BE Magazine - Volume 5, Issue 1 - (Page 18) BUILDING BE Award Winner Concrete Vision Engineering the United Kingdom’s tallest residential post-tension concrete building W ith a slender tower measuring 155-meters high, the 48-story Beetham Hilton Tower in Manchester features 279 hotel rooms and an additional 219 apartments. A glass and steel blade tower—with an adjacent five-story steel-frame podium structure that houses the hotel ballroom, restaurants, and bars— extends an additional 15 meters above the main roof for a total height of 170 meters from ground level, making it the tallest posttension concrete residential building in the United Kingdom. The tower foundation is a 3-meter-deep concrete raft foundation that directly bears on sandstone rock. Using a raft design v WSP’s post-tension concrete Beetham Hilton Tower won Best International Tall Building in 2007 v The ability to easily modify input data helped the team make informed decisions during various stages of the project instead of piles delivered significant cost savings. Pad foundations support the lower structural steel podium block, and the perimeter walls for the basement are contiguous bore pile walls that retain the surrounding ground and external services adjacent to the site. Lateral stability against wind and dynamic performance was provided by the core walls and outrigger shear walls that act as a cantilever from the basement raft. Two concrete cores that measure 8 meters by 9 meters with shear walls running from front to back extending through the full height of the building. One of the cores incorporates stairs, lifts, and services; the other is purely structural. Reinforced concrete columns around the building’s perimeter supplement the shear walls. The different functional areas within the building—hotel, residences, and the ground-floor lobby area—required the column layout to change from the top level to the ground level. Walking columns are used as transferred structural systems for the two short edges of the building. The edge columns walk in two directions at two different levels over a distance of several meters. Below the 23rd floor, the maximum width of the tower is 16 meters. The height-to-width slenderness ratio of about 11 is relatively high. Above the 23rd floor, the floor extends a further 4 meters beyond the north face of the main core to accommodate different functional requirements for residential use. A combination of posttension slab and in situ concrete cantilevered beams extend from the main core walls to support the extended cantilevers. 18 BE MAGAZINE | Volume 5, Issue 1
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.