Original subtitles

How do you build a luxury high-rise

out of 1,200 pieces of wood that won’t go up in flames?

Nobody to date had tried to build mass timber

at any kind of height, at least in the U.S.

How do you save a piece of decaying inner-city dockland

By creating cutting-edge office the length of a city block.

I told them, I like to build on the track.

I said, "You can’t demolish history."

And how do you pull off

constructing the tallest building

on the smallest footprint in the world?

We sort of thought,

"Well, why not 20, why not 30, why not 40 stories?"

You know, how high could we actually go?

Welcome to a world where anything is possible.

The space where innovation and creativity collide.

This isn’t just impressive, it’s revolutionary.

Where the only limit is human imagination.

This wasn’t just ambitious, it was audacious.

No one had ever attempted anything like it.

Unpacking the miracles and mysteries of construction.

Sometimes buildings can change the world.

And this is one of them.

To ask... How Did They Build That?

When was the last time you saw a skyscraper made of wood?

I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous.

There’s a reason skyscrapers aren’t made from wood.

Just like there’s a reason cars aren’t made from,

say, cookie dough.

But harness the latest technology,

and it turns out anything would be possible.

As populations grow and space runs short,

we’re no longer building out.

We’re building up.

And after a century of skyscraper construction,

we’re pretty sure what they should be made of.

There are, generally speaking, two types of tall buildings.

Office buildings are built out of steel,

and tall residential buildings are typically built

out of post-tension or cast-in-place concrete.

They’re materials we’ve grown to trust

and rely on for very good reasons.

The Great Fire of Chicago in 1871

saw over 17,000 buildings burnt to the ground.

300 people lost their lives. And that changed regulations

so all buildings had to be built with fireproof material.

Along with strength and flexibility,

this made concrete and steel

pretty much perfect building materials,

shaping the way cities have been built across the U.S.

But there is a cost.

Producing concrete and steel is responsible

for about 15% of the world’s CO2 emissions.

So it’s massively important

for our future that we find alternatives.

In the 2010s, Tim Gokhman is eyeing up a plot

ripe for development and makes move that could do exactly that

We wanted to build a luxury,

high-rise apartment building in Milwaukee.

The initial designs were concrete.

But in 2017, I read an online article

about a mass timber tower, and that got our imagination going.

What if you could build skyscrapers out of wood?

It’s readily available,

renewable, cost-effective, and beautiful.

Doing it with box-standard timber

would be challenging, to say the least.

It’s highly flammable. You’d need huge lengths

of super-straight timber, and it isn’t reliably strong.

But in Europe, they were building

with a material called mass timber.

Mass timber construction

has been around probably since the early 1990s.

The idea being that there aren’t a lot of very large trees,

so sometimes it’s challenging to incorporate heavy timber.

But if you can take smaller trees,

glue them together, manufacture them,

you can create these mass timber,

larger elements for construction.

Imagine, if you will, a sort of super-timber.

It’s made by gluing together multiple layers of wood

under pressure, so what you end up with

is even stronger than regular timber.

In fact, it can even be stronger than steel.

Despite the fact that no one makes mass timber

at this scale in the U.S., and it doesn’t pass the fire codes

for tall buildings there,

Tim decides it’s a really good idea

to build a 284-foot-tall luxury apartment skyscraper

in the heart of downtown Milwaukee.

It’ll be called Ascent Tower.

That’s if they can convince everyone

a wooden skeleton will be stron enough and won’t be a fire risk

Having figured out how to creat a solid foundation for the towe

that also allows for six levels of parking,

they’ll need to organize the 1,200 individually made pieces

of this mass timber jigsaw puzzle

ready to slide into place.

And they’ll need to be prepared because in theory,

it could go up pretty quickly.

Then it will be covered in glass,

creating an extraordinary and unique tower.

That’s if the authorities will let them build it.

Nobody to date had tried

to build mass timber at any kind of height in the U.S.

In fact, building codes don’t exist

for a tower like this.

The class of construction that this building would fall into

would be limited to five floors of timber framing,

and up to 85 feet in total height.

