The Country With a $200BN Building Boom

Australia is

building

like never before, investing more than $200 billion to connect its cities, reduce carbon emissions, transform urban life and prepare for the Olympic Games, from epic railways dug into deep terrain to stunning Sky Bridges and skyscrapers covered in trees. Sit back and prepare to enjoy. some of Australia's most incredible construction projects What if I told you the way we've been

building

Metro lines is wrong? These are subway lines all over the world. Notice a pattern. Most of them were built in the mid-century and designed with a single goal in mind to get you from where you live in the suburbs to where you work downtown as quickly as possible, but that's no longer how they work. our cities.

We are now seeing massive fixes around the world to fix and adapt these City Loop designs, but it certainly isn't cheap. One city is spending A$125 billion on a massive infrastructure project that will fix this problem, but it will take more than half a century to complete. It's a major upgrade to the Metro on a scale we've never done before. seen before, so why do these types of Metro lines no longer work in most cities? Well, now people live and work almost anywhere. Some sections of cities are no longer cordoned off as residential or commercial only;

They are much more mixed, take Melbourne for example, The original layout of the city had all the offices and shops here in this central network, no one lived here, everyone lived outside of it, here in the suburbs, in the post war period , rail lines were extended to these growing suburbs to bring people in and out of the city, and it worked for a while, but now people live in apartments in the city center and offices have moved to all sorts of places. locations so this simple system no longer works, for example if you lived in bwood but worked in coldfield and wanted to take public transport you would have to travel to the central business district and then back, a journey that would take an hour and 20 minutes by train, if you went by car, it would take you only 16 minutes, now take a look at these Metro lines.

They are rated as some of the most efficient in the world and you may be noticing a pattern here there are a multitude of lines that crisscross over each other there are rings that surround not only the center of the city but also the outer bars and provide options and allow for a variety of trips, not just the suburban-to-work route of the crazy era. Melbourne is in the middle of a once-in-a-century megaproject to tackle this problem. Not many people are using trains in Melbourne, well not as many as there should be. With 5 million inhabitants, it has just surpassed Sydney as the most popular city in Australia.

In fact, 19% of all Australians live here thanks to the construction

boom

over the last decade. The city now has almost more skyscrapers than London and Beijing combined. It has hosted the Olympic Games. Luna Park and Margar Robbie before she was Barbie by all indications, this should be a city with state-of-the-art public transportation and has the largest tram network in the world, its Metro is decidedly lacking. Census data from 2021 found that while about 50% of people drove to work, only 3% took the train, so the city is now building more rail lines outside the city center. This is the Suburban Rail Loop, a 90km-long megaproject that will circle Melbourne's outer suburbs, but it isn't.

To be completed soon The massive A$125 billion project has been divided into four huge phases: The first section alone will cover 26km of twin tunnels and six new stations will cost approximately $33 billion and will be completed in 2035 The second phase The project that will connect to the city airport will be completed between 2043 and 2053, while the completion date for the entire Loop is to wait until 2084. Yes, this is a long-term project before the huge Loop suburban railway of Melbourne can be built in the city first. has to solve the accumulation of traffic in the city center, for this they are building the Metro tunnel about 40 m under the streets of Melbourne.

These machines dug a series of 9km long tunnels that will create a new end-to-end train line connecting West to South East, along with five new stations, the tunnels are the first step in Melbourne's infrastructure renewal because they address a crucial floor that many of the city's loop designs have a choke point because each line has to pass through the center of the city. limits the number of trains that can travel, that means you can't just show up at a station knowing you're probably just a few minutes away from getting on a train like in London, in Melbourne trains only run once every 10 or 20 minutes, You have to plan your trip before leaving home and if you miss the train, sorry, you will be very late.

Now this new tunnel seems obvious, but it wasn't always like this. Some politicians have wanted to prioritize trains. While others wanted to focus on the motorways just before they were about to be built, plans had to be redrawn when the public gasped at the thought that this massive tunnel would tear up the city's main street and split Melbourne down the middle. half for years, one slightly dramatic politician even compared All of this resulted in clever, quick engineering to keep the same route of the tunnels without causing major disruptions rather than tearing up all the streets in Swanson.

Key buildings along the tunnel path were demolished and excavations would snag. below the street allowing workers and tunnel B machines or tunnel boring machines to access the excavation route, a total of four tunnel boring machines are responsible for excavating these twin tunnels and they are enormous, weighing more than 1.00 tons each and reaching almost 120 m long. The size and weight of the skyscraper because they were being borrowed under each tunnel boring machine is topped with cutting heads that itself weigh 100 tons, this ax serves as a drill and can excavate rock six times harder than concrete. You could think of tunnel boring machines almost like submarines.

A crew of up to 10 people, including an operator, worked on each TBM at any time, was staffed and supervised 24/7 and was fully equipped with an office, kitchen and bathrooms, a system next-generation navigation. He kept the machines running at all times and made sure they didn't accidentally drill something they weren't supposed to. Each was named after local female heroes, from the state's first female debutante to an Australian cricket captain, and each was given her own badge. color, the first one called Joan was launched from Arden in 2020, followed by Meg a few weeks later, the other two tbm were launched a few months later, from the other end of the tunnel, the four met in the middle in mid-2021, this The first stage of Melbourne's epic new rail journey will open in just over a year and while the entire Vision will take many decades to complete, we are already on our way.

