Vancouver House

Creative Engineering Marvel!

This tower looks unrealistic at first sight but looking at it made me look at what different and new challenges were faced by the engineering team. The team wanted to show a playful curve that turns the head of every person walking by the road.

Icon For West Coast Of North America

The tower gradually turns from one end to another. The front width is equivalent to just one-floor height and then it seamlessly expands on every floor without any support and is 16 times the initial width according to official data.

Geometry & Structural Design!

Actually what happens in a normal building is, it has a wide base and gradually it contracts towards to the top. But here it is reversed! The top is a rectangle with 13200 square feet of area and the bottom is a triangle having 7800 square meters of area. The north end is the vertex of the triangle where the building width tapper to just a column.

Such buildings nowadays are made of pre Or Post-Tensioned reinforced concrete members. Here as the slab width increases with every floor towards the east side of the building, the lateral force in that direction increases. Hence the columns were cast with the offset in opposite direction and when the post-tensioning occurs it comes to the intended position and the pull is neutralized. With this, the core of the building having lift and stairs were also shifted from center to another end due to the design.

Earthquake Prone?

The region is highly seismic which adds more complexity to the Structural Design with Gravity forces that try to induce torsional force to the spine i.e core of the structure which made team think innovative and find a new solution. They added a vertical post-tensioned high strength wall that counteracts the unidirectional loading which will bring back core and the building members near to verticality. 

Such a building where stresses are in the design itself will often have cracks which the team evaluated on software with service and seismic load cases. Hence they said,

Every unit Is Custom Designed

and this is also called Performance-based design with the use of the best technology in the non-linear analysis development and bring tower in existence.