic meters of air equivalent to a large airship it takes about seven hours to inflate the roof [Music] for the roof to look as The Architects intended all the cushions must evenly inflate to a height of exactly 70 centimeters Matt is prepared for the worst can't quite believe what he sees well the first inflation looks like it's gone okay the cushions have good pressure and there's even distribution of air pressure throughout all the cushions uh so yeah we're looking pretty happy with it Against All Odds the winter installation has been a success once again salami's boldness has saved valuable months and it's up the world's biggest tent a structure unlike anything else on Earth but inside the tent no one has time to celebrate it's now just six weeks until the president's birthday and the grand opening across six floors a small city is under construction dozens of painters are applying 13 000 liters of white paint electricians are wiring up seventeen thousand lights and teams of Carpenters are frantically fitting out shops and restaurants everything must be ready the president expects guiding the installation is architect Tolga oz so we got this water park on the Upper Floor and in this level with various standing gear is where the entertainment begins okay the monorail and The Flume right and there are a lot of uh games machines and car races for the kids we got a drop tower two restaurants this is the flying bus for two little children and this is actually a boat which spins around itself four thousand square meters will be full of this entertainment stuff on the entertainment floor rides engineer Lucio romaro is ready to test the star attraction a high-level monorail that loops around the entire interior looks fine as a first test the complete ride it will take five minutes the people they can see all the Panorama and so they feel enjoy does Norman Foster know about all this this design solution is mindful of the of the social mix incredible range of activities from exhibitions a half a kilometer of jogging Trail um it's it it's it's um it's very much a kind of welcoming uh populist building [Music] six weeks later the interior is nearly complete it's the day before the grand opening [Music] these teams of workers have almost completely transformed the Han shatir from a building site into a 21st century pleasure Palace thanks to the etfe roof the hansheteers plant life is in stark contrast to the dusty steps outside [Music] hundreds of plants from all over the world will thrive in this giant Greenhouse the structure is crammed full of every imaginable entertainment the tropical beaches and water park Turkish baths saunas a gym and Spa a cinema and two floors of rides and arcade games [Music] top name brands from around the world have bought into the concept they all want a presence inside the world's biggest tent and now hundreds of workers are in a race to get the goods into the stores in time for the opening [Music] Matt Wilson is on hand to make sure his roof is looking good for the opening ceremony as you can see the building by the sound of things is pretty frantic but we're confident uh that all the main construction works are obviously finished and the uh the fit out is uh almost there as well so we're confident for a great opening the design team from Fosters and Bureau Apple has flown in from London to see the finished building for the first time [Music] flattering the models um you know with the snowflakes yeah foreign [Music] that's incredible isn't it beautiful yeah with those legs you're over to sign them do you there's a lot of force in those people as they make their way up the building they begin to appreciate the sheer scale of what they have designed when you're at the bottom you really don't appreciate how big it is you've got to get office we've got to get up because even now you look at this look up there I know look at that giant thing in this sky [Music] I see the train is running my children would love it here pina colada I think swing trunks [Music] the water park on the top floor is enclosed within its own etfe roof over 1 000 kilometers from the sea the people of Astana now have their own year-round Beach quality of light is like being honest it is like being on the beach what more could you want while the water park is maintained at Tropical temperatures the rest of the Interior is maintained as a pleasant temperate zone all year round thanks to some very clever design and Engineering work to fulfill Buckminster Fuller's dream of an environmentally efficient Dome the designers needed to harness nature to do a lot of the heating and cooling so how did they manage it architect filo Russo from Foster and partners had the job of making it work it was never meant to be a space that is is fully conditioned overall it was meant to be a shelter that it would have a barrier with the outside summer with temperatures outside hitting 35 degrees Celsius the challenge is keeping the building cool to stop it becoming a giant Greenhouse the etfe on the roof is covered in hundreds of thousands of silver dots this fretting as it's called reflects some of the sun's heat but the building also uses a natural process called the stack effect it's the same as you have a chimney a fireplace at home you know you get hot air and it's going to get sucked out at the top of the tent above the ring adjustable slats allow warm air to be released we've got openings all the way around the crown of the very top of the the tent when the wind is blowing and it's cooler as it passes through it's gonna suck the hot air through inside the building hot air which is lighter than cold Rises naturally to the top of the tent at this height the wind outside blows faster than at ground level it creates suction drawing the hot air out to replace it chill there is created at ground level air is drawn in through intakes around the building cooled and blown out through vents and nozzles inside condition the entire volume but just the occupied spaces so even in the hottest days of summer it's Pleasant inside [Music] but what will happen when it's minus 40 outside in Winter the roof will act like a giant transparent duvet insulating the interior from the cold Siberian winds and allowing in heat from the Sun you're always going to get a lot of solar radiation irrespective of the time of the year in that respect the the enclosure the volume and the material actually helps to trap heat even in the tropical pool area which is kept at a constant 30 degrees Celsius no energy is wasted the excess heat that is generated in this area only around is can be recycled and mainly in the winter is used to heat up the the car park levels down at the bottom at plus five degrees so it you'll never be frozen the transformation is complete concrete shell into Leisure Paradise everything is ready for the big day but before the president will allow the building to be opened he has insisted on a personal tour of inspection he's on his way on the morning before their president's 70th birthday the people of Astana streamed towards the harshit here 140 000 of them for the world's biggest tent is open to the public it must pass its presidential inspection it's a nervous time for all involved what will he think of the latest addition to his capital city [Music] foreign so the president is doors are thrown open to the people of Kazakhstan their reaction will be the best indication of whether this amazing structure will be a success the vast roof in spires Wonder [Music] food court young kazakhs are quick to get their teeth into international cuisine [Music] some have never seen the beach before London Paris and Milan have arrived in Kazakhstan and there's no doubt that the amusements are a hit [Music] um foreign to celebrate the opening of his new building the president lays on a spectacular opening ceremony celebrates modern architecture as horse riders hunters and acrobats pay tribute to the thousands of workers who built the hardship here [Music] foreign [Music] s like a beacon in the wilderness the harshita is not just another shopping mall or Amusement arcade it's an iconic building a statement of the president's determination the Kazakhstan will be a leading player in the modern world this is the symbol of Kazakhstan and Astana let's say this is a symbol for Astana [Music] yeah I'm definitely proud of it it's not the sort of project that comes comes along that often um it's great to be able to to make the most of that and and it's great to have worked with the whole pile of really interesting people to get to get God I I think the fight the final building is is pretty breathtaking for Norman Foster the Han shatir is a glorious realization of the Visionary ideas of the great Buckminster Fuller I very much hope that you he would have approved I'd like to think that um he would see it as very much in the spirit of of his teachings um his philosophy as an engineering achievement this is the first step in a New Direction Paving the way to low energy habitats and even cities of the future [Music] [Applause] [Music] in one of Europe's busiest ports workers are battling to construct a concert hall to rival the best in the world but work isn't going to plan the building is seven years late well frankly it's a big mess 10 times over budget basically we knew that there is no failure allowed and threatening to destroy everyone's reputation if others are not correct we have to