Melbourne already knows what kind of city it will be at the end of the century and it won't be small, this city has big plans and when we say big we mean big skyscrapers, the Olympic Games, massive new mega projects that push the boundaries of engineering and it's all happening In Australia in the coming decades, we will see a transformation on an international scale and it is all starting right now with the largest infrastructure project in the state's history, a new Metro that borrows from the city itself, but this is not Sydney or Melbourne , this is the fastest growing Brisbane city in Australia now, if you have.

You haven't heard of Brisbane before, you're not alone, but the city has big ambitions, that became clear when it won the bid for the 2032 Olympics, the 35th Olympia games which I awarded to Brisbane Australia Brisbane is the third largest city of Australia, but it is growing at a phenomenal rate, around 1,000 people move to the region each week, while the Olympic Games are part of Brisbane's rebranding as an international destination, it won the tender precisely because of the city's commitment with its Ambitions and the massive new infrastructure already being planned and including the $6.3 billion megaprojects Cross River Rail is a 10.2 km rail line with 5.9 km of twin tunnels that dive under the river Brisbane and the central business district are essentially building a massive new railway just below the center of Brisbane.

The project includes four new underground stations and eight upgraded stations plus the development of three new stations on the Gold Coast. Beyond that, what we have is a network that hasn't been updated for quite some time, so we have stations in the inner suburbs that some of them date back to when they were first built in the late 19th century. That's Graham, he knows a lot about this project, so I'm the CEO of the Cross River Rail Delivery Authority. It's really the largest infrastructure project in the city's history downtown and what it will do is change the way people actually move around the city.

Cross River Rail is looking to rectify a major problem with Brisbane itself. You see the city is defined by its river for better or worse and this river is of beasts, Brisbane. The river is a pretty big river, it's tidal, and it's several hundred meters wide and it's quite deep, so it creates a kind of barrier and sort of separates the city, you know, from north to south, but also It is a meandering river. Now there is only one crossing over the river that divides the city into two distinct halves. A bridge was built over the river in 1979, but that is actually the only crossing and that limits the way the rail network can operate.

Restrictions are 24 trains per hour Cross River Rail provides a second crossing of that river, but actually passes under the river. The new railway will relieve the pressure on the current railway network which is close to capacity and this transformation that we are doing basically unlocks that ball neck that is in the center of the city, which is really tied to that historic development, so we are really liberating the core of the city. Untying these knots will unlock enormous economic potential and revitalize previously disconnected districts. The construction of the railway itself already provides the city with 1,500 jobs a year.

There is also a business case. A report predicts that the benefits of the project will exceed the costs by 1.9 billion Australian dollars and for every dollar invested the product will generate 141 dollars. in benefits for Queenslanders. The development that you know in some economic forecasts takes the multipliers. It is only between 15 and 20 billion of growth and of the order of 35,000 jobs basically as a result of the interconnection that will be obtained by having the railway system and then the development around those that are perhaps the most important. The reason for the construction of Cross River Rail is the population explosion that the region is expected to have.

South East Queensland's population is forecast to grow from 3.5 million today to 4.9 million in 2036 in just a few years, putting the region on par with Melbourne and Sydney, more than 80% of this Most growth will occur on the outskirts of Brisbane, while at the same time 45% of job growth will occur in metropolitan Brisbane, meaning jobs will continue to emerge in the city as people move away. to the surrounding suburbs and there is a vital need for better public transport to connect the two. The stations are actually adjacent to the CBD, meaning that the traveling public has to walk between 10 and 15 minutes to get to the center of the CBD from the train stations, not to mention that these new stations will connect to the Olympic Stadium and carry to the millions of tourists expected in 2032, but building under a major metropolitan area is no easy task and the engineering challenges themselves have been immense when seen up close. personal, it is a marvel of engineering, it is almost like doing open heart surgery in the middle of the CBD, digging an excavation about 50 M below the CBD that had to reach under all the services, reach under the foundations of the current one. um, high rise office buildings and so on, so it's actually the deepest hole ever dug in Brisbane and we're putting the station there because the tunnels have to make their way under the city centre, the tunnel boring machines do what they had. what to do to get under the river uh the rock is a very difficult day just add it up Albert Street station is 31m below the heart of the city and in such a densely populated area every space counts that's where these mezzanines enter. make useof these massive tunnels creating a pedestrian level directly above the train tracks.

Now mezzanines are nothing new, but the way they are built is new with this segmental bridge technique which is a fairly common practice for above ground bridge construction, but it is built. Something like this in an underground tunnel is a whole new challenge. This is how they are doing it. Each mezzanine beam is precast into huge concrete segments weighing up to 70 tons and then lowered through this hole in the heart of the city. in tunnels that will become the new train station because an underground station is much narrower than a wide open space above ground. The equipment was custom built to fit the site.

Then, those three segments are connected into a single beam that is lifted rotated 90°. and was then placed in the arches of the cavern to form the mezzanine level. All of this was made possible by the early integration of a digital twin of the entire project. It is essentially a virtual version of the Cross River Rail using Bentley software. It was even navigable in first person. Like a video game, the model is so detailed that those on site can use it in real time essentially as an x-ray to see behind walls or what's behind them. Other future projects in the city could also access the model and plan.