This building needs to be almost 200 feet taller,

so that means convincing the city to change the rules.

If you can prove that you’re as safe or safer

than those more well-understood construction typologies,

then they can allow you a path to approval.

So the good news is it’s not impossible.

But the path to approval

means proving that the wood won’t burn.

Effectively, we took different samples

of different mass timber members,

and they put them in a furnace so that they could measure

how quickly did that char rate grow.

If it burns too fast,

the whole project could go up in flames.

What we have here is one of nine glue-laminated columns

that was placed into a burn chamber

and then was subjected to fires for three hours

of approximately 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit.

And what they found was that the center of the column

remained at 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

That temperature’s important because that’s

the temperature at which the wood inside

is still structurally viable.

So from a structural engineering perspective,

there’s enough area left on the inside after this char

as to hold up the structure.

It’s great news, and there’s more to come.

Amazingly, they found that mass timber

is more predictable in a blaze than steel.

Char actually protects and insulates the material,

but the inside of the wood is at a reasonable temperature,

maintains its structural integrity.

Naturally, plants contain something called lignin

in their cell walls, and that’s what gives wood its strength.

It also turns out that lignin is extremely heat-resistant,

so burnt wood on the outside protects the timber inside.

It’s a big win for the team.

Now, they just need a mass timber manufacturer

who can take on the job.

There wasn’t really capacity in the U.S.

to produce this volume of mass timber at one time.

And so ultimately, our partners led us

to fabricators in Austria,

which is actually generally where this technology

sort of emerged in the late 80s and early 90s.

This construction method is so precisely prepared

that a mass timber home like the German Huf Haus

can be assembled in a matter of days.

You are meticulously designing every last detail

of the entire building beforehand.

Applying this technique to Ascent

could see the building fly up,

provided they get every detail right.

Whether it’s ducts, risers, pipes, shafts,

you can imagine if those are not in the right spot,

there’s going to be some challenges,

there’s going to be some rework,

there’s going to be some problems.

In October 2020,

work starts on the concrete foundation.

And even here, the upside of mass timber starts to show.

One of the big benefits of mass timber

is that it weighs so much less

than if you were using traditional materials.

So the foundations don’t have to be as strong to do the job.

We had to drive 100 fewer piles than we would have

if this had been a concrete building,

which immediately saved a month on the project schedule.

Now, they can start building upwards.

Because the first six stories

are entirely open to the elements,

they decide to keep it old school.

The bottom six stories of Ascent

are parking structures. If you thought hypothetically,

"Could you have done it out of mass timber?"

The answer is yes, structurally.

However, when you’re talking about parking,

particularly being in Milwaukee we have cold winters.

It would be additional cost, additional maintenance

over the life of the structure.

That versus a post-tension concrete structure.

Then, in June 2021, the fun begins

as the team turns its attention to the timber tower.

Building with mass timber can be over 25% faster

than regular construction, but to pull that off,

everything needs to be planned with military precision.

Including dealing with the 1,273 pieces of mass timber

that are on their way to the U.S.

One big problem with downtown sites is space.

Where do you put all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle?

In Milwaukee,

the team building America’s first wooden skyscraper

is working out where to hold over 1,000 unique pieces

of mass timber before they’re moved to site.

We’re so close to the Port of Milwaukee,

so the port could actually hold the pieces.

Which means on site, they’re only dealing

with the next piece of the puzzle.

They could actually bring a semi that day

of the exact parts and pieces they need,

drop them off out front, have the crane pick them up,

and then put them on top, on the level they were working on.

A team of up to 50 workers

constructed the six concrete floors.

For the remaining 19, it’s a different matter altogether.

We had a 12-man crew

for the entire duration of the mass timber,

and that consisted of five carpenters,

five ironworkers, and two laborers.

But installing the 2,500 beams and columns

does take some pretty serious screws.

So this is a 16 and seven-eighth screw,

and this was one of the more typical screws that we had.

Each floor requires around 1,200 of these screws

to hold it together.

Some of the screws were so long,

they’d only be able to drive 10 screws

before the battery would need to be swapped out.

