How Engineers Built the Tallest Tower in Japan to Withstand Earthquakes | Blueprint

in this episode the world's tallest freestanding Tower it's a striking Landmark the world number one Tower taking structural design to new heights the number of the steel was about 37,000 in total and the Innovative pioneers of the past this is unbelievable this rocket is just so big when I try to wiggle side to side I really can't that made the impossible [Music] possible Tokyo home to over 35 million [Music] people with vast suburbs stretching 14,000 square miles its lowrise sprawl as a direct result of a serious construction challenge one of Nature's most deadly forces earthquakes

but as space in the city Runs Out Engineers are for the first time being forced to look up this evolving Skyline poses a new problem one that having lived and worked here high-rise architect David mot is well aware of the city's 333 M Communications Hub Tokyo Tower is being neutralized you can almost see it's going to be locked out by a building so Tokyo Tower is no longer serving its purpose as a television transmission tower the signal is being blocked in a nation that experiences 1,500 earthquakes a year uninterrupted TV and radio communication is vital

a problem that requires a radical solution here it is Tokyo Sky Tree the Tokyo Sky Tree is the world's tallest freestanding Tower and a project the like of which has never been attempted before in Japan at 634 M tall it's double the height of Tokyo Tower it's got the most ad Advan engineering and Technology we have available today this is the solution for Tokyo's connectivity completed in 2012 the sheer scale of this engineering Marvel offered a career defining opportunity for designer tsuyu tuia I think all the Architects and Engineers have some dream to create you

know something high and something you know you know going to the sky its record-breaking proportions demanded extraordinary solutions from structural engineer at suo konishi this is the first time to H design the 600 M High Towers in Japan we have to solve the uh many problems the 600 1 34 M structure is more than four times the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza its spine is a 375 M Hollow concrete core cloaked in a 37,000 piece steel frame which morphs from a triangle to a circle it has two observation decks the tallest at 450

m is one of the highest in the world and is topped by the state-of-the-art antenna tower capable of transmitting 100 km away [Music] [Music] construction begins in 2008 but before Sky Tree can even rise out of the ground its designers face a seemingly impossible problem where we are now used to be part of Tokyo bay the land I'm walking on was underwater so what that means is the soil around here is extremely soft and for engineers this presents a big challeng challenge especially when you do something of that height in in in a place that

has earthquakes and typhoons it's going to want to push the building so that building needs to be firmly anchored into the ground now if you don't get the foundations right then that's a recipe for disaster and with a tower exerting 67,000 tons of force how do you ensure such a colossal structure will remain standing on such unstable soil in a seismic Zone it's a challenge that may not have been possible without the great innovators from the [Music] past it might be far from perfect but soft ground has never put off history's Builders I'll forget it

o in fact some of the world's most famous cities they've been built on swamps and marshes Bravo I'm getting wet in New Orleans the ground is so soggy they famously had to build their cemeteries above ground Ah that's better and Berlin is crisscrossed by a constantly changing 40m network of pink pipes used to pump the ground free of water ah Wonder [Music] a architectural historian Jen masar has traveled to one of California's most iconic Coastal locations to discover how a change of Fortune sparked an engineering Revolution it's hard to imagine but San Francisco hasn't always

been this big at the beginning of the 19th century it was a small outpost on the west western edge of the United States all of that changed in 1848 when Prospectors struck gold as the population swelled by the 1890s the city's infrastructure was creaking Under The Strain one of the areas that needed a lot of attention was the old fairy house that sat here in the harbor the solution for San Francisco's booming Bay Area would be completed in 189 98 the Monumental new Ferry Building wow what a great building it's got that great tower and

all these Bays lined up along the water it's so much bigger than its original predecessor it weighs about 150 million PB which translates to about 75,000 tons but building this structure was an unprecedented challenge the massive weight including the 75 M Tower sits on 55 M of bay mud which being in a seismic Zone creates near impossible building conditions so those task with designing a new Ferry Building really had to think about innovative solutions in order for the building to be successful supporting architect Arthur pige Brown's Grand Design was down to engineer Howard Holmes he

proposed a huge concrete slab set on piles driven into the ground but traditional methods simply wouldn't be enough I've got some wet sand which is the same kind of sand that's here underneath the ocean and this wooden plank is to help us see that concrete mat that the entire building is sitting on and these nails are those wooden piles that are driven down to the sand in a typical building you might use only as many piles as you would need to support the building so let's see if that works I can put quite a bit

