CBI member, Arup has published its latest edition of the Arup Journal. This quarter’s edition includes a feature on the firm’s work on Beijing’s Zun skyscraper, now the city’s tallest building (overtaking another Arup-designed construction, the 330m China World Trade Tower).
The article explores in detail how Arup tackled building a 528m skyscraper in an area with pronounced seismic activity. Arup was the lead structural engineer on China Zun, working with architectural practice Kohn Pedersen Fox.
The building’s intriguing profile – wide at the top and at the base and slender in the middle – is inspired by the zun, an ancient Chinese ritual vessel for drinking wine, which also lends the structure its nickname. Formally, the building is known as the CITIC Tower, after its developer and end user, CITIC Group.
The novel shape means that, of the 350,000m2 of premium office space that it adds to the city’s central business district, an unusually high proportion is in the top one-third of the building. This both provides the client with an abundance of high-level office space with spectacular views across the Chinese capital and makes the most of the building’s narrow site of just 11,000m2.
The unusual shape had implications for the engineering team: Beijing is located in a major seismic zone, although the building is not near any tectonic fault line. Beyond designing for its hourglass figure, the risk of an earthquake added complexity to the engineering design, which needed to keep the building stable during a significant seismic event.
To ensure that the design could be delivered safely, efficiently and cost effectively, Arup engineered a highly efficient tube-in-tube structural support system composed of a perimeter steel megastructure and a reinforced concrete core. The firm also employed advanced digital technology to rapidly assess more than 800 different options for the design in a short space of time.
To read more about how Arup handled this major design challenge, please follow the link.
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