In order to keep the project on schedule,

the team comes up with a clever solution.

The guys came up with these charging stations

that were essentially mobile.

Despite needing over 12,000 battery recharges

for the drills to fasten the 122,000 screws,

the building races up.

What we found is that it took seven months

to build 19 floors of mass timber

with less than a quarter of the labor.

So the level of acceleration

in the construction was spectacular.

By winter 2021,

Ascent is quickly approaching its 290-foot limit

when the team grabs the chance

not just to be a first for America, but for the world.

Once we found out that we were

within about three feet of the world record,

I went to the development team and I said,

on the top floor of the building,

we should make the roof do this.

And there it is.

The final piece is set on December 17th, 2021,

just in time for the holidays.

For construction manager Chris and his team,

it’s been a transformational experience.

You know, it’s something that I’ll never forget,

and Ascent is living proof

that you can build a high-rise out of timber.

And in doing so, perhaps it’ll change the way

other buildings are made in the U.S.

Who knows where a rekindled lov affair with wood could lead?

Our goal is to build the best building possible

and decrease the use of concrete and steel.

Over 25 stories with 259 luxury apartments

and a pool on the seventh floor

this manages to be high-end living with a low carbon impact

Both concrete and steel

have astonishingly large carbon footprints.

Mass timber goes somewhat the opposite way

in that it is in fact a carbon sink

rather than a carbon producer.

It may have taken time

to embrace the idea of a timber tower,

but Ascent gives a glimpse into what the future may hold.

There are so many benefits

from a sustainability perspective

that it just makes sense to utilize mass timber,

so to be a part of that is really an honor.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder,

and that’s certainly true for buildings.

What might start out as an eyesore can, with time,

blossom into the most unexpected, beautiful bloom,

like an industrial duckling transforming into a swan.

Case in point, this once ugly dockside relic

now stands as a stunning vision of the future.

This is Kraanspoor, a transparent office

the length of a typical Manhattan block,

built on top of old shipyard crane tracks in the Netherlands

It will take ten years to create.

It means fighting off a demolition order

and cost 37 million US dollars.

But it’s a shining example of what derelict docks

around the world could become,

because most of the city ports

that were once the arteries of trade throughout the world

are now relics of a bygone era.

After World War II,

supertankers transformed shipping.

But their massive size required deep water channels.

Old dockyards just couldn’t keep up,

leaving them abandoned and crumbling.

By the early 1980s, the maritime city

of Amsterdam is full of decaying dockyards.

All that remained were rusting machinery and rotting buildings.

In the mid-90s,

after years of being a derelict industrial zone,

the city has plans to clear the docks.

But local architect Trude Hooykaas has a different idea.

I took my bicycle. It was a Sunday, it was August.

It was very warm, 30 degrees.

And there was a track with two cranes on it.

Where the city sees a rotting, disused port crane lin

Hooykaas spots something special.

It was magic. I thought, "No, it’s not. It’s not true.

I have to build on it."

"I will do it immediately."

The rebirth of Amsterdam’s crane track,

known as Kraanspoor, will be understated and elegant.

With three stories of modern glass offices

sitting over the river,

it will honor the past and the future.

Though, there will be many hurdles to overcome.

First, they’ll have to remove the two disintegrating cranes

without destroying the entire structure.

And they’ll have to repair the ancient foundation,

submerged five feet below in the riverbed.

Then, they need to work out how to

put a 5,000-ton office building on top of legs

designed to carry a fraction of that weight.

Finally, they’ll wrap the office in heat-trapping glass,

preserving energy as well as history.

But none of this is going to be easy.

This is monumental.

An extraordinary vision, not just of reclamation,

but of preserving a vital piece of Amsterdam’s past.

Kraanspoor is set for destruction at the end of 1997.

First, we had to fight against the permit of demolition.

It was a race against time.

Trude marches to Amsterdam City Council to make her case.

I told them, I’d like to build on the track.

"Oh, no. It’s out of the question."

Said, "Why?"

"Because we are going to demolish it."

I said, "You can’t demolish history,

"because it’s a part of the harbor.

It’s the part of Amsterdam." They thought, "She’s crazy."