Around the new stations to the millimeter, the digital twin has allowed engineering and construction decisions to be made quickly and efficiently, reducing overall costs. Design flaws could be detected and corrected before they became a problem, while the progress of the entire project could be seen from all angles, the model will be used to train future drivers, as well as to upgrade to members of the public and inform ministers and the previous year, needs and disability specialist groups are also using the model to ensure accessibility once the project has built the digital twin. It will be used by O&M service providers when we start doing our 3D modeling, which we consider one of the things we are very proud of;

There was no single solution that would really give us what we want. Bentley at the project level provided the common data environment, which is the platform we're using now and they've really been able to help us adapt and as we've evolved, the project and the model, Bentley has been part of that journey with us. Cross River Rail is now on track to be delivered early Work began in August 2017 and main contractors begin Construction in late 2019 The project opens in 2026, well ahead of the 2013 Olympic deadline2, using the Olympic Games as a means of catalyst for that type of activity, you know, it's a really positive thing, we need to be ready for the Olympics, the next decade is going to see phenomenal changes in Brisbane and south east Queensland and when you look at projects like this you realize While those changes have already begun, Sydney is one of the world's top tourist destinations for a reason: you have Bondi Beach, the Opera House, the Harbor Bridge, all iconic places that make tourists come in droves, but if you actually live here or you just want to get from A to B somewhere nearby the central business district things can get a little less than idic traffic is heavy approaching the sydney harbor tunnel this morning after a multi vehicle accident there is a truck on fire in right now the traffic is just horrendous just avoid the area going south, they knew it would be busy but not even the transportation officials saw this coming;

In fact, driving around the city can be a nightmare, which is why a new road is being built under the port to relieve the pressure, but in late 2022 it is now happening in a completely different form to the original plans after the Work has already begun and in the world of large infrastructure, that is a big decision. Here's why a multi-million pound New Road tunnel has just made a massive U-turn. Come to Sydney and you. You will have sun, sand and traffic. Yes, it's a problem in many cities, but drivers here have it worse than most, although that's partly due to high car ownership and lack of public transportation.

There aren't many options if you want to cross the harbor in air conditioning. Road and a lot of people do that just on the Harbor Bridge. More than 200,000 trips are made every day. It is one of the few options to cross. There is also the Harbor Tunnel which runs parallel to it underground and the Anzac Bridge to the west, which means Traffic bottlenecks are common on all these connections and when incidents occur and you need a detour you will often not get one now, although a completely new crossing is being built across this great waterway and it is another major construction project.

The A$5 billion plan is called the Western Harbor Tunnel and, surprisingly, it is another tunnel under Sydney Harbour, but this time further west, creating a much-needed new bypass of the CBD, the New Wales government del Sur says it will cut off traffic in the west. The 35% distributor highway, 20% original port tunnel and 177% port bridge is around 6.5 km long and is being delivered in two stages. Construction of the first stage, which involves the use of roadhead TBMs, began in mid-2022. The name This new piece of infrastructure may be a little obvious, but the construction method for the crucial central part is where the Things get really interesting.

The time to make a trip beneath that section that passes underwater would be a submerged tube tunnel, the same approach used to build the original har tunnel in the early '90s, which would involve dredging a large trench in the bed. of the port, throw prefabricated tunnel segments into it and then cover it to make it as much as possible. Huge temporary construction sites were planned at each end of the tunnel. to cross, they would be used for everything from manufacturing the tunnel segments to building the cofferdams and removing material from, wait, wait, what is a coffa dam.

They are used to create a dry area within a body of water that you need to connect. a submerged tunnel to the continental sections at each end, if you are a b1m fan then you may remember that the submerged tube tunnel is the same technique used on the Fon Belt fixed link between Denmark and Germany and as with That project, despite its benefits, not everyone is happy with the new Sydney tunnel and much of it is due to the environmental impact; there were concerns that dredging would unleash a cocktail of chemicals into the port; those temporary sites would cause major disruptions and the overall project would create a lot of noise, dust and even property damage; in fact, the arguments against it were becoming so serious that it seemed something needed to be done about it.

Now you might be wondering why we explain all that last bit in the past tense. Well, it wasn't an accident. The whole dip tube thing we just told you about, forget it, it's not happening anymore. Yes, one of the largest construction projects in Australia that is already in progress is now being delivered in a totally different way, instead of the underwater section now being excavated by a couple of tunnels. machines, but before you roll your eyes and think the most exciting part of the project has been eliminated, these are not normal TPMS for digging holes big enough for a six-lane highway that has three in each direction, these machines They will be a whopping 16 m. in diameter, compare it to the TBMs used for the Sydney Metro and you can see how big they really are, similar to those building Melbourne's West Gate Tunnel, as with the Metro, which will arrive on boats in large pieces before being taken away at launch.

The cavern where the two will begin their journey beneath the harbor looks much simpler than previously planned, but it still won't be easy, the tbms will have to borrow deeper than the submerged tunnel would have gone and there is some challenging terrain. In fact, one of the reasons for the previous method was the poor geology of the site, which can make deep tunneling difficult. Therefore, Aeona, the contractor chosen for this stage of the project, will use what is called a Shield combination TBM, this is where they have an air cushion just behind the cutting head to control and support the pressure on the front of the machine as it moves ideal for when you need to dig a really big hole in an area of ​​high soil and water pressure and where the ground is made up of different materials, such as under Sydney Harbour, so the big question is why what to change to a tunnel boring machine.

