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