It takes over four years of lobbying

before the city agrees,

on the condition that Trude can find someone to fund her vision

After that, we made a huge model.

And ING Real Estate said, "OK, we are going to build."

The budget to bring the crane tracks

into the 21st century is 37 million U.S. dollars.

But not all of it can be saved.

The cranes were in a bad condition.

They were not maintained. So, it’s erosion, rust.

The risk of wind blowing them off

was too, yeah, that was too risky.

Too dangerous to try and disassemble,

the team looks to an old-school method to take them down:

Dynamite.

A single mistake here would have been devastating.

Cranes crashing into the ports.

Or worse, demolishing the concrete structure itself.

the team transforming an old crane track on the River Ij .

into a state-of-the-art office building has called in

explosive experts to carefully remove the cranes on top.

Explosives are actually a precise tool when used right.

There’s an old technique

where they hollow out the area to be demolished,

then pack it with metal to focus the blast.

The team must work out where to place the explosives

to within an eighth of an inch.

They lay the charges, clear the area, then...

I was on a bit of a distance,

and I saw the two cranes, like, in slow motion.

Yeah, it was strange to see.

It was all so sad.

The beautiful cranes, like enormous birds, fell down.

There was just silence.

As the dust settles,

the team assesses the rest of the structure.

We know the concrete was,

in some places, not in too good condition.

You can see on its surface, it’s a bit of a white spot,

but you don’t know how deep it is within the concrete itself.

The symptoms point to one thing.

Concrete cancer, also known as ASR,

alkaline silica reaction,

occurs when stone and sand in concrete react with cement,

absorbing water, causing it to crack and break apart over time.

That was a very scary moment because we didn’t know

if we could preserve the whole building.

One of the politicians called me.

"Hey, Trude, what about Kraanspoor?"

"Oh, it’s fine. I’m just talking with a developer."

It was not true at all. I lied because

I don’t want to lose their faith in the project, so I lied.

The only way to know if the project can go ahead

is to see how deep the concrete cancer goes.

Drilling through concrete this dense

requires serious firepower.

A deep diamond-tipped drill is key.

And it’s not just concrete. It’s also reinforced with steel,

which helps the structure to hold more weight.

If you cut that steel, the whole thing could buckle.

To ensure that doesn’t happen,

the team brings out another tool from their arsenal

ground-penetrating radar.

By using that, you can know where the reinforcement is,

and then you also know where to drill and where not to drill.

Over the next three weeks, they take 24 samples,

carefully managing to avoid damaging the steel rebar inside

which are then analyzed. Thankfully, it’s good news.

The investigation showed that the structure,

it was, well, quite OK.

The source was underneath the rail of the crane track,

so it was removed.

If the impact would have been worse,

the Kraanspoor project would have been dead.

While they repair the concrete cancer,

the engineers move on to the next challenge.

When you build on top of this structure,

270 meters and three floors high,

the wind is going to push against the building,

which, of course, we had to do something about the foundation.

Along with the weight of the new building,

the additional area being hit by the wind

will put some pretty serious extra forces on the foundation.

Submerged five feet underwater,

the team constructs a cofferdam around the building,

and pumps the water out so they can be assessed.

We could walk on the ground, of the River Ij,

which was very fascinating.

There on the riverbed, they uncover the pile caps.

Pile caps take the weight of Kraanspoor’s massive columns

and spread it across deep piles in the River Ij.

But Kraanspoor is about to get a lot heavier,

and that’s a problem.

The reinforcement in those pile caps was not sufficient

to deal with the new loads on the structure.

If the caps aren’t strengthened,

they might split under the weight.

We had to make a steel corset around the foundation itself,

because otherwise it could split.

Then, the plan is to encase them in fresh concrete.

And even that’s not easy.

Layering new concrete on old

is incredibly difficult. It’s not like glue.

You can end up with two blocks that aren’t bonded,

and if river water gets in between,

the whole structure could break apart.

To make sure it was a right connection

between the two parts of it, the new and the old part,

we blasted with high-pressure water

to make sure every bit was clean, you know?