A government minister said it is the best outcome for the local community and the environment, it means there will be no more dredging and two of those construction sites are no longer operational. necessary, the cost will also be lower according to the same official, but while this new approach addresses some of the main concerns, it does not cover them all, in the middle of the night you can hear the noises of some of the large drilling machines. they take them in and out our house was built in 1890 it will not be able to cope with the tunnels under the houses some residents are unhappy with the disruption caused by the work already carried out in stage one and that part will not change others They are not very happy that it is going to be another toll road in a city where drivers already pay a lot to get around and one MP has claimed that it could lead to greater car use and ultimately very little impact on the traffic. longer to complete than initially planned with a finish in 2028 instead of 2025 to 2026, which is somewhat to be expected after recent changes.

Major work on stage 2 will not begin until late 2023 following further consultation with local communities. Sydney's Western Harbor Tunnel is still another example of the pros and cons of a major infrastructure project: it could make a big difference to the city's traffic problem, but it will be expensive, disruptive and take years to complete, but What it also shows is that plans can change if there is a big enough project. reason and that doesn't happen very often, while other plans seem to continue regardless, even under intense scrutiny, this project has made the boldest moves, the people of this great city hope it pays off.

This is one of the most striking skyscraper designs in recent years and at first glance you may not be entirely sure what you're looking at. The renders show a pair of towers that appear to be wrapped in gold like the world's largest birthday present. If you think the architects were just having fun, but what seems like a bit of decoration is actually a key part of the overall structural design, head to the center of Melbourne where these towers now stand and you'll see there was no trick in that gold stripe It's going to be a skybridge, but building something like this 40 stories above the ground is no easy feat, and the team trying to make it a reality is dealing with complex structural forces of extreme height, an ambitious architectural design, and the eyes of the world watching.

This is How Engineers in Australia are Building the World's Most Impressive Skybridge It's no secret that skyscraper developers have gone to increasingly lengths to put their buildings in the spotlight. We've seen them get taller, thinner, and just plain weirder, but there's another category of build. which is helping the new structures stand out. Sky Bridges join two or more above-ground buildings creating a connected structure. Yes, they have been around for a while, some believe they date back to the 17th century, and have become a common site in many cities. and cities, but recently there has been a huge leap forward in what is possible at the increasingly high end of the scale. 2019 saw the completion of the City T Chongqing draw, which has a nearly 300M long skybridge called the Balanced Crystal across the Four Towers in 2020 jate in Dubai followed with the world's highest occupiable skybridge floor and then , in 2021, we saw the world's longest skybridge also in Dubai raised in place at wabil now, although it may not be the biggest, longest, heaviest or tallest skybridge we have seen in this new effort in Australia. will become a major horizontal highlight when it is completed in 2022.

It is part of a project at 308 Exhibition Street whose construction began in late 2018. The site will be home to two skyscrapers designed by Cox Architecture and Fender Catalis, each of which will be will rise on a 200 M tower, one called Sapphire by The Gardens is located in House Apartments, while Tower 2 will feature a luxurious Shangrla hotel, in addition toBeing far away to get from one Tower to the next, the skybridge will feature private dining rooms, lounges and a glass floor offering some terrifying views across Prett towards the city. It will wrap around one level of the apartment building before rising to wrap around two floors of the hotel.

There is also a structural element here. Both towers need the elevated bridge to create a rigid link between them and that would allow them to share wind loads. and seismic forces, as you may have guessed, building such a unique connection between two skyscrapers more than 40 stories above the ground is a pretty serious sky-forming challenge. Steel bridge beams and metal forms are being used to make the concrete slab a structure that will also hold the coating underneath within the slab. Steel tendons will extend from one tower to the next holding them together and creating that fixed bond.

Steel girders will also be used for the roof of the bridge with a movement joint on one side allowing for any minor differential movement, but sooner. Any of this can happen, a plywood deck must be installed that offers protection and a platform to add the steel slab that is divided into seven pre-assembled modules and the bottom lining, the concrete will be poured in two phases once it is strong enough. The steel tendons can be tensioned in a process known as post-tensioning and the towers will then be locked with steel IT. At this point, work can continue on the upper levels of the towers after post-tensioning is completed, temporary steel ties are removed and facades and cladding can be installed, then the timber deck is removed and backfilled. the spaces left behind, as these images show that work on the elevated bridge had already begun in early 2022 and will be completed by the end of this year.

Yes, the skybridge is pretty epic. but it's not the only interesting part of this project: when construction began, the excavation and piling was followed by one of the largest concrete PSs in Melbourne's history. The material was spread 3 m deep over an area of ​​1,000 m and required 469 trucks of concrete. On top of that, there are railway tunnels running beneath the site to think of all this engineer at work. Appearance sets offer a great reward. Multiplex, the major construction company building Sapphire by The Gardens, has described it as Melbourne's most exclusive address, which is quite a statement from the city.

Now, Australia's fastest growing city is already home to several other luxury skyscrapers. There are more tall buildings here than in any other city on the continent. More than 60 skyscrapers are completed and at least 10 more are being built right now and more and more people are choosing to live here. than ever and many want to be as close to the center as possible, there is a new demand for high-rise buildings. In developments like this, the towers are not your average apartment block or hotel, they overlook the historic Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens , a UNESCO World Heritage Site, offering panoramic views of the grounds and Melbourne's central business district.