do it's an ambitious project to construct a unique 18-story building on top of an old Warehouse to create perfect Acoustics wow in one of the noisiest places on Earth some of the world's greatest architects and Engineers are using ingenious Solutions a model the size of a small house 150 000 tons of concrete and thousands of custom-made components can they create against the odds the greatest concert hall in the world Hamburg is Germany's second largest city but it's relatively unknown around the world [Music] it's part of the development of its old dockland Hamburg plans to celebrate its musical Heritage with an iconic structure the city that gave birth to Brahms Mendelson and even launched the Beatles once a world-class Concert Hall to put it on the map [Music] situated on the banks of the river Elba the elm philharmoni will Tower 26 stories high making it the tallest building in the city and a symbol of Hamburg its story began in 2001 when property developer Alexander Girard saw an opportunity to develop a disused 1960s Warehouse in hamburg's Old docks well it was just more or less what you see now it was a building with very little windows for ventilation purposes and then you had these these balconies which you could drop so that you could bring the goods inside we did not want to have the building knocked down so we had to look for a use which meant no daylight if you wanted to keep the facade Gerard knew of one type of building that didn't need Windows we knew as concert goers that Hamburg had lost two big concert Halls during the second world war Hamburg was lacking an important part of its music infrastructure and this led to the proposal of building a new concert hall Gerard traveled to Basel in Switzerland to present the idea to the architect Jack Herzog and Pierre dimura famous for Designing the Tate modern in London and the Olympic Games Birds Nest stadium in Beijing but would some of the most Innovative architects in the world stake their reputations on rebuilding an Old Brick box we said yes we would love to do this people we've never done a concert at all delighted they were interested Gerard took them to see The Brick Warehouse and Jack and I and him we were standing on the roof of this building what they saw was a fantastic location with 360 degree views of the city the perfect spot for a landmark building the original idea was that the concert Halls would be inside the oil structure and grow out of it but the Architects had something very different in mind he sort of made a sketch of what it could look like with this quick sketch Gerard's idea was literally turned inside out [Music] his beloved Brick Warehouse was about to become a plinth instead of building the concert hall inside the warehouse Herzog and demuron would build it on top the concept is radical entering the building visitors will ride the longest curved escalator in Europe to a Scenic roof Terrace on top of the warehouse above this will be the centerpiece of the building the main concert hall with steep Terraces seating 2 100 people built around it will be 45 Apartments shops restaurants and a luxury hotel all wrapped in shimmering glass walls that rise to Peaks like cresting waves [Music] when Herzog and demuron unveiled their designs to the citizens of Hamburg in June 2003 they created a sensation people really loved it and it was published in newspapers and there was a movement bottom up and not up down bottom-up we want that the Senate of the city of Hamburg in December 2003 unanimously cast a vote to go ahead with a project in April 2007 after four years of planning construction begins but the costs are already Rising from an initial estimate of 77 million euros to 272 million or about 360 million US dollars having a groundbreaking design and a spectacular location isn't enough to be the world's greatest concert hall it can't just look the best it will have to sound the best too and for that they needed one of the world's top acoustic designers we invited acoustical Engineers from all over the world American British Australian Japanese in California they approached the man who had recently completed Los Angeles acclaimed Walt Disney Concert Hall a man excited by working with some of the world's most adventurous architects he's a Toyota the design in the by the architect is quite unique very very exciting the first time that we see this kind of unique design and so it's very very challenging here but it wasn't just the architect's ambitious designs that posed a challenge for Mr Toyota it was also the location of the building foreign with the bustling City Center on one side and Germany's busiest port on the other nine thousand ships transport over 130 million tons of cargo and half a million passengers through these docks each year ships horns are the biggest problem their low frequency sound can be heard over four kilometers away and can penetrate even very thick concrete [Music] today Mr Toyota is going to find out firsthand just what he's up against wow it's your first time on the bridge yes yes sure you can see your descender yeah so you have to pull the handle only in this direction oh and then you start oh very simple shall I yeah of course okay don't be shy very easy if you like we can go outside we can feel the difference between here okay between outside for the full effect Mr Toyota needs to stand directly in front of the horn if you're ready you can do it now [Music] wow this is loud it is different the sound yeah yeah but actually this is a very very good experience for me yeah yeah Mr Toyota's problem is that even if they build the concert hall with very thick walls low frequency sound will vibrate the concrete and be transmitted to the inside foreign on an unprecedented scale the plan is to build not just one vast concrete Concert Hall but two one inside the other in a double wall Construction the outer concrete wall can reduce the sound of the foghorns enough that it will become too weak to penetrate the inner wall ensuring the concert hall remains insulated from outside sounds great in theory and many would say attempting this classic soundproofing trick on such a vast scale is all but impossible June 2010 work on the outer concrete shell of the elf Hill Harmony concert hall is nearly complete and construction of the inner shell is well underway [Music] bolted to the inner shell a matrix of Steel girders will support the stage and seating areas a steady stream of lorries delivers concrete to the site giant cranes winch at 100 meters above the ground so workers can pour it into molds filled with steel reinforcement bars to build up the walls to complete the building including the 2100 seat Concert Hall 244-room hotel and 45 Apartments it's going to take 63 000 cubic meters of concrete weighing about 150 000 tons and 18 000 tons of steel with its unique ambitious design it's proving much trickier to construct than expected the geometry of the hall is already very complex and now you have to create this like a second skin almost egg in an egg it's becoming clear for the original Target to open the concert hall by the end of the year isn't going to be met [Music] the acoustic designer Mr Toyota is Keen to check up on progress particular on one specific feature of his design on which the success of his whole plan depends [Music] with all its steel and concrete the concert hall will weigh 12 and a half thousand tons and it can't simply float in thin air it has to be supported somehow but solid legs would transmit sound vibrations into the concert hall so instead of legs they have decided to use giant Springs the architect's project manager Nick Lyons is overseeing the construction okay at the moment we're in between the inner skin and the outer skin of the concert hall the acoustical concept was to detach in a concert hall from the rest of the building the Springs are responsible for isolating the inner concrete skin from the outer concrete skin the giant Springs between the two walls should absorb any sound vibration here you can actually see one of the spring packages the bottom part attached firmly to the outer skin the top part attached firmly to the inner skin and in between behind this flap you can see the actual Springs inside it will take 362 Springs each 30 centimeters long to support the weight of the hole [Music] Mr Toyota hopes this will create a perfectly soundproof concert hole but in the process they have created a serious headache for the Project's Structural Engineers with all this added weight the new building will weigh an astonishing 200 000 tons [Music] that's the weight of Two and a Half large cruise ships with most of that weight to be supported on an Old Brick Warehouse so keeping only the facade they had to demolish the interior of the building and rebuild it new massive concrete pillars running through the structure Provide support for the weight above a giant spiral ramp provides access for vehicles the Interior Space originally planned for the concert hall has become a seven-story car park we don't store anymore cacao or Cafe but we store cars [Music] with the soundproofing challenge dealt with Mr Toyota can get on with the job of making this the greatest sounding concert hall on Earth a notoriously difficult problem that many great designers in the past have got badly wrong when New York's Philharmonic Hall opened in 1962 critics panned it the cost to improve its acoustics four million dollars