Once they got rid of all the river slime,

they have to roughen the concrete surface

to give the new concrete something to latch on to.

The men were all dirty, you know,

when they came out.

It was not a nice job to deal with, but we had to do it.

As the engineers finish stabilizing the structure,

Trude is reassessing her design

I was looking at it, and I thought,

"What’s missing? What’s missing?"

It’s missing space.

It’s not interesting to put a volume on it,

you have to make a volume floating.

But floating the office building will concentrate

the weight onto specific points

rather than spreading it across the structure.

So we had to reduce the weight to 50 percent.

In Amsterdam, the team behind the redevelopment

of an old dockland crane track

must halve the weight of the new office building

that will float above it.

It’s a massive challenge,

starting with the steel structure.

H-beams are super efficient.

They’re strong without using more steel than needed,

which makes them lighter.

In September, the team installs the first H-beams.

But on their own,

these won’t reduce the weight enough.

They have to find more, and turn to the floors,

because these are usually made from reinforced concrete,

and that’s seriously heavy.

So we found this hollow floor with steel beams,

and then you reduce a lot of amount of weight.

Sections of this lightweight flooring

are prefabricated off-site.

When they arrive, the construction team is amazed

It was possible to handle with one man,

one floor, never any heavier than 50 kilograms.

It’s like a Lego system. It’s done in a couple of months.

In April 2007, the team is ready

to put the finishing touches on this featherweight facility,

130,000 square feet of glass.

Well, glass is great because it solved the weight problem,

but it creates another problem, sun coming into the building.

Wrap a building in glass,

and you’ve basically built a giant greenhouse.

Sunlight gets in and heats everything up,

but that heat has nowhere to escape.

To prevent the building from becoming a heat trap,

the team turns to an innovative new building technique.

To deal with that problem,

we have the special double skin facade.

It’s fretted glass with a screening on it

to protect the building from the sun,

but to have enough daylight coming in.

It’s an ingenious system, where the gap

between the two layers of the facade acts like a buffer,

preventing heat gain in the summer

and heat loss in the winter.

It’s also the finishing touch to Kraanspoor’s reinvention.

In 2007, Trude’s redeveloped office is complete,

and the ugly duckling has become a swan.

Kraanspoor proves you don’t have to flatten history

to move forward. You can build right on top of it.

Narrowly avoiding demolition,

Kraanspoor has a new purpose.

It was our fight to retain this building.

When I visited for the first time,

it was a wasteland or no man’s land.

Now you see students, creative industry, and housing.

It’s incredible to work at Kraanspoor.

When I first saw the building,

I was like, "Wow, you don’t see this quite often."

I actually thought it was awesome.

The developer told me, "You are too stubborn."

And he was right. Never give up.

Kraanspoor, it’s an icon.

It’s an act of sustainability to preserve.

You have to know where you come from.

You can’t make future that’s not rooted in the past.

Amsterdam doesn’t exist at all without the water.

Melbourne, Australia is buzzing, bustling, and above all, busy.

So when they wanted to create a stunning residential building

in the city’s business district, there were two simple rules.

You can’t build out, so you gotta go up.

It’s 2010, and Melbourne developer Peter Hart

is looking to fulfil a childhood dream

Ever since I was young,

I’ve been interested in tall buildings. In my early 20s,

I went to New York, went to the World Trade Center,

went to Rockefeller Center at the same time.

Looked up and just loved the concept of tall buildings.

Peter’s love of towers

agrees with the changing needs of a growing city.

In order to combat urban sprawl, Melbourne actually

came up with a plan for the future of the city in 2002.

Part of their solution is encouraging

high-density development in key areas like the city center.

The challenge for a small developer

is finding an affordable site to build big on.

They’re rare. When they come up, you’ve got to be ready to act.

So when Peter finds an old pub

on a tiny plot just 20 feet wide,

he sees the opportunity to create something special.

When I look at building sites as a developer,

I look at the gaps. I look at what’s not there.

The problem is that to make the figures add up,

Peter has to build big on the tiny plot.

And that means one thing.