of load on this but we're in a seismic Zone you can see that I can turn this sideways pretty easily so wiggle wiggle wiggle to survive earthquakes Brown's fairy building would need something special so here's my new demonstration with lots of piles if I take this last one hammer this guy in and try it again let's see what happens this time wow not only can I not push it in very much but when I try to wiggle it side to side I really can't and the secret of this stability is down to friction friction is

created around the surface area of each of these piles and more piles equals more surface area and because it's much more stable like this any Earth load all of those forces are just going to be absorbed by all the piles making the rest of the building much more secure brilliant over 5,000 wooden piles were driven deep into San Francisco's semifluid Sandy mud each cluster supporting just one of the structure's 111 concrete peers it's a foundation with three parts which you can see here a reinforced concrete mat under the whole building then concrete years then wooden

pilings driven down to the mud those wooden pilings are about 80 ft in length underneath the tower there are 345 piles [Music] alone on its completion in 1898 the new Ferry Building had the largest foundations for a structure over water anywhere and to this day it continues to defy sinking sand and anything that nature can throw at [Music] it this design has withstood the earthquakes of 1906 and 1989 both of which caused massive damage throughout San Francisco the building has proven itself through its innovative engineering at the 634 M Tokyo Sky Tree Engineers take Howard

homes method into the 21st century 131 concrete piles are driven into the soft ground to stabilize it but the building's record-breaking height adds a further problem when the big forces apply to the tower like a typhoon or Big G break the entire Tower acts like a giant liver and put enormous force on its base pushing up one side and pulling up the other to overcome this Sky Tree needs a unique system its 67,000 tons of force is exerted onto a tripod shaped base right now I'm standing at one of the feet of the tripod structure

and underneath this here is a bunch of uh wall foundations 5050 M below the surface three clusters of 1.2 M thick walls use friction with the surrounding soil to increase horizontal rigidity connecting each cluster are three 50 m wall piles with added Knuckles acting as spikes further increasing friction combined with the column piles the towers foundations act as a tree roots stabilizing the superstructure in the most extreme of conditions it has a a huge surface area and the friction between the wall and the ground soil acts as a anchor and constructing it a huge amount

of it was enormous W this is a very special Foundation system exclusively used for the Tokyo Sky [Music] Tree but to complete the world's tallest freestanding Tower Engineers face more challenges and have to turn to another of History's great Innovations it's a brilliantly simple solution and sparked a Renaissance in skyscraper construction to produce more impossible [Music] Engineering in Tokyo Japan the 634 M broadcast tower Sky Tree pushes high-rise construction to a whole new [Music] level and its Engineers to their limits it is uh the world's tallest tower in one of the world's busiest city so

it was very challenging work for us to construct more than six times higher than London's Big Ben and twice the height of its predecessor the Tokyo Tower Sky Tree changes the face of Japan's capital highrise architect David mot appreciates building higher than ever before in the capital is a huge challenge particularly when land is running out the engineers at Tokyo Sky Tree had to put a tower that's twice as high as Tokyo Tower on a piece of land that's only a quarter of that size the proportions of a super tall tower are crucial if a

structure is more than five times higher than its narrowest base Dimension it can become unstable in the wind Sky tre's ratio is a staggering 9:1 it's one thing to build tall and wide and it's a much more challenging thing to build tall and slender so how do you build a super slim record-breaking tower on such a confined plot Engineers have always been able to build short and fat and after a while they mastered tall and [Music] fat but building tall and thin has often been a problem are you sure go for it Ireland's highest round

Tower is an amazing feat I told you perfect but isn't exactly straight the first St Marks calian Venice certainly looks the part M Mia but the impact of the weather and the weight of its five Mighty Bells led to disaster we're going to need a newer Tower Engineers needed to think [Music] again during the 1920s Chicago became snonymous with skyscrapers by the 60s with space increasingly at a premium developers wanted to build even higher but traditional bulky construction methods were stifling their ambition in 1968 engineer Faz Lan came up with a gamechanging solution all right

thanks local architect J Shaw has come to see for herself this is the groundbreak building that Khan was working [Music] on the 344 M Hancock Center was the first of Chicago's Towers to reach 100 Floors despite its impressive height it sits on a footprint 27% smaller than the city's second tallest skyscraper from that time the Chase Tower so this is the very top of the Hancock Center what an incredible view so how does the Hancock Center stand up to the windy City's challenging environment so now I'm going to show you how this works just take

a look at this skyscraper shaped Tower if I push on it just a little bit like a lateral force similar to the wind you can see how much it bends now if I push even more more you can see how it begins to twist oh jeez all right I broke it but the simple addition of 45° cross braces changes everything you can see how much stiffer it is when I push against the building now it's not bending or twisting as it did before G's use of brace tubing reduced the horizontal loads on the building as