when San Francisco's Davie Symphony Hall opened in 1980 it too was a critical failure cost to improve its acoustics 10 million dollars and there have been many other concert Halls filled with poor acoustics that cost Millions to improve [Music] the stakes are high as hertzog into muron's lead architect askan mergantyler knows only too well we were very worried from the very first moment you know that this I mean basically we knew that there is no failure allowed you know it has to work the safest option for The Architects would be to copy the design of some of the world's best concert Halls foreign these classic venues are all rectangular a shape popularly known as shoebox [Music] so you have the orchestra on the stage in the front like this so it's like the two of us it's looking at each other but Herzog and demuron are not known for playing safe they want their audience to have a more immersive experience so we try to ins take inspiration for other from other places also especially from stadia from stadiums where we always admired the proximity of The Spectator to the pitch so having in the center the orchestra the podium the stage and the listeners around so as well as building the concert hall in the middle of Germany's busiest port Mr Toyota knows that a shoebox shape that everyone knows will work is not an option he's got to make this in the round Concert Hall sound the best in the world just as well he has a sense of humor if the sun was not correct then they're probably uh we have to do Hello Kitty stadiums aren't known for their classical music acoustics so the stadium like elb philharmoni is going to need some clever design to achieve just the right amount of Echoes known to acoustic designers as reverberation Jeff Alpert is an American percussionist living in Hamburg to demonstrate how important reverberation is today he will play his vibraphone in two very different venues wow I was completely dead in here there's absolutely no reverberation at all so we'll see how the vibraphone sounds in here this is an anechoic chamber a room with no reverberation the walls sailing and even the floor are carefully designed to absorb sound waves there's really absolutely no Echo at all and that's quite strange even when you're speaking you you don't even hear any kind of echo coming from your voice I don't think any musician would enjoy playing in a room like this for very long for musicians it's a very important part of playing is is to be able to listen and in in a room like this I think it would be very hard to to hear each other a good acoustic brings warmth to music and in a room like this you don't get that at all to demonstrate The Other Extreme Jeff sets up his vibraphone in Saint Michaelis hamburg's largest church in a large space with hard walls sound behaves in a completely different way [Music] when Alpert plays a note on his vibraphone it sends out sound in all directions [Music] with the church's hard surfaces the sound continues to bounce from wall to wall for several seconds foreign you can hear you have about three or four seconds where it echoes comparing the sounds of the church with the anechoic chamber it's easy to hear the difference [Music] if there's too much reverberation the sound can become mushy as individual notes blend with the repeats of the notes just played the perfect Concert Hall I think would have to be something right in the middle and that would mean also that the the reverberation is not too long like it is here and but it has to be a lot more than it would be in the Anna Coke chamber to create the ideal reverberation in the concert hall The Architects must work closely with the acoustic designer Mr Toyota to perfect the size and shape of the walls and the materials used on every surface for us working with monitors is absolutely crucial and they're real working models you know they're not presentation models yeah I would say we maybe create it over over 100 models using the models The Architects hone the layout and shapes of the walls yeah so this is this is an important cardboard model for us because it is already more or less the final shape you know this is basically where we are right now this type of concert hall is known as a Vineyard Style as the layout of seats look similar to The Terraces of a sloping Vineyard its complex arrangement of balconies and walls is essential to create a good acoustic one of the keys to good sound is what acoustic Engineers call Early reflections when a musician plays a note the sound travels directly to each member of the audience but a good Concert Hall must also reflect the sound from a nearby surface so that the listener receives it between 10 and 80 milliseconds after the direct sound early Reflections enrich the music for The Listener in the world's greatest concert hall every seat in the house must receive these early Reflections so you can see here the straight lines and they are very important for the early Reflections within the space and you actually even need to introduce an in-between wall here because that distance of the back wall here would be too far away from the actual Orchestra they have tested the shape with computer simulations to show the acoustic Works in theory but there is only one way to really check it build it in a 1 10 scale model [Music] this model took six months to build every detail is accurate even the tiny felt hats on the 2100 model people absorb sound in a similar way to hair and one of the most important uh purpose of this and one tensor model and with the actual sound is to detect detrimental Echo to find any unwanted Echoes that could ruin a concert Toyota and his team play sounds through a 12-sided loudspeaker on the stage tiny microphones placed in the audience pick up the sound and feed it to the recording devices weeks of testing reveal a problem the concert hall has an unwanted Echo it shows up clearly on the audio waveform this is showing the Echo and then this is coming from the seating a delayed Echo Was Heard separately from the direct sound we have to find out the uh the path for each Echo uh in order to fix the problem by changing the angle by changing the material a small change to the model ceiling fixes the problem finally we eliminate the detriment records here Mr Toyota has done all he can to create a perfect acoustic in this in the round design but he won't find out if he succeeded until opening night and that's starting to look like it might be a very very long wait as summer turns to Autumn progress slows at the elm philharmoni construction site work is underway on the glass facade [Music] high above the river Alba the construction workers must install 1098 individually Designed Glass panels each costing on average around 20 000 Euros but fitting them is proving a bit of a nightmare today we have to mount six elements we have to mount it in the 26th floor so today it's a little bit tricky because we have normal weather for Hamburg it's raining it's very windy this balcony unit weighs over a ton its large surface area means the wind could easily blow it out of control [Music] if the wind reaches 40 kilometers an hour installing the glass becomes too dangerous and work must stop all right like this despite the wind today the team is On Target we fixed six elements per day or we have fixed now four elements today it's a situation now it's good the same way The Architects are striving to give their concert hall the perfect acoustic they also seek Perfection for the building's facade panel is printed with a pattern of opaque dots for decoration and for temperature control the residential part of the building where you can see these kind of cutouts in the glass they're like these kind of lodges where you can step outside exterior spaces behind so the residents themselves can actually get an understanding of the environment and sense of smell sound and so on each unit has its own unique design that contributes to the overall look that the Architects wanted to achieve foreign liquid about Reflections and so on the building skin now is becoming so much more interesting you know it's like a water surface but a water surface has a texture we suddenly create this very alive skin but the vast Glass Walls gave the Architects an unusual problem [Music] normal glass could reflect ships radar signals creating the impression of ghost ships in the harbor [Music] the main problem of building such a large and I'd say dominant glass element or glass building in the harbor area especially which ships are coming in and out all the time is the fact that you have to avoid any radar Reflections from glass for sand it lead a ship's crew to think their vessel was on a collision course with another ship the solution was to make the glass visible to radar with reflective Chrome micro dots embedded in the pattern the special um chrome mirror dots on the glass being placed in a way that Radars from from the from the big ships that actually enter the port of Hamburg won't have a kind of a doubling effect of their signals every stage of construction is closely monitored by The Architects and their next big challenge is the top of the building the design calls for the vast seven thousand square meter roof to be covered in wave-like Peaks and valleys that reflect its Maritime location but to construct it around a thousand steel girders must be curved into precise shape above these bespoke girders will be an outer skin of 5800 