The reason we built so tall

is to maximize the land value. The taller it was,

the more feasible it was going to be at the end of the day.

So I had to think out of the box.

Luckily, he turns to architect James Pearce,

who loves nothing more than a challenge.

The pub actually was a three-story building,

and Peter came into the office

thinking he might be able to get a few more levels on it,

about ten stories.

But we sort of thought, "Well, why not 20?

Why not 30? Why not 40 stories?"

You know, how high could we actually go?

So once I bought the site,

I had my own concept of what I wanted to do.

I’m an engineer.

My projects need architecture to make them work.

So we sat down together at a cafe near the site

with a piece of paper and a pencil, and he drew the tower.

And I was sold.

The building’s success

rests on something engineers call slenderness.

How slender a building is determines how stable it is.

Or not.

The key to skyscraper design comes down to one thing,

the ratio of height to width.

For instance, the Empire State Building

is about three times taller than its base width.

That’s pretty stable and balanced.

But when you have something extreme,

like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai,

which is nearly nine times taller than it is wide,

that’s really pushing the limits.

Building slender brings with it

its own set of challenges.

And at about 290 feet high and 21 feet wide,

Phoenix Tower is definitely going to be that.

We pulled out our iPhones,

and we realized that the dimensions,

the slenderness of an iPhone is about 11 to one.

And so you can get a good picture

of what the tower’s going to look like,

and it’s pretty slender when you hold your phone up.

And it will be a first, because this has never been don

on a site of this size. The 28-story high rise

will have a single apartment on each floor.

The starting point, as with any building,

will be laying a solid foundation.

But with barely enough room to move,

the challenge will be how to do it.

Then they need to work out how to make the tower tough enough

so despite being slender, it stands up

and also leaves enough room inside for someone to live.

Then they must provide onsite parking,

with no basement to put a garage.

They also need to stop it from swaying in the wind,

a particular problem with slender towers.

And they need to make it look beautiful.

It’s a list as tall as the building.

There were many risky construction techniques

that made things very difficult.

Despite the obvious constraints, on March 23, 2012,

work begins demolishing the old pub.

And the team is thinking about the challenges ahead.

At the time, it was the tallest building

on the smallest footprint in the world.

Looking at the building, it just intrigued me.

There’s a real challenge.

The first of which is how to construct the foundation

There’s very large forces from the tall,

skinny structure at the base, and thus piles were needed.

In fact, they were going to need to create 21 piles

going 50 feet into the ground.

But the tiny site throws up the first of many issues.

The piling rigs are large, and the piling rigs

really had a lot of trouble fitting into this site.

It’s beginning to look like

the team has bitten off more than they can chew.

We’re up against old buildings,

and they’re very fragile. And the risks were great.

The foundation is everything.

And just one mistake

could compromise the stability of the entire building.

In Melbourne, Australia, the team

behind building the tallest tower on the smallest footprint

must find a way to drill 21 foundation piles

into a plot just 20 feet wide

without damaging the surrounding buildings.

The key to everything here

was about sequencing work in that confined space.

The machinery obviously needed

to swing and rotate to drill the holes.

So the sequencing of each pile was quite complex.

In July 2012, after four months

of careful maneuvering and piling,

they face the next challenge.

Skyscrapers are very sensitive,

in terms of their stiffness and strength.

Most skyscrapers rely on

a slender concrete column right down the middle,

like a strong backbone, holding everything upright.

But there’s a problem with doing that here.

The reality is in this building,

at 6.7 meters wide, the space is at a premium.

A traditional core will take up too much room.

So they turn the problem inside out.

Basically, this whole building is one big core.

Instead of a core wall in the middle,

they use the building’s exterior walls.

And to make it even stronger,

some of the interior walls will act as bracing.

It’s a clever engineering solution

that allows them to maximize the floor space

while giving the tower its strength.

But now, they have to build it.

The issue is constructing tower means using cranes.

Pragmatically, there is no way a crane

could have gone external of the building on that site.

The only place the crane can fit is inside the structure

Which in itself presented

aa number of challenges, purely because of the size.

With the crane taking up valuable space,

they have to build around it, one floor at a time,

using a clever system called jump form.