the winds pushed against the elevations they now transfer down the diagonals to the base of the structure easing the loading on the building's vertical members it's a brilliantly simple solution fosler K's brace tube design sparked a Renaissance in skyscraper Construction [Music] engineers at Tokyo's Sky Tree have drawn on Fan's genius bracing creating a record-breaking super slim structure that dwarfs all around it steel braing structure is very important to stabilize this um tall and thin structure in an area renowned for typhoons building a tower almost double the height of the Hancock Center on a footprint 51%

smaller is a mindblowing feat engineer Hiroshi Takagi is standing in the stunning solution the number of the steel was about 37,000 in total as you can see the piece of the steel is huge and the biggest one is 2.3 m in diameter [Music] the 37,000 piece steel framework consists of three layers with thousands of triangular trusses immensely strong it can resist wind gusts approaching 250 mph this outer steel frame U carries all the weight um against the strong wind you can also see through it so that uh the wind can pass through the tower so

that we can reduce the wind load in building the world's tallest freestanding Tower its Engineers have achieved proportions that many thought were impossible if you look at the iur tower the height is about 320 M The Stance is 120 M so it's almost like a you know 1 2 three but this one the height is nine times torer than the widths of this [Music] Tower as well as defying the odds its designers have also created a shape that makes Sky Tree totally [Music] unique the shape of this Tower is characterized by the Triangular shape at

the foot and gradually transformed into Cy shape to the top that came from um traditional Japanese architecture so gentle um carve this is a very beautiful structure stretching into the sky it's amazing structure but to complete this engineering Marvel Sky tre's Team face another huge challenge and will have to turn to a truly Innovative solution from the past it was a beautifully simple concept that ultimately helped push our exploration out into space to produce more impossible [Music] Engineering in Tokyo architect tuia engineer Hiroshi Takagi and a huge construction team are transforming in the city skyline

at 634 M the Tokio Sky Tree is the world's tallest freestanding Tower and an engineering challenge never before attempted in Japan people can see this Tower and also we can see the city so I think that's a really great you know Viewpoint to really understand than the city of Tokyo building to such Heights is an incredible achievement Anywhere But as highrise architect David mot is aware building to this scale here means conquering a seemingly impossible problem Japan is part of what we call the ring of fire so it's one of the most active seismic zones

in the world uh so earthquakes are a part of daily life uh here in Tokyo [Music] this is a uh very a tough condition for the highrise building in Japan it's a very big challenge for us to control the swing and the movement of this Tower so the engineers of Sky Tree were tasked to build not only the world's tallest television Tower they had to put it in what is proba the world's most dangerous [Music] location in a country that is subjected to around 1,500 earthquakes a year how do you ensure a super tall tower

will remain standing the solution would come from an unlikely source and a truly remarkable Innovation from the past [Music] lunch commit lift off we have lift off space historian Amy Shira title is in Florida at the home of one of history's most a inspiring projects where everything is Extreme from one of the world's largest Vehicle Assembly buildings this is unbelievable this is really incredible to Rockets of unprecedented power this rocket is just so big it's so great from the' 60s Kennedy Space Center was the Launchpad for NASA's epic Apollo space missions this is really amazing

to be standing here this is Launchpad 39b this is where the Apollo 10 crew launched and went all the way to the moon to orbit before coming home at the moment of launch the five F1 engines together produced more power than 85 Hoover dams the sound of the launch was so intense they actually had to dump 3 million lers of water onto the pad every minute just to dampen the sound waves so they couldn't bounce back up and rip the rocket apart just like old time it's beautiful out there achieving such an explosive liftoff called

for a lot of energy almost 2 million lers of Rocket propellant was needed to get the0 M rocket off the ground delivering all that fuel to the rocket required umbilicals masses of cords and wires running all the way up the service structure attached to the rocket by spring-loaded arms it was essential the umbilicals remained in place until the very last second before an electrical discharge jerked them and the swing arms back towards the launch Tower however the challenge was controlling the swing arms sudden powerful movements they had to make sure they wouldn't break off from

overexertion or bounce back and hit the rocket as it left the Launchpad thankfully there was one engineer working on a solution former Air Force engineer Paul Taylor was working alongside NASA developing new technologies for the Space Program his patent for an Innovative shock absorber design would offer the Breakthrough for the Apollo mission's critical launch procedure the concept Taylor came up with was the fluid damper or the liquid spring and it works something like this now imagine that this coffee press is our fluid damper and it's sitting between the Tower and the rocket you can see