The jewel in Zafiro's crown will be its 1,200 square meters. Super Penthouse Developer SP Satia says it is the largest on the market in Australia and currently has an asking price of $39 million Australian dollars. In addition to the skybridge, the two skyscrapers will be joined at Base 2 by a 10-story building. Combined podium, when it's all over, the project will become the latest member of Melbourne's increasingly crowded Skyscraper Club, but the newcomer won't have to work hard to stand out for its prominent location and clear visual impact; It will probably be impossible to miss our Cities have a problem despite longing for it, we are fighting for green spaces and architects and engineers have had to be creative by reusing old infrastructure and locating parks where they can;

It's a pressure that has caused one of the most ambitious skyscrapers ever conceived to buckle. towards the sky Melbourne's tree-covered South Bank by bu Tower is born from that very real desire for a better connection with 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. vision conditions remote work 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 super-tall vertical garden is being built Melbourne Skyline could be transformed by a new state Six proposals for state-of-the-art buildings have been shortlisted after a call for ideas from around the world was launched.

If you think back to 2018, you might remember an architectural competition in Australia that caused quite a stir. Australian developer buer had acquired a site in the heart of Melbourne's Southbank and wanted to create a building with a difference, something that would stand out from the sea of ​​skyscrapers that had already sprung up, so to realize our ambitious Vision we launched a competition architecture international 3 years ago inviting some of the world's most innovative architects is truly like nothing Australia has ever seen. Pairing local firms with six of the world's most famous architects, the competition produced some of the boldest submissions Australia has ever seen and made international headlines after intense debate between the judges and the internet.

Green Spine won the competition designed by a studio and Cox architecture. The mixed-use towers would feature spectacular planting on their levels and would become the tallest skyscrapers in the

country

. I think what sets Green Spine apart from the others is mainly the ability to connect people with nature everywhere with the biophilic architecture and the interface between the public street level and the podium were the highlights and that was one of the key considerations during the evaluation process. The design team traveled around the world to learn lessons from similar projects constantly developing their plans to integrate. Commercial space Apartments, a podium including commercial units and a new cultural plaza on 165 floors of green space.

Along the two towers, the renamed South Bank for bu Tower will become the first vertical garden to exceed 300 m and achieve super-tall status that is now building a pair of twisted skyscrapers and covering them with plants 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've got quite the engineering feat on your hands. The ground conditions facing this project are very challenging. We are talking about more than 20 million excavations in the silt material of Cou Island.

The way we overcame the challenge was to design what we call diaphragm walls, so these walls are essentially extremely thick concrete walls, they are between 12200 and 1500mm thick and then there is also an extremely thick slab at the level of the base that has a thickness of the order of 2 m of concrete. We observe two different ones. options for basement design, one of them was what we call a bottom-up or anchored design, the other option we looked at was a top-down construction methodology: you have to sink all the columns and wall elements from the ground floor you go down and then you pour the slab of earth, then you excavate the material underneath, you have to leave some large temporary openings in the slab to get the material out, then you excavate two levels down, you do it again so that the slab you build on each level The downward excavation actually restricts the perimeter walls.

The East Tower's slender 13.5-to-1 height-to-width ratio presents some particularly onerous challenges. Its twisted shape is achieved through the use of moving columns. Now typically, columns are aligned between floors to carry loads through a building and down. to the foundation, but here each column will have to be slightly offset from that of the floor immediately below, creating the turn of the building and at the same time maintaining a path for the load to travel through it. If you think that sounds complicated, that's just the star we have. central core that runs through the entire heart of the tower, we have fish walls on all the residential floors that join the central core to the perimeter columns and then, on each floor of the plan, we have a series of, we have a wall belt around the Out Regal perimeter and additional walls in the strong direction.

The way I think about it is like if you go skiing, your body imagination is the core and your arms are like your Outrigger walls or your rack walls, your poles. you're supporting, it's your columns, you're engaging the entire perimeter of the building by playing the damper, you know in this particular case it's a mass damper melody that also comes with the opportunity to turn it into an art sculpture, you know. As engineers, you often think, oh yeah, they'll just add a pretty ugly-looking piece of steel on top, but actually, this steel may be, or this mass, actually, may be a green-looking creation. magnificent in buildings. are nothing new, but the scale and ambition of the South Bank design is unprecedented;

There will be more than 5 1/2 kilometers of vertical gardens and aerial parks that will extend up to 365 m above street level, according to an international team of landscape architects. sunlight testing and analysis, all for species that can thrive in a city famous for its extremely cold summers, winters and the occasional sensation of four different seasons in one day to keep everything green without the need for an army of gardeners at work constantly on the road. The construction of each garden bed will be connected to a self-contained irrigation system that is capable of monitoring soil conditions and delivering water and nutrients directly to the roots of each plant.

The idea is that the system should require minimal human maintenance once completed. That's my kind of gardening that brings together A complex design between two architects, landscape specialists and several consultants on a challenging site would be difficult under any circumstances, but compounded by the fact that much of the design evolution in recent years 3 years has actually occurred remotely, which makes things even more difficult. the components alone of the key challenges of being a super tall, slender tower and then the twisted nature of the vertical garden is obviously another key challenge, but both of those combined can't really solve that without a computational approach if we can build it.

In a centralized computational model we can ensure that we know how to get the best results from both key areas of the design. One workflow we were able to incorporate was the ability to quickly visualize the design through a computational model. workflow that could be in a 3D model environment where the client could obviously see quick visualizations of the structure, but then we also took that craze where we could extract the information in two formats very efficiently and let's not forget that this is a project that is still in the early stages of its final design and we are doing a lot of high-level analysis, a lot of high-level modeling, so Blue Beam is a platform and software that we find very efficient, very effective at communicating, uh, that. type of information so that we can connect directly from our computational design model automate the generation of the plan Um and that can be updated very quickly through the process, so if we make some key changes in our requirements or in the architectural design, we can update that information. very efficiently on our blue beam platform, so it's a really key benefit for us, especially early in the project, to get those efficiencies and get the formal green light in April 2020.