aluminum discs each one carefully placed by hand [Music] even for seagulls the old philharmoni will look stunning [Music] if it ever gets completed because the project is now expected to be at least three years late the costs continue to spiral and the people of Hamburg are beginning to question whether the city needs to spend so much money even the musicians are concerned if it was spent with private money then I would say wonderful they can do whatever they like however the costs are now approaching 400 million euros it's a great thing to have a such a musical landmark and uh but on the other side it's taking a lot of money from all the other cultural activities in the city and this has to be watched in November 2011 the crisis over Rising costs comes to a head in a dispute over reinforcing the roof the construction company stops work the project has become vastly more complicated and expensive than the job they agreed to five years earlier and tender was far too early and you can imagine if the tender documents are not precise enough then of course a Contractor on the other side cannot make a fair price or a precise price the grand scheme that has swallowed hundreds of millions of Euros of public money lies all but abandoned the headlines Revel in the misery of it all and month after month passes as lawyers argue over who is to blame well frankly it's a big mess this is unacceptable it's become a very political issue and it's something that the politicians are fighting about [Music] with the costs more than quadrupling might the world's greatest concert hall never be finished okay well there's no turning back I mean what do you do with a with a building like that now for over a year There is almost no work at the construction site until finally the dispute is resolved but at an additional cost of more than 250 million euros for the city of Hamburg [Music] the total cost to the city is now a whopping 789 million euros almost 850 million US dollars new contracts have been made which now make it possible to realize this building and which hopefully will lead to a result that people will say well it was worth it [Music] in April 2013 construction of the El philomony restarts the glass facade and the roof can be finished and the focus turns to the interior inside the large Concert Hall the final part of the acoustic design is coming together [Music] over 10 000 specially designed acoustic tiles will line the walls and balconies of the auditorium the design is abstract and modern but these tiles owe their shape to a concept that dates back centuries research reveals that it's not just the shoebox shape that gives classical concert Halls their superb sound the decorations along the walls are just as important [Music] when sound waves hit the plaster decorations they scatter in different directions this creates multiple Reflections giving a more even natural sound philharmoni Herzog and demuron have created their own modern equivalent that they call the white skin their specially developed fiber reinforced gypsum tiles can be individually micro shaped to create acoustic Reflections to Mr Toyota's exact specifications by scattering sound and we can get a very even distribution over the audience area under Mr Toyota's guidance The Architects developed the pattern of the white skin tile by tile every tile is different um it's a that was part of the whole micro shaping idea so we started analyzing each war with him understanding more depth here meant more dispersion less depth meant more direct reflection and by doing that we kind of optimized acoustically every wall for his needs it's taken over 350 million lines of computer programming to produce this vast three-dimensional jigsaw every one of the 10 287 tiles is different but their patterns must all line up it's basically like going back to Childhood with a huge meccano set everything is numbered labeled there's a sequence as to how things are done for Nick Lyons this is a tense time if the tiles don't fit together perfectly it will be a major setback they started about six months ago and they've been mounting in a kind of a spiral form working the way up to the tip I'm really surprised at the Precision I have to say it just fitted I mean everything fitted of course there was a little bit of Shaving here and there but in general it was was a set piece it's fantastic and at last it seems the Rouse over money are behind them progress has been fast and impressive and especially after such a long wait it's wonderful to see the uh the progress of construction yeah it's going on well [Music] a building is starting to look good but no one really knows if the extraordinary acoustic design will work until the first concert takes place six years behind schedule [Music] the end is finally in sight in every part of the building painters electricians and Fitters are hard at work they're putting the finishing touches in preparation for the grand opening to the public so at the moment it's I mean we're two two months before official hand over to the city so it's it's very much about final paintwork jobs and fine-tuning of Technical Systems maybe laying down the yard a bit of wooden flooring the hotel is complete and it's 244 rooms are ready to receive guests a top end a night here will cost you over 3 000 US dollars on the other side of the building the prices of the luxury Penthouse Apartments are a secret that is only revealed to people who can show they have enough money to buy one the most expensive is said to cost thirty seven thousand dollars per square meter also finished is the main public space at the moment we're standing on the Plaza which is the rooftop of the whole storage building it's a public level everyone can come here and without having to go to concerts so everyone can experience the views after years of delays the final work is progressing remarkably smoothly but before they can reveal the concert hall to the public the acoustic designer must give his approval Mr Toyota has flown in from Los Angeles it looks like really beautiful Mount Fuji the reflector designed to bounce sound backs of the orchestra can hear themselves playing wins his approval and the concert hall it's just amazing are you pleased with it very much very much now Mr Toyota is ready to put the concert Hall's design to its first big test it must render a passing ship's fog horns completely inaudible this is a opening directly to an outside and the uh one of those on the weak point in the acoustic structure will the double wall of the hall do its job or will Mr Toyota have to commit Harry Carey [Music] actually are along with the very close and to the building [Music] I don't hear the inside but yeah what is the situation outside tell me okay okay fine inside the hall the ship's horn is inaudible the and the result uh is very successful I think it has passed its first test it's sound proof but the critical test of its acoustics with a full Orchestra is yet to come [Music] two months before the first concert the City opens the plaza level to the public after a six-year delay the people of Hamburg finally get to see what they have paid for [Music] flown in from Switzerland for the Press launch today this is the first hand over to the public the Handover of the public Plaza and that will be accessible for everyone so it's a place for everyone to reach the public Plaza from the entrance visitors travel up the 82 meter long escalator [Music] over 8 000 giant sequins lie in the walls it's Europe's longest curved escalator its visitors Ascend its convex shape slowly reveals their destination [Music] for us it was always very important to to to be really firm you know on special things you know because the quality was in the foregrounds so this was really almost for us no compromise [Music] The Architects have stamped their mark on every aspect of the building yeah vast archers allow light to pour into the center of the plaza floor [Music] a Rippling curtain of glass rising from the brick floor keeps out the wind from the plaza level curving staircases lead up to the main concert hall running right round the building gives the people of Hamburg a 360 degree view of their City [Music] despite the cost the locals seem proud of their new building [Music] I think it is a very impressive building it did take quite a while to complete and it did cost a lot of money but I think it's elegant and I think it's a gateway to the world and a Gateway into Hamburg it's great it's a big day for the architects in more ways than one today they are unveiling the concert hall to the Press despite the hurdles along the way they have stuck to and realized their original vision you say that even if this was especially long architecture is always a marathon it's not a Sprint often we had difficult meetings really difficult meetings or bad news contractual news or other news not good news you know but when you went then to the Constitution side then you were back again in this project world and you were fascinated again and really and fired by by this unique place and the work really kept us alive it has taken 16 years from initial sketch to finished building but the time has finally arrived for The Architects to let go of their creation it's like children you are with them you take care you do the best to make it really a great child or a great piece of architecture and you have to let it go like children actually Hamburg finally has