Cagelike Frame Will Support Shanghai Tower's Twisting Curtain Wall

摘要

The 632 m tall mixed-use Shanghai Tower, now under construction in Shanghai, China, features the innovative design of a twisting curtain wall-attached to a cagelike steel structure triangular in plan-that will be rotated by approximately 1 degree at each floor around a series of stacked, standardized floor plates, each circular in plan. As a result, the design team-which included San Francisco-based Gensler as the design architect and the New York City office of the international engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti, the latter responsible for the structural engineering- was able to divide the steel-framed tower into a series of nine zones, each typically 14 to 17 stories tall, and the floors within each zone will have a standard diameter. For example, each of the 14 floors within zone 1, at the base of the tapering structure, will be 76.4 m in diameter, and each of the 17 stories within zone a, near the top or the building, will be 46.5 m in diameter, notes Dennis Poon, P.E., M.ASCE, a Thornton Tomasetti vice-chairman and the firm's project director for the Shanghai Tower project.