South Bank is now considered by the state to be an important part of Melbourne's postco economic recovery. government, of course, we will have to wait and see how construction unfolds to know if this ambitious project can live up to its expectations and results, but for whatever the future holds, South Bank by buer is apparently in on track to have a pretty big impact by not only injecting new life into this part of Melbourne and becoming the tallest building in the

country

, but changing the way we think about design in our cities and demonstrating what can be achieved if we look Make the most of the limited space most of us now have available. a healthy holistic philosophy that integrates excellent design technology and ever-evolving lifestyle options in the leafy, bustling 24/7 areas we're exploringall the possibilities to create the next evolution of skyscrapers Sydney is getting much bigger, the Australian city is in the middle of building one of the largest suburban rail projects in the world, this is a $64 billion infrastructure megaproject without equal in size and scope that will extend the city in almost all directions by 2030 Sydney will have 113 km of new Metro Rail and 46 new driverless train stations. will pass every 4 minutes beneath the harbor and CBD, in the process creating the country's largest underground railway cavern, as well as its longest transport tunnels, since the Harbor Bridge was built almost a century ago, Sydney had not built such a colossal city and, frankly, projects that define Sydney is a divided city, its iconic harbors are beautiful postcards, but they are an urban plan like a nightmare, the north and south of the city are isolated from each other now, The history of Sydney's infrastructure has been the story of linking this Gap application most famously and literally with the Sydney Harbor Bridge in 1932, the tallest fixed arch bridge in the world, it took until 1992 to build the second crossing of the Sydney Harbor Tunnel, a freeway hidden under the Foria Waterer kilometer that connects northern Sydney with the central business district or CBD now, more than 30 years later, the Sydney Metro is the city's next major junction and is being built in four phases.

The first one has already been completed. Sydney North West Metro. It came into operation in 2019, cost 7.3 billion Australian dollars and included 36 km of track. Between Chatswood and Rouse Hill a staggering 15 km of tunnels, 4 km of bridges and eight new stations were also built as part of that phase, Second Step Sydney Metro West features 24 km of underground Metro Rail connecting par para para to Sydney CBD and that's going to cost 25 billion Australian dollars, that's pretty vital because Paramat is establishing itself as Sydney's future second hub. That phase of the railway will be completed in 2030. The third phase includes the connection to Western Sydney Airport, which will cost $1 billion.

This new international airport. will open in 2026 and is expected to serve more than 10 million passengers each year, easing the load on Sydney's main airport, which is home to one of the world's busiest passenger air routes, but perhaps the busiest phase exciting part of the project is the metropolitan city of Sydney and The southwestern section currently being built this part of the project consists of two main components: the first is the conversion of 11 stations on part of the existing Banks line for rail use autonomous driverless; the second is a new 15.5 km double tunnel railway crossing. Under Sydney Harbor and across the city, that new BS 40M tunnel beneath the shiny surface of Sydney Harbour, where it reaches the sandstone-carved CBD, is the largest railway line ever built under the center of Sydney.

Sydney since the city's Circle Underground Railway was completed in the 1950s is an engineering feat that included the construction of Australia's largest underground railway cavern at Victoria Cross station. The mammoth space is 265m long, 25m wide and 20m high in terms of length, which is comparable to Sydney's recently completed Salesforce Tower which sits above your view or for those of you not below of the Trans-American Pyramids of San Francisco, is absolutely enormous inside this cavern 31 M below the streets of Sydney, currently being built a new station, escalators, a mezzanine and the platform that future travelers will use.

The tunnel boring machines of 2019 broke into the cavern and connected the station to the new railway network. It is these machines that have worked hard under the streets of Sydney and under the harbour. 16 of them will have been used in the Metro expansion once completed. You can think of them as huge sandstone worms that feed on sandstone. They operate between 35 and 58 m below Sydney. They submerge beneath the existing infrastructure. They typically weigh more than 1,100 tons each and reach 120 m in length, which is approximately the weight and length of one A380 in the world. Larger, heavier airliners work slowly through rock at a rate of about 120 m per week.

Each has CER heads weighing 100 tonnes that act like a drill and can punch through rock six times harder than concrete. The rock is crushed by high strength alloy steel discs in the cutter head, these rocks are then collected into the machine head and onto a conveyor belt which transports them along the machine and into the tunnel behind it before transport them to the surface. The concrete ring segments are delivered to the building area in front. and placed to support the tunnel, each concrete ring is connected to the previous one in a long chain and how the tunnel is built piece by piece, each TBM includes a team of up to 10 people working on them, including an operator at any time.

Once inside Of them there are offices, a kitchen and even a bathroom, a state-of-the-art navigation system keeps these machines on the road at all times and ensures that they do not accidentally drill something they should not do by 2030. These 16 machines will have completed more than 56 km of tunnels, that is, more than was built to connect Paris and London. Of particular interest is a specialized tunnel boring machine that had to be built expressly to excavate under Sydney Harbour. It is called a mud tunnel boring machine and was used for cutting. Through the different terrain conditions in the sea, it used pipes and fluid to control the pressure in the machine by converting the excavated material into a slurry and then pumping it, this means that the excavated rocks were crushed and mixed with fluid so that they could be more easily.