its new landmark it's almost two decades since Alexander Gerard first conceived the idea of putting a concert hall in an old Warehouse what does he think of the final result the look is different from what we envisit we wanted a more traditional glass facades but all other details are marvelous I really think so it's a very very good architecture the building as a whole is really quite exceptional unlike The Architects Mr Toyota can't let go just yet this is just a start of the process of our actual testing and the reduction missions the first moment uh is I would say in the most difficult moment and since everything is new so it means that yeah for instance and how to play how to hear each other uh it is the process is taking time gradually gradually the situation will be uh you know improved and uh changed and by Mission themselves whole satisfy its most demand and the musicians who will work here Jan Larson is the first Viola player in the Resident Orchestra what does he think like a crystal you can hear every detail it's very easy to listen to your colleagues it's kind of a very strict teacher to a group so you really have to be in every little detail you have to be perfect otherwise it's hearable it's just great after checking the sound from around the hall Mr Toyota gives his personal verdict on the acoustic [Music] hey dear uh you know the one of the best or one of five bests or you know but still it is unique and they should be in one of those on the world class definitely but the most important judges will be the public attending the first concert foreign it's the opening night of hamburg's elm philomony Concert Hall a city is laying on a spectacular show above the plaza level concert goers make their way up the grand staircase that leads to the concert hall every one of its 2 100 seats was booked months ago foreign as the doors close the holes double walls ensure that not a Sound reaches the public areas [Music] This Is The Moment of Truth will hamburg's Discerning music lovers give the acoustic the thumbs up foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it's really crisp and clear it was really an inexperience to hear that and you can hear every single instrument it was really impressive yeah really nice overwhelmingly people appear to love the hole in its acoustic I think the the sound is beautiful you can hear single instruments and you really become very aware of how sound is produced and it spreads the Acoustics are very good very good and it's an acoustic which is probably best described as a breathing you know if anyone knows if the sound is working it's world-class conductor Ken Nagano the concert hall is a is an enormous success of course from an acoustic point of view I think every musician myself included and every public member is so deeply moved to have this acoustic here in Hamburg a total cost of 866 million euros around 900 million dollars the elb philharmoni has been described as possibly the most expensive entertainment venue since the Romans built the Coliseum so was it worth it I think to see it right now it's probably it's worth it yes it's worth it yeah is this this is it certainly was worth the money and also this is what it's like in Germany had anyone said at the start this will be over 500 million then nobody would have built it there would never have been an approval so you start small and later and when it's there it's such a terrific thing you don't think about money too much anymore is it worth it it simply is worth it and it will be worth it for years for many many years whether it is decades whether it is centuries we don't know but it is worth every single Cent yes and is it the greatest concert hall in the world this has the potential to be one of the great Halls of the of the world um and we'll just have to wait and see [Music] this is the story of the battle to build a railway across one of the most extreme environments on Earth [Music] delay over a thousand kilometers of track in a remote Wilderness to drive seven tunnels through the rugged slopes to raise 675 bridges over valleys and rivers all at an altitude where even a simple breath is nearly impossible to come by this is a tough place to work headaches shortness of breath freezing winds 140 000 workers and 2 000 Medics struggled for five years to conquer this hostile environment and to complete the qinghai Tibet Railway the highest most extreme Railway in the world [Music] [Applause] Beijing West the largest station in Asia and one of the busiest four hundred thousand can pass through here in a single day thank you coming through with today's crowd is Finnish engineer passi lauta it's here to see for Thief himself how one of the most extraordinary Railways on the planet was built the line to lesser into bed it goes so high and of course for such a long distance over really really rough terrains so I don't think anything like that has been ever done on the railway engineering world possible this is no ordinary rail journey the Lassa Express is a multi-billion dollar Marvel specially built to survive at altitudes higher than the Swiss Alps and at freezing temperatures [Applause] for train obsessed Percy it's a journey he's dreamed about for years I've read about it and I've seen some of the engineering solutions they use to build the track and I gotta see it it's 9 30 and the Lasser Express is underway this is it director of rail Transportation at Michigan Tech University pasi is here on business we're doing some work connecting uh Alaskan rail network with the Canadian rail network and as part of our product we've been studying some of the called regions railroads around the world to see how some of the other countries and some of the other regions have built them so it's a it's a learning learning experience for me from Beijing the Lassa Express will travel 3000 kilometers across China to the town of golmoud from there the train will climb up to the Tibetan plateau and across the roof of the world to Lassa [Music] now a journey but it's the final high altitude section of the line that interests Percy crosses land higher than any mountain in the American Rockies an environment so hostile that it's like building a railway on Mars and it took Chinese Engineers 50 years to work out how to do it [Music] the idea to build this controversial Railway dates back to the 1950s when the Chinese Army occupied Tibet in 1950 they wanted a railway to supply the troops but to build a railway first they needed a road the Chinese government threw a vast labor force equipped with basic tools against the harsh conditions of the Tibetan plateau but around 3 000 workers died from exposure and from altitude sickness was a disaster and although the dream of a railway to Tibet lived on the plans were eventually shelved [Music] today the Lasser Express pounds its way across industrial Eastern China at over 110 kilometers per hour it's the pride of the Chinese Railways and only the best get to work on it Yang Jing Jing is the train Master he's responsible for everything that happens on board especially safety I need to ensure the train has a safe journey from Beijing all the way to Lassa he begins the day with a briefing for some of the 36 staff who look after the passengers [Music] 13 passenger carriages of the Lasser Express are divided into three types two so-called soft sleepers are the Chinese equivalent of first class well this is definitely quite a luxurious way of traveling this compartment is called the soft sleeper those four birds for four people and we even have a entertainment system with some Chinese TV or movies but it's not as luxurious for everybody in the train seven carriages offer hard sleeper accommodation a bit more of a squeeze with six people to a room and four carriages are simply fitted with seats [Music] 900 people on board who need to be fed for two days and nights that's the responsibility of zhangyang and His Four chefs [Music] the most difficult part is that we have people from different ethnic backgrounds along the length of the Railway everyone has different tastes Tibetans the way ethnic people and other minorities all have different tastes this makes life very difficult and the train has plenty of hot water for those who like to make their own hope cuisine it may look like a normal train but later in the journey the lives of everyone on board will depend on the hidden high-tech features of its carriages [Music] they've been specifically built to cope with the conditions on the Tibetan plateau when you take a look at these trains they look just like regular Chinese trains there's nothing extraordinary except I see this one here it is an oxygen outlet that you can get some extra oxygen in the high altitudes of the train thank you [Music] each carriage is fitted with an oxygen generating unit that will come into operation at high altitude it's a small portent of what lies ahead [Music] throughout the day the train heads West stopping for safety Jacks and to pick up passengers lhasa is still 24 hours away but already there are signs of Tibetan culture as new passengers settle in for the night the train is already climbing by the time it reaches golmu the last stop before the Tibetan Plateau it will be 2 800 meters above sea level by 3 am most of the passengers are fast asleep is wide awake this is quite exciting moment to me in a few minutes we are going to be reaching ball mode which is the last station