They build these structures using huge molds,

basically massive forms that they fill with concrete.

Once it hardens, powerful hydraulic rams

push the entire mold up to the next level,

and they repeat the process over and over,

all the way to the top.

The engineering of this jump form was just amazing,

because as the building jumped up,

they still needed to lower through that jump form

precast panels and other elements that would make up

the internal structure of the building.

Floor by floor, the structure takes shape,

and the team turns its attentio to their next challenge.

Where do you put 27 car parking spaces when there’s no basement?

Peter’s determined that the team finds a way.

At the very beginning of the project,

we had a rather wild idea, which was that people might

drive in onto a car lift and get lifted up

to their apartment and then drive their car onto a balcony.

Get out of your car and into your front door.

The solution they settle on is just as nuts.

The rear of the building

was designed as a car stacker system.

The cars are stacked mechanically

and then delivered back to the base,

turned in a turntable and exiting the building.

This will be

Melbourne’s first fully automatic parking system,

with spaces for cars stacked on 13 levels.

It will also be designed and built in Germany,

10,000 miles away.

They make their own steel in Stuttgart.

They make their own motors up the road in Stuttgart.

Everything comes out of Germany straight to here.

While that’s going on, in Melbourne,

the structure reaches its full 290 feet.

And the downside of using an external concrete core

becomes evident.

From an architectural point of view,

it was what to do with those side walls.

They should have some sort of texture or pattern to them.

They can’t just be plain.

A graphic designer that we really love working wit

is a guy called Gary.

So we invited him to have a think about what sort

of pattern or graphic might go on the sides of the building.

Gary’s big idea is to create a weaving ribbon

of blue steel running up the building,

though nobody’s quite sure why.

When you press Gary for what’s the blue ribbon about,

and he sort of shrugs his shoulders,

and he’s not really sure.

And we said, "Well, could it be like a city skyline sort

of turned on its side?"

And he said, "Yeah, it could be that."

So where the balconies stick out,

the ribbon sort of grabs them

so that it’s not just purely stuck on the building,

it’s an integrated part.

And it has some lighting behind it at night

so that it sort of glows.

In 2014, 23 months after the first piles were sunk

The Phoenix is finally finished

The whole process was a great dream come true.

It was a great success.

Measuring 28 stories tall, the 28 luxury apartments

also offer a state-of-the-art car parking system,

ingenuously built inside a 20-foot cylinder.

I think it’s the coolest mechanical device

I’ve ever seen. You know, you park your car, you get out,

you swipe, and you go to your apartment.

Little knowing that your car’s going to be put away

It could be ten stories in the air.

And when you come back down, you swipe again,

and it presents itself to you,

turned around, ready to drive out.

If there’s one thing about slender buildings,

they move more than other towers in the wind.

To compensate, The Phoenix

has an 8,000-gallon liquid-tuned mass damper,

which for the most part seems to be doing its job.

The only time I can recall one of the residents saying

that they noticed the sway of the building

was on some windy nights.

There was a pendant light over a round dining table.

You would actually see the pendant just very slowly moving.

So when we’re designing tall, skinny buildings,

we shouldn’t have chandeliers or hanging lights.

We should have them all fixed.

Above all, the slender Phoenix,

with its distinctive blue steel ribbon,

makes a big impression on its much bigger neighbors.

The funny thing about this building

is when I’m walking along the street,

I do hear people say, "Wow, look at that building."

And then I almost want to say to them, "I live there."

We had always considered living in this building.

We actually drove past it many times

whilst it was being constructed

There’s so much natural light comes in

from all directions throughout the day.

The fact that you get more than a 180-degree view

down to docklands through to the parklands is quite amazing.

I think the Phoenix building has set an interesting challenge

to the industry.

How do we build difficult buildings

in tight contexts that stack up economically?

With his dream realized,

Peter’s not looking to take the credit.

I won’t be remembered as the developer.

Like, you don’t remember who commissioned the Mona Lisa.

So I think The Phoenix Tower will survive, you know,

as the architect’s building, and not mine.

And I’m ok with it.