Original subtitles

How do you construct an extraordinary building

that represents the reunification of Germany,

but wants to fall down?

We needed 132,000 cubic meters

of scaffolding which had to be filled.

How do you build a museum

covered entirely in glass tubes that lights up at night?

It had cracks, and the cracks grew over time,

so that scared everybody.

And how do you give a 100-year-old bridge

a facelift to get it ready for the next 100?

Keeping a bridge operational

while you build a new bridge within its own structure,

this has never been done before.

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?

Want to create a stunning building in Houston, Texas,

that’s worthy of housing one of America’s finest,

most valuable collections of modern art?

Well, first of all, you’re going to need a touch of class.

And then, you’re going to need a touch of glass.

1,100 translucent tubes of it, to be exact.

And the result is quite simply a modern masterpiece.

The heart of Houston has been home

to the Museum of Fine Arts

since its first gallery opened in 1924.

Over the years, the campus expanded,

with buildings designed

by some of the world’s greatest architects.

Mies van der Rohe,

Raphael Moneo, Isamu Noguchi,

these are some of the big names in 20th century architecture.

It was very much Houstonians wanting to create something

that could one day be like

the great institutions on the East Coast.

In 2012, as part of this grand vision,

the trustees decide

to add another building to its collection.

The brief was to create

a building of approximately 250,000 square feet,

to create a parking garage with at least 440 spaces,

and to unify the campus.

One of the competing architects is Steven Holl,

who designed The Reach expansin

to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

and the horizontal skyscraper at Vanke Center in China.

But Holl has an issue with what the museum wants.

We read the brief and basically said

they should not be building a parking garage first.

He throws out the museum’s plan and starts from scratch.

I said, "I want you to switch it now

and not build a parking garage,

and build a new glass cell, and put the parking underneath,

and beautiful tunnels with art in them."

Anyway, they agreed,

and it was a unanimous vote for our project.

His audacious plan will put 100,000 square feet

of gallery space in an extraordinary new building,

named after patrons Nancy and Rich Kinder.

The team will need to dig in waterlogged ground

to house the parking garage.

Above it will be three stories of galleries,

which on the inside will let the art take center stage.

And on the outside, there will be an incredible exterior.

That’s if they can work out

how to bend thousands of glass tubes.

The next challenge will be

engineering a roof designed to mimic clouds.

Finally, they must dig down into the water table,

connecting the campus through a series of tunnels.

It’s a formidable engineering challenge.

And they’ve got the Texas hurricanes and heat

working against them.

On May 31st, 2017, work starts on the foundation

of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building.

But in August, disaster hits Houston.

We were about 40 feet below street level

when Hurricane Harvey hit.

That put a stop to everything.

Harvey is the first Category 4 hurricane to hit

the U.S. mainland in 12 years, displacing 30,000 people

and causing over $150 billion U.S. dollars worth of damage.

Hurricane Harvey is nothing I’ve ever seen before,

and I don’t expect ever to see it again.

The rainfall that resulted from it,

which was the damage it did,

was anywhere from a one in 5,000 to one in 9,000 year event.

50 inches of rainfall causes devastation

across the city, including the museum’s construction site.

We got a picture showing

the basement as a pond, filled with water.

The hole itself had about a million gallons

of water in it that we had to pump out

after the storm had moved through.

Clearing the site takes four weeks.

But surprisingly, the foundatin has survived unscathed.

Work starts on the main building,

which is going to need to stand out

among some very distinguished neighbors.

The original building is 1924 stone,

and then Mies Building’s glass and steel.

Then across the street, you have the Moneo, a block of stone.

And I said, let’s not do steel and glass.

Let’s not do stone.

Let’s do a complementary contrast in translucent glass.

To do that, they need something

pretty solid to hang the glass off of.

They decide on cast-in-place concrete.

Meanwhile, Holl and the design team

are working on the details of the glass facade.

Stephen Holl is known as the master of light.

He uses it like some architects use concrete or timber.

We were fooling around in the shop,

and we got these plexiglass tubes,

and we sawed them in half,

and we started to make the model in that.

And then we said, "Ah, tubes, hollow tubes of glass."

The entire exterior

will be covered in these glass half tubes,

causing the finished building to glow.

Translucent facades have been done before.

Curved glass has been done before.

But in this combination, six to seven meter long

half glass tubes with such a tight bending radius,

translucent, that has not been done before.

To create Holl’s vision,

they’ll need 1,100 of these haf tubes in 29 different sizes.

There are basically two methods to bend glass.

You can use a machine,

but then the radius is quite limited.

On the machine, the smallest tube they can get

is around six feet across.

This is way too big.

So we finally used the gravity bending method

to fabricate the glass.

You put your layers of glass over a mold,

then heat it slowly. And as it softens, it begins

to form a shape around the mold below it.

It’s reliable, but it’s not as fast,

and it requires some very big ovens.

It’s an ancient technique

that’s been around since the Romans.

But on this scale, it’s practically unheard of.

We hit a stone wall, I mean a glass wall, if you will,

because nobody could do this.

These tubes that are 20 feet tall

and 30 inches in diameter, laminated glass,

that was never done before anywhere.

So who’s going to do it?

Eventually, they find two specialty manufacturers

in China to take on the job.

12 test pieces are made to Schieber’s specifications

and sent to Texas. But it’s bad news.

Three of the tubes had cracks, and the cracks grew over time.

So that scared everybody.

Schieber has to rethink the glass design.

What we did was slightly increasing the radius

of the tubes, but only by one or two inches.

We increased the glass thickness

from six millimeters to eight millimeters.

And no problems occurred

on the next full-scale mock-up we built.

That gave us the confidence

that we could use it on the actual project.

But manufacturing the glass tubes

isn’t the only challenge, because there’s a danger

this facade could turn the museum into a giant greenhouse.

In 2023, there were 45 days

above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Houston.

This high heat on a glass exterior

creates something engineers call solar gain.

As heat energy radiates through the glass,

it produces heat inside, and that air gets very hot,

and can be a problem if it’s not able to ventilate.

For a solution, first they choose a clever glass.

By adding four layers of a resn called polyvinyl butyral,

they can dramatically reduce te amount of heat getting through.

Then the team turns to a bit of engineering knowhow

called the chimney effect

Heat rises.

So if you