before the train climbs up to Tibet Plateau since I want to see the how they built the track this is the end of line for me it's time to get up find out how Chinese Engineers conquered the plateau he needs to see the line close up and in daylight it's here that the engineering challenge really begins yeah the remaining passengers are about to embark on a steep 2 000 meter climb and that means an engine change to a loco with serious power very high altitudes a conventional diesel can't cope with the low oxygen levels bring on a pair of nj2 Locos [Music] 138 ton diesel electric monsters with a combined output of 8 000 horsepower immediately behind the engine they've added an electricity generator car the Train's life support system supplying power heat and most important of all oxygen for the passengers and crew train is about to embark on an extreme Journey that is only possible thanks to some radical engineering and a controversial political decision by 1984 the Chinese Railway system had reached golmood but here it stopped for the next 16 years the unique problems of constructing a railway at very high altitude blocked its progress to Lassa then in 1999 the Chinese government announced that it wanted to extend its Railway Network to the poor undeveloped regions of western China and into Tibet foreign that the railway would bring prosperity to the province and raise the standard of living critics claimed that the line was intended to tighten political control over Tibet and that it would enable large numbers of Han Chinese to move here overrunning the culture of local Tibetans whatever the truth China's Engineers had their work cut out to deliver on this bold plan 50 kilometers outside goal mood pasi lautela begins his mission to find out how Chinese Engineers solved the first challenge of this extreme Terrain to reach the plateau they first had to cross the formidable peaks of the kyeonglong mountains the old Tibetan Highway runs close to the new Railway giving Percy the chance to drive the route well when you see this common mountains with the snowy tops it's no longer surprise it took 50 years to build this Railway line up here quite magnificent cars and lorries can cope with steep climbs but heavy trains need a slow gradual Ascent what Engineers call a steady gradient well they chosen this route because this goes kind of between the mountain tops they are following the valley between and that's the easiest way to maintain the smooth gradient but going straight up the valley is out of the question the gradient is too steep so the railway must zigzag up it Crossing time and time again with literally dozens of bridges two-thirds of the way up the valley the engineers faced an enormous challenge building the sanchiha bridge the tallest bridge on the whole route right here we are crossing the river valley so we have to maintain the railway up in the air so that we can keep the smooth gradient the critical structure that had to be completed quickly so they could get supplies up to the plateau by rail to build the rest of the Railway and that meant working through the winter by throwing an army of workers at the job and keeping the concrete warm when temperatures plunged to minus 20. they managed to construct the bridge in just 12 months the deadline was met wow this is fantastic I'm quite happy I got off the train and I can't even imagine how it was to build this bridge over the winter time just amazing but this was just the beginning passy heads over the kyunlong mountains up to the cold thin air of the Tibetan plateau he's about to discover an extraordinary natural phenomenon that destroys towns [Music] crossing the kyanla mountains day breaks for the passengers on board the t27 train from Beijing to Lassa it brings with it spectacular views of the Tibetan plateau [Music] I had dreamed to come to Tibet for many years and see the scenery from from the many books and and the scenery is far more better than what we imagine and from the book actually so it's really great yeah this incredible area is so vast and cold it's been called the third pole it stretches over two and a half million square kilometers a quarter of the area of China [Music] winter temperatures plunge to minus 35 degrees Celsius and the entire area is higher than the Matterhorn for Railway Engineers like pasi lautela this is about as tough as it gets if I was asked to build a railway all these mountains I would probably run away I don't think you can find much more of a challenge than doing something like that [Applause] actually you can because below the flat surface of the plateau lies a substance that for 50 years defeated all attempts to build a railway Frozen Earth permafrost well the per Frost can have depth of view meters or all the way up to like 50 or 60 meters and most of the permafrost stays Frozen year around the problem is not the permanent permafrost deep in the ground but a layer of soil and water above it the active layer that freezes in winter and thaws in summer in Winter the ground is frozen solid but if I was here in the summertime it would be like walking on a bark or a swamp the effects of the winter freeze can easily be demonstrated it's getting quite chilly here so we're going to have a little experiment I have a full bottle of water and I'm going to leave it here we'll come back and see what's happened to it [Applause] and here is the result of our experiment as water freezes it expands by about nine percent now this landscape is full of water which behaves the same way as the water in the bottle over decades the ground here can shift several meters it's a problem that the locals have struggled with for centuries as Posse finds out on his first stop on the plateau the small town of Wu Dalian where the locals have been having a bit of a problem with their foundations many of the buildings in this town show damage from permafrost once the ground gets moving from freezing and thawing almost nothing can stop it as the ground Rises and Falls it's pulling the town to pieces I mean take a look at these cracks in this building this is a great example of what permafrost can do in the buildings tough for buildings the movement of the permafrost makes it impossible to build a railway as the Builders of this line in Alaska and these lines in Canada found out the hard way [Music] so Chinese Engineers were expected to somehow solve the unsolvable [Music] this nightmare problem landed on the desk of cold region scientists guo dong Jin who quickly ruled out the obvious conventional solution the problem with this idea is that it involves a tremendous amount of work you have to dig out all the foundation soil remove all the ice and finally fill it with rocks over half the planned route across the Tibetan Plateau crossed permafrost 632 kilometers in all building deep foundations into the permafrost on such a vast scale was just too much labor and too much cost even for the Chinese [Music] then came a revelation the solution had been staring Chang in the face right here on the plateau the locals had figured out that the biggest problem for their houses was that the heat inside melted the ground below causing subsidence their solution was to build their houses on stilts or put pipes between the building and the ground to allow air to flow through Cheng realized that this kept the ground below the houses Frozen it was a Eureka moment if he could keep the ground below the railway Frozen then it wouldn't subside I think the most important issue regarding the railway is the idea that we must change from maintaining the temperature to reducing the temperature this is essential to try out this idea in the 1970s Chang's team built a research station upon the plateau at bayua they built a test section of the Railway embankment and started to experiment so here we have ventilation ducts which are just Hollow pipes that run through the embankment in the winter they allow cold air and wind to go through the embankment removing heat from it over time something amazing happened year by year the ground below got colder over several years they reduced the average temperature of the ground by two to three degrees just enough to keep it Frozen [Music] but to build a whole Railway line 600 kilometers long with concrete tubes running through it would still be too expensive Chang's cheap idea wasn't cheap enough but he didn't give up after years surveying the plateau he noticed that something strange was happening beneath piles of small rocks the reports showed the temperature under the Rocks was lower than other areas [Music] could this point the way to an even cheaper solution than the tubes a report from a remote part of Eastern Kazakhstan confirmed his suspicions [Music] archaeologists had discovered ancient tombs made from piles of small rocks they noticed that the ground away from the tombs was soft and boggy but under each tomb it was frozen and had remained Frozen for thousands of years preserving the artifacts below somehow these rocks were cooling the ground [Music] back at the research station Cheng decided to see if an embankment built of small rocks could do the same for a railway the purpose of these crushed rocks is to remove heat from the embankment and from the crown below so when they are built they make sure there is no fine material between the Rocks leaving as much space for the air to circulate as possible over just 14 months Chang's experimental