If removed from the tunnel, this massive infrastructure boost will go a long way to addressing the needs of Sydneysiders both now and in the future. By mid-century, Sydney's population is expected to increase by up to 60%; Now not all of those people can or should drive cars to get around. The city is notoriously congested and has by far the most traffic in Australia; In fact, New South Wales is spending a $16 billion loan over the next 5 years just to address this congestion and widen Sydney's roads. but New Roads won't be enough Sydney, like many major cities around the world, is now facing a reckoning when it comes to its automobile alliance and expanding its Metro in such a massive and comprehensive way will provide sydney ciders a valid new mode of transport the history of sydney really has been the history of bridging its divisions and this huge $63 billion megaproject comes a little closer to each side of the harbor with its towering skyscrapers, diverse economy and Port positioning Brisbane is no stranger to development, but the new scheme at Queens Warf takes things to a different level, stretching across 26 hectares of land and water.

The project is easily the largest district development in the southern hemisphere and one of the largest developments ever attempted in Queensland. unfathomable levels of information here's how the team on one of the world's largest construction projects is using technology to succeed Brisbane is Australia's third largest city, a thriving business center that grew from an initial European settlement in Queens WARF from the early 19th century to becoming that historic site is being carefully restored and reinvented in an effort to attract more than 1.5 million additional tourists to the city and create more than 8,000 jobs led by destination Brisbane Consortium.

The A$3.6 billion megaproject will see the construction of six new towers and the restoration of several heritage buildings, once completed the new Queen Warf district will offer hotels. Apartments. 12 football fields of public space and a new physical link across the river to make this new city within the city a reality. Engineers undertook for the first time the largest demolition and construction scheme ever undertaken. In central Brisbane, an attempt was made to build the structural foundations and create space for a five-storey basement car park, a 26m hole was dug and almost half a million cubic meters of material was removed, the largest amount ever recorded for a project in the center of a city in Queensland.

Material has been sent to Brisbane Airport for recovery work and to help build what will be Australia's first automotive precinct. The b&autal with the excavation completed in 2019, the development has been steadily increasing in the basement and two more floors of the podium and the works reach the street level in By the end of 2020, from there, the new towers will begin to get up. Building a new district of this scale and all next to a river in a historic city center is extremely complex to rise to the challenge that the project team led by lead architect Cotti Parker has embraced digital. collaboration to plan and coordinate your large amounts of design data working in an information modeling environment and employing 16 different software tools across 39 contributing companies, from architects and engineers to contractors and suppliers.

Information modeling allows the team to clearly organize all key project information. an easily accessible central location is where the team stores and coordinates all 3D model data and specifications the approach improves efficiency dramatically increases people's understanding of the project and reduces waste at Queens Warf, the engineering specialist digital dbm vercon has over 340 models under management and is processing 215 individual models each week, NE group products are the ones that have had the biggest impact on Queens Warf, although many of us may not realize it. Each group's products are now behind much of how our world is designed, built and maintained with the company's 16 software.

Four brands have been used in the main stages of the project, covering the entire life cycle, from planning to operation, making the lives of architects, engineers, contractors and users easier. Teamwork in the design stage was possible thanks to Graphisoft archicad following the principles of integrated design. able to review and verify the same models in real time understanding the intentions of each and detecting errors before they occurred on site open tools Compatibility with Bim meant that any model could be incorporated and coordinated in archicad even if they were not produced in the software that breaks down barriers and improves teamwork on any construction site, time means money and when part of a building cannot be built due to a lack of clear design information or, worse, is built poorly, the impact can be huge to avoid such circumstances in a In a project as large and complex as Queens Warf, the team used cbri to check design information for errors before submitting it to contractors on site.

The approach represents a critical step that saves the time and money that can be lost when errors occur on the site, in addition to ensuring the information is correct, simply finding and accessing what you need on a project of this scale can be a challenge, especially once on site, and giving everyone a level playing field to find and open what they need, regardless of how digitally savvy they are, is key with blue. Beam Review Cotty Parker has saved the team the need to wade through thousands of physical documents by introducing a paperless digital workflow. The approach has reduced time spent reviewing drawings by a staggering 50%, while decisions involving multiple stakeholders have been made more quickly, as even newcomers to the software seemed to grasp it easily, it's difficult to convey the volume. of information that is produced in a project like Queens Warf.

There are 10,000 times more documents than you would normally find in a domestic building. This helped the team process their data. Drus was able to consolidate the enormous amounts of information coming from multiple sources, keeping it all in one place and allowing users to easily access and edit it when necessary, while information modeling has been essential in the design and construction phases, it could It is said that he will play a larger role once Queens Warf is completed. Helping to manage and maintain the new District during its 99-year lease enabled by technology, the team is now moving towards its goal of completing the core elements in 2022 and renovating the site's heritage structures, including the historic the treasury in 2024.

Nowis set to bring new life to Brisbane for the second time in its history, Gateway at Queens Warf powerfully demonstrates the construction sector's ability to shape our cities and unleash economic growth, while highlighting the incredible teams that make it everything happens through remarkable complexities with technology in place. Hello from Sydney. Australia now, this place is beautiful, it has the opera, it has the bridge, it has the impressive port, but one thing you notice when you get here is that there are not many skyscrapers despite having an economy and population geography that should encourage many skyscraper. The buildings that go up here are not many and they are not very big and that is all due to a secret rule that keeps Sydney short, a rule that is about to be lifted and that change could trigger the beginning of a skyscraper renaissance In the most famous city area First, let's clarify a couple of things: skyscrapers are not cheap and they are not built just anywhere.