that when our damper is empty it offers very little resistance to weight or the force of the swing arm when it's released but if you fill it full of fluid look at the magic of the green liquid and if you put the weight back on you can see it compresses much more slowly so what's happening is as the plunger is pressed the liquid is forced through the holes this creates resistance which dissipates the energy which makes the plunger move more slowly during a launch as the umbilical Laden swing arm Springs back the attached fluid dampers

are compressed and the fluid inside forced through holes in the Piston creating friction slowing the arm to zero speed at the end of travel and minimizing risk of damage to the Tower or rocket in 1969 Taylor's ingenious system proved its worth as Apollo 10 safely launched on its pioneering mission to orbit the Moon making its Mark in space travel history we are go for a mission to the moon at this time we have ignition sequence start all engines running launch commit lift [Music] off his hydraulic innovation has stood the test of time and is still

in use today protecting sensitive equipment during launches to the International Space Station [Music] it was a beautifully simple concept that ultimately helped push our exploration out into [Music] space in Tokyo Sky Tree engineer at suok konishi and his team face a potentially devastating natural phenomenon in Tokyo area uh the big earthquake occur that is a challenge for us H to H design the such a highrise structure their solution to controlling the shake of the tower is centered around the earthquake proof ancient Japanese pagoda its tiered wooden structure traditionally stabilized by a shimira a flexible Quake

dampening Central pole Sky trees Engineers emulate this ancient technology creating an enormous 375 M concrete column set on six giant rubber bearings now we are uh here at the bottom of the uh qu I came up with the uh qu system H because uh there is a shim in Japan and sandwich between this mass and the tower steel structure lies the Apollo inspired fluid dampers the upper half of the cor is uh connected with oil dumer H to the sh structure situated between 125 and 375 M the series of fluid dampers control the movement of

the freestanding 10,000 ton concrete core and the steel exoskeleton threw out a seismic event during the earthquake the qu designed to shake just a little bit slower compared with the steel towers that condition H is a reason why the Coram system reduced the vibration of the to the different vibration cycles of the central column and the steel frame can counteract the vibration of the entire [Music] Tower if the O damper isn't installed the cor will cide the steel structure the cor will corpse the system is so effective it reduces an earthquake's vibration by 50% meaning

Sky Tree Will Survive Tokyo's most severe seismic activity the like of which is only expected once every Thousand Years the vibration control system is a unique system for Tokyo Sky Tre this is the first one in the world but as well as standing firm during a magnitude 7 quake [Music] this state-of-the-art Communications Hub also has to continue to transmit and to do this the vibration of the 140 M antenna tower has to be controlled with pinpoint accuracy the swing of the antenna has a really bad effect if you really want to enjoy the TV show

the movement of Broadcasting is allowed only a few cenm so we have to control the swing the solution is a secondary vibration system An Almighty piece of engineering perched at the Pinnacle of the tower to control the swing and the movement we have tuned Mass dumper very at the top on the antennas the tuned Mass damper contains a 40 ton concrete block which moves like a pendulum during an earthquake there is a time lag between the vibration of the tower itself and the movement of this concrete Mass cancelling out the vibration of the main structure

resulting in a super stable antenna system that can transmit in Tokyo's most extreme seismic activity without this system uh our broadcasting cannot continue after the big Grass Creek brilliant engineering has tained one of Nature's most devastating forces but to complete this Mammoth super Tower its designers face more challenges and have to draw on another great Innovation from the past to produce more impossible [Music] engineering completed in 2012 Tokyo Sky Tree has set a new Benchmark in high-rise [Music] design acting as a Communications Hub the 634 M Tower can transmit up to 100 km away but

for its architect tetsuo toia this engineering Colossus stands for much [Music] more the sky tree has two major functions one is of course this is a broadcasting Tower and at the same time this is a you a very interesting observation tower for the tourist so getting here and enjoy the view is the most important thing in this [Music] Tower having designed some of the world's most iconic super Towers David mot can appreciate that creating a bird's eyee view from one of the world's highest Skywalk pose tremendous problems for Sky tre's Team When You're Building observation

decks at Heights of 350 M 450 M it's going to be subjected to tremendous force from typhoon the wind speed here up above is maybe uh 50% stronger than the uh the ground level and it was very important that the the any guest feel safe during that their visit even in bad weather or any earthquakes so the engineers need to come up with materials that can withstand whatever Mother Nature wants to throw at it and to offer the perfect view one material is crucial but how do you guarantee that glass will remain in a safe