Rock embankment lowered the average temperature of the ground by three degrees Celsius and he found out how it worked in winter cold strong winds blew through the Rocks pulling heat out of the ground while in the summer The Rock shaded the embankment from the heat of the Sun after 50 years of frustration Chinese scientists had stumbled onto a 2 000 year old solution to the permafrost problem that was about as low Tech As It Gets this can be almost a one meter thick layer that goes down to embankment then down to the other side and up again making almost like a u-shape [Music] at last Chinese Engineers could start building the railway [Music] in 2001 thousands of workers converged on the plateau and work began building the huge embankments using local materials and basic machinery [Music] by 2002 construction Crews were rolling out the railway line at an incredible Pace thanks to another very clever but simple idea the pg30 locomotive which lays its own rails as it advances it makes building a track almost as easy as assembling a model train set by mid-2003 the workers had laid over 250 kilometers of track from goldmood up onto the Tibetan plateau and were making good progress towards Lasser but the battle with the permafrost was far from over well in some of the areas the permafrost is very warm so that the rocks by themselves could not solve the problem and in those cases they would have to look into alternative Solutions in some sections of the route the summer temperatures were just a little too warm the embankments needed a little extra help to keep the ground Frozen an ingenious device was found that was once again very low Tech harnessed nature and required no power these bizarre looking tubes are called thermosiphons the idea behind this is ingenious but really quite simple if you have ever licked the back of your hand and blown on it your skin feels cool that is because the water is evaporating and that removes heat from your skin these work in a similar manner up to 10 meters long with 5 meters buried into the ground the thermosiphons contain ammonia a refrigerating liquid however unlike a fridge a thermosiphon doesn't need an electricity Supply to work [Music] inside the tube the liquid ammonia behaves a bit like the water on your skin it absorbs heat from the ground which causes it to boil and evaporate into a gas the gas rises in the tube taking the heat from the ground with it the top cold wind cools the tube and the ammonia gives up its heat to the air outside and condenses back into a liquid which runs to the bottom of the tube and the cycle repeats itself simple low-tech genius 34 kilometers of track are cooled this way [Music] thermosiphons were incapable of protecting the most vulnerable sections of permafrost Hussey heads to an area called Ching Soo almost a quarter of the way across the plateau to explore the most fragile area of permafrost on the whole route foreign here the active layer of permafrost melts during the summer and it turns into a treacherous bog that can behave almost like a quicksand if it turns into that kind of quicksand you can't bring anything on top of it everything would just sink into it immediately the ground here gets too warm in summer even for thermosiphons to cool if the engineers couldn't find a way across this shifting Marsh there would be no Railway though Engineers recognized that at most difficult locations crossed rocks and thermosiphons were not enough to have long lasting Railway so they decided to build structures or try Bridges at these locations now this was more expensive but they believed it was the right way to go the answer they believe treat the bog as if it was water Bridges along the Route teams of workers drilled thousands of holes deep into the permafrost by drilling through the active layer and down into the ice below that stayed frozen year round they could build on solid Foundations at least that was the theory because they now faced A New Nightmare and again it was all about temperature the concrete poured into the ground to make the piers of the bridges could destroy the very foundations they were building on when you mix the concrete it goes through a chemical reaction as it sets it gives out Heat in this experiment the temperature of the mix steadily increases when all your work is aimed at keeping the permafrost Frozen heat is the last thing you want the temperature here is 13 degrees that would be enough to melt the ice around the structure and to make it unstable so how would Chinese DIY engineering deal with this one by putting mother nature to work for them they would build in the dead of winter when ambient temperatures fall below freezing and cool the concrete to 5 degrees pouring it as quickly as possible before it sets by bringing in thousands of workers they built nearly 3 000 Bridge piers in just seven months breathtaking achievement epitomized by one of the iconic features of the line the spectacular 11.7 kilometers long qingsua bridge the longest permafrost bridge in the world the permafrost problem was finally conquered in all over 160 kilometers of the qinghai Tibet Railway is built on Bridges like this one-seventh of the whole route but permafrost was not the only formidable natural challenge of the plateau the terrain is so high that it is deficient in one of the basic ingredients for life up here you battle to stay alive [Music] with an average altitude of four and a half thousand meters the Tibetan Plateau is unsurprisingly very sparsely populated about a third of the way across the plateau the Tibetan town of Totowa has a population of 1300. the locals have adapted to living at high altitude over hundreds of years but for anyone else it's a serious hazard up here breathing is much harder than at sea level despite that handicap pasi is taking on the local pool Champion to demonstrate air is mainly made up of molecules of nitrogen and oxygen about one in five molecules is oxygen at sea level there are plenty of molecules of both nitrogen and oxygen in every breath we take but the higher you go those molecules get fewer and fewer at 4 700 meters where I am now the amount of oxygen in the air is almost half of that at the sea level here the body finds it very hard to get enough oxygen out of the air into the blood into the muscles where it's needed the harder we work the more oxygen our bodies need and if we don't get enough it can be fatal in severe cases fluids can leak into your lungs and brain and kill you as the Lasser Express travels over the plateau one of the most important jobs for the crew is to keep an eye on the passengers they're looking for signs of altitude sickness the train is now traveling at 4500 meters above sea level medical advice recommends you should take five days to climb to this altitude to allow time to acclimatize the train has done it in just 32 hours at this altitude around three quarters of people start to experience altitude sickness I can feel that the air is very thin when I was taking pictures even slight movements made me feel Breathless since chunar River I start to feel dizzy and sick my nose feels very dry and so does my child's he has also complained of tummy ache to reduce these symptoms remember those special oxygen generators they fill the carriages within Rich there the oxygen generators inside each carriage use a technique called membrane separation air from outside the train is compressed and pumped through small tubes the walls of those tubes are made of a membrane containing small holes which allow more of the smaller oxygen molecules to pass than the larger nitrogen The Unwanted nitrogen is exhausted from the train via an outlet pipe while the oxygen enriched air is fed into the carriages it raises the level in the air from 21 to 24 it's not much but it makes most people feel better but for people who are really suffering there is a backup system the staff give Afflicted passengers a tube which they can plug directly into a supply of 40 oxygen every birth and seat on the train has its own oxygen supply [Music] the train is not pressurized like an aircraft cabin but the doors are sealed to keep the oxygen enriched atmosphere inside and there's a very slight positive pressure so the air outside can't see pin thank you by comparison for the workers who built the track conditions on the plateau were a living hell hard physical labor at this altitude is not only difficult it's dangerous [Music] I really feel quite fraternal up here at the plateau I have a bit of a headache and even though I'm walking at less than regular Pace I'm completely out of breath many of the 3 000 workers who died building the first road into Tibet in the 1950s died from altitude sickness and the railway Engineers were Keen not to repeat the disaster but they needed extreme structures to be built at extreme altitudes including one in particular I just had to see this this is the highest railway tunnel in the world 4905 meters above sea level the Chinese called the fungwa shantano the nearest Door to Heaven I can't even imagine what people who built this had to go through we are at the 4900 meters and there's not a lot of oxygen so it had to be literally a headache to build it [Music] building this tunnel required hundreds of laborers to live and work at this extreme altitude so the railway company brought in one of China's leading experts on high altitude medicine head of the qinghai Highland Medical and scientific