Just because the city is big or famous doesn't mean it has a Skyline like Manhattan, in fact there are. Three main factors that generally combine to make tourist buildings an economy of necessity. ICS population and geography think that Hong Kong, New York and Shanghai, with their enormous costs, skyscrapers are essentially economic indicators of a city's success. In simple terms, they have to be built by companies. that can afford to give you an idea, a typical skyscraper in the 2020s costs between $300 million and over $1 billion in bills. Now Sydney has no businesses that can afford it. It is home to 42% of Australia's top 500 companies and more than 600 multinational companies have their Asia Pacific headquarters right here.

Sydney is the capital of New South Wales, a state that has the largest economy in Australia and accounts for a whopping 30.6% of the country's GDP if we take it out of Australia and make it its own country. South Wales would have the 19th largest GDP per capita in the world. If you were in Japan, France and the UK, basically Sydney is rich and has money to burn. 5.3 million people call this city home and it has been Australia's most populous urban center for over a century. in fact, Melbourne only surpassed it a few months ago because there is a clear need for real estate, there are tons of people here who need homes and offices to work in now, although it's not exactly apples to apples.

In comparison, it is worth mentioning that the city with the highest Skyline in the world today, Dubai, only has a geographical population of 3 million people, the city of Sydney is boxed in almost everywhere, the harbor surrounds it almost by complete and Parkland limits the expansion of the central business district. And when you can't build outward, you have to build upward. Skyscrapers just make sense here, so where are they now? I know what you're thinking, what's up with all those skyscrapers right behind me right now? Do not misunderstand. There are skyscrapers here, it's just that there aren't many of them and they aren't very big until very recently, no skyscrapers in Sydney were taller than 235m, which isn't very tall if you compare them to those in Melbourne, Chicago or even Singapore, so , why has it taken so long for such a prominent international city to build a skyscraper over 235m and why hasn't a super-rise over 300m been attempted here, especially when nearby Melbourne already has one with two more on the way, well to find out, we have to turn back the clock more than 100 years to the early 20th century, as America reached for the skies.

Australia was more reluctant to embrace the skyscraper when this 14-story building was built. first built in 1912, everyone panicked despite what is a really modest height, now at that time no one had really seen a building that tall, even the fire department was worried that, in case of emergency, they would not be able to reach the higher levels as a result. The city passed the Building Height Act 1912, which limited the construction of all new buildings to only 45M or about 13 storeys in height, forcing Sydney to expand its suburbs outwards and eventually becoming geographically larger than all of London; that law wasn't then it changed until 1957 now to put all that in context this was the New York Skyline in 1957 and this was the height that Sydney buildings were limited to but it turned out there was one thing that could top the Sydney's fear of heights, the city's love of icons.

In the 1970s, the city built the tallest tower in the southern hemisphere, the 305th I met Senter Point Tower, which you can see right now, is a shiny golden monument to that era and became one of the biggest tourist attractions here after the opera and From its rotating observation deck you can see more than 80 km in all directions from the bridge, but because it is not technically a skyscraper but rather a revolving restaurant and an observation platform suspended on a pole giant, was able to circumvent Sydney's strict regulations - new rules, in fact. were implemented to protect the city's new icon, a law was passed so that nothing could be built higher than the tower that crowns each skyscraper at 235 m, but nothing lasts forever and the first exemption to this rule came in the form of Crown Tower in 2020. a 270M casino-funded skyscraper with a height that exceeds the observation deck of Center Point The fact that Deep Pockets was able to ignore these rules has raised more than a few eyebrows, however , the seal was broken, a president was appointed and there could be no march.

Realize again that a 270 M skyscraper did not end the world. Sydney's skyscraper phobia of the century quickly collapsed and the rules changed again now the new limit for tall buildings is 330M suddenly super high rise is possible for the first time in this city and we are seeing a flood of skyscraper proposals: Foster and his partners, 26 3 m, designed the Salesforce Tower, Renzo Piano designed the Bangaroo Towers, which recently got a big increase, Sydney Harbour, the Twin. Tower Art Deco inspired 338 pit Street, 270M 55 George Street and Sydney's first super tour proposal at 56 pit Street, which so far has no renderings, we can show you it was originally slated to be 314M tall, but now there are reports that it could be as high as 330, the genie is definitely out of the bottle but it's a good thing Sydney's anti-skyscraper laws didn't protect the city in a way, in a way yes, but let's look at some of the facts Sydney frankly needs the space, its population is forecast to grow by 60% to 80% and reach 8 million people by 2050, and a government study found that increasing height limits on Sky debris could create more of 2.9 million square meters of floor area, representing an increase of 30%.

On the current capacity of the central business districts, Sydney has protected a Skyline for a long time, but now the floodgates are open and anything built here in the coming years will leave a permanent mark on this place, which comes with great responsibility . about Fantastic Architects and the construction team leading these projects to get them done right, guys, this video is made possible by Blue Beam. You can get more information at the link below. There's also the CH to dive deeper into this and other topics on our channel at the Best World Building Podcast available right now wherever you get your podcasts and as always guys, if you enjoyed this video and want more from the channel definitive videos for the construction of the channel that takes you to Sydney, Australia, press the subscribe button.