state in the face of some of the planet's most extreme weather achieving this would have been impossible without a chance Discovery in France's congested capital over a 100 years [Music] [Music] ago scientist Susie shei is in Paris to discover how the city's notoriously bad traffic inspired a discovery that would transform safety in the modern [Music] world in 1903 driver was fast becoming the hot new hobby among parisians but like today the traffic was congested and dangerous and accidents were Common [Music] Place the situation was so concerning one local paper ran a feature on the Spate

of recent crashes when the article in question came to the attention of one native Parisian called eduward Benedictus it sparked an idea that would go on to change the world born in 1878 scientist Edward benedicta studied chemistry in Germany before setting up a laboratory in Paris it was here that his inspired breakthrough happened courtesy of the capitals traffic nightmare the newspaper article outlined how car windscreens were causing drivers serious injuries in the case of an accident the windscreen would smash into shards which in some cases Prov fatal incredibly a solution to this concerning problem had

already been discovered by Benedictus entirely by chance doing some routine testing at his lab one day Benedictus accidentally knocked a glass flask off a shelf and remarkably instead of smashing into a thousand different pieces it actually maintained its shape examining the shattered flask that had mysteriously remained in one piece Benedictus observed remnants of a liquid plastic within the vessel and concluded that its thin coating had held the broken glass together just Days Later inspired by the article about the dangers of driving benedictos Had a Brain Wave he realized that this plastic coat of glass had

the potential to save [Music] lives so this is a piece of laminated glass and it's like the modern evolution of Benedictus Discovery it's basically just two pieces of glass which are bonded together with a piece of plastic between which holds it together and over here I also have some pieces of just normal sheet glass and this is similar to The Glass that would have been used in a car windscreen in Benedict's time to see how each one reacts under impact a 2 kg steel ball is set 4 M off the ground first up the normal

sheet glass ready to [Music] go oh wow okay so this piece of glass is really smash you can imagine how dangerous one of those sharp shards of glass would be if it came flying at your face during a car accident so instead let's try a piece of laminated glass and see what happens all right place my laminated glass now but this time I'm going to raise it up higher to prove the strength of the safety glass this time the drop height is raised to 6 [Music] M wa she didn't go through oh wow okay so

my steel ball managed to form that beautiful spiderweb pattern on here and the glass has actually stayed in place stuck to the plastic in the middle they haven't been able to fly off everywhere Benedictus layered glass is so resilient because the lightweight plastic stretches when struck absorbing any force and offering a tear resistant barrier so it's a pretty simple invention but it's made the roads a much safer [Music] place as a result Benedict has founded a company to produce his laminated safety glass by 1927 it was so successful The Firm was taken over by San

Goan one of the Giants of the glass industry today sanaban is one of the largest global producers of glass and they Supply their products to one in two cars in Europe and one in five cars throughout the world Benedict's chance Discovery really revolutionized the car industry and undoubtedly saved millions of lives in the process [Music] engineers at Tokyo's Sky Tree take Benedictus is ingenious glass to tackle Tokyo's typhoons this is a very tall tower so the the wind is very strong here if you look at the the building um down there the wind pressure here

is almost double with two 360° observatories and one of the highest skywalks in the world incorporating a glazed floor each of Sky tre's 10,27 panels of glass have to be super strong we are in the 450 M level uh today we are in the cloud and these are the glass panels installed from the inside and into integrated into Steel Curtain wall framing this state-of-the-art laminated glass can withstand winds in excess of a mindblowing 100 m/ second these glass panels are with the two layers of double strength glass pain in between it is this a polymer

membrane it is called the layered glass it is a super strong to withstand the strong wind even if the most who typhoon came this system is very safe Tokyo Sky Tree Tempo Galleria and thanks to Benedictus in the unlikely event the glass does shatter it will remain in place allowing around 4 and A2 million people a year to safely visit one of the greatest Vantage points on the planet I want to come back here here and see you know people enjoying the great View and that makes me very happy and I myself is very um

the exciting moment to you know look look down the [Music] [Music] city conceived in 2006 this audacious architectural Marvel was constructed in under 4 years the result of brilliant planning and testing by thousands of Engineers this is a first time for Japanese to design the uh such a high H Tower it is very proud for me to H work on this project [Music] by learning from the great pioneers of the past adapting upscaling and making Innovations of their own Engineers have written a new chapter in high-rise design since the very beginning of the civilization to

structure has always been a dream of human being so constructing world's tallest tower is uh one of the most exciting and challenging job that any Engineers can [Music] engage they have succeeded in making the [Music] impossible possible Tokyo Sky Tree is a striking [Music] landmark this is really a combination of state of the-art Japanese construction technology and also the very all Japanese wisdom of of creating very to Tower [Music]