research center the engineers built the tunnel and other high altitude structures without the tragic loss of life of the 1950s road construction [Music] during the initial building of the Tibetan Railway as most of the workers were from regions around sea level they were not adapted to the Highlands aware of the dangers of Rapid Ascent Professor Wu prepared a careful plan our first measure was a stepwise adaptation which meant letting them Ascend gradually so from Inland after the journey from Beijing to sheening they'd stop for three days and then a week stop at goldmood then Ascend to the tangoola mountains Professor Wu was supported by a vast team of 2 000 doctors and nurses foreign s were built every 18 kilometers along the route to treat sick workers and Professor Wu made sure there was a good supply of oxygen [Music] during the process of building the railway there were 21 oxygen making stations built averaging about one for every 50 kilometers this would ensure that during the work every worker had a small oxygen supply device but the heavy cylinders made the work harder so instead oxygen generators were set up to pump oxygen enriched air through the tunnel to the workers of the face with the extra oxygen it was as if they were working 1 200 meters closer to sea level but many of the tunnel workers still got sick so Wu's team installed 25 emergency hyperbaric oxygen Chambers along the route of the line over time the work is adapted to the altitude by the fifth year the incidence of high altitude illness was very low so it was not a single case of serious high altitude illness by October 2002 the workers had completed the Fung War Shan tunnel it was a major Triumph it opened the way to the rest of the plateau and the route South to Lassa but it wasn't fast enough for the Chinese government [Music] 2004 Beijing announced that it wanted the railway completed by early 2006. a whole year ahead of schedule it was an almost impossible Demand on an already ambitious program there was only one way they could pull it off they decided to LEAP ahead to the town of amdo in Tibet and start building the railway from there in two directions at the same time one machine would lay track back towards goal mood while a second machine would build onwards towards Lasser it would triple the speed of construction by the summer three teams of track layers were blazing their way across the plateau in total 140 000 workers worked on the High Altitude section of the line thanks to the medical plan they avoided the fate of the workers of the 1950s who built the original Road so despite having over a thousand cases of severe high altitude illness over the five years no one died the mortality rate was Zero [Music] thanks to the onboard oxygen supply the crew and passengers on the Lasser Express are traveling in relative safety [Music] but as they cross the plateau their lives depend on another critical safety system save money the line was built as a single track but that brings with it a constant Danger if two trains traveling in opposite directions are accidentally rooted onto the same line there could be a head-on collision but to control the trains there are no signals instead alongside the track every 15 or so kilometers there's a mobile phone antenna that passes information between the train and the control center 2 300 kilometers away along the Route there are crossing Loops short sections of double track where trains can pass each other 39 hours into its Journey the Lasser Express is approaching one of these passing points tangula the highest railway station in the world it's a ghostly place station is simply a passing point for trains it's early afternoon and the train is still 500 kilometers from Lasser inside the passengers are protected from the extreme environment outside but while the train protects the passengers from the environment it must also do the reverse it has to protect the fragile ecosystem of this ancient landscape from Human pollution [Music] Plateau contains the kakashili and sanjin Yuen nature reserve the second largest Nature Reserve in the world it's larger than England and Wales combined Eco system easily disrupted and destroyed on most trains around the world sewage and Wastewater are dumped straight onto the track but not here the heat from all that water would warm the permafrost and degrade it it would destroy the very foundations the train runs on so the Chinese have gone green instead of dumping Wastewater on the track the lhasa Express stores it in collection tanks below each carriage each tank holds 500 liters of waste water enough for 250 toilet flushes [Music] every night at Golden station a small Fleet of mini tankers drives along one of the platforms at 11 45 PM the Lasser Express's Sister train the t-28 from Lassa pulls in on its way to Beijing after crossing the plateau the Train's tanks are full of waste water small army of workers leaps into action they attach hoses to the tanks and pump the waste water out the whole operation takes less than 10 minutes the train leaves the station the tankers head off to dispose of the waste safely 900 relieved passengers head off to Beijing Percy is impressed by the efforts to conserve this fragile ecosystem but in his trip across the plateau he's discovered that all is not quite right with the railway the line itself is still under threat despite all the efforts to keep the ground beneath the line Frozen the qinghai Tibet Railway is being attacked by an unexpected enemy in parts of the plateau lies a natural phenomenon that has been here for thousands of years sand though this is quite impressive I didn't really expect to see Santos up here in the plateau it's almost like being at the beach the problem with sand is that unlike mud its grains don't stick together if I stick my hand in here on a windy day like this it just blows away and it's blowing straight towards the railway embankment half a kilometer away and this is where the problem comes the scent that has been blowing in the wind is filling up the gaps in the Rock embankment as the crushed rock embankment fills up with sand it loses its ability to cool the ground below in time this could lead to the permafrost thawing out buckling the track so the railway companies trying its best to stop this happening they have erected dozens of these fences to keep the sand away from the tracks you can see how the sand has piled up behind the fence Wind Blows through the fine mesh of the fences it slows down and drops the sand but despite all their efforts the sand here has already permeated The Rock embankment the sand only affects a small section of the line but there's another much more serious threat to the long-term future of the Railway and this one is man-made the permafrost on the plateau is extremely sensitive to changes in temperature and global warming is slowly heating it up our country has done research in this field and has given us a set of data speculating that the temperature of the qinghai Tibetan Plateau Will Rise by 2.2 to 2.6 degrees Celsius over the next 50 years the railway is designed to cope with a three-degree increase in average temperature foreign but other factors could raise the temperature far more than this across the continent and particularly in neighboring India coal is used extensively in fires and furnaces that produce smoke containing black particles of soot much of that sort Falls onto the snow that covers the Tibetan plateau in winter the dark particles cause the dirty snow to absorb more of the sun's heat than clean snow in Spring the snow now melts earlier than before adding to the warming of the plateau despite all the measures to keep the rail bed Frozen if the temperature rises more than three degrees the railway could be in trouble [Music] the Lasser Express sweeps over the stunning triple span Bridge across the sacred skaiatu River for the crew of the train it's a welcome sight 47 hours it's a sign they are nearing their Journey's End [Music] vast new Lassa station 35 it's a symbol of the Chinese determination that the railway is here to stay with this line Chinese Engineers have proved they are among the best in the world and they've laid the foundations for an expansion program the like of which the world has never seen in the next five years China will spend an estimated 300 billion dollars constructing over thirty thousand kilometers of new railways for passy lautela his time on the plateau has come to an end coming up here has been stunning experience for me I already had a lot of respect for people who built this Railway but only now I truly realize the challenges they faced I mean this is a tough place to work headaches shortness of breath freezing winds not only they got the railway built but from an engineering point of view it really is quite amazing the qinghai Tibet Railway is a truly Monumental engineering achievement a vast labor of human endeavor and ingenious low-tech engineering shows the way forward for new railway lines all over the world perhaps the start of a new golden age of railways

Channel: Free Documentary - Engineering

Views: 2,539,026

Keywords: free documentary, free documentary engineering, engineering, engineering documentary, tech, tech documentary, constructions, constructions documentary, technology documentary, architecture

Id: tEm_H280JLc

Length: 148min 2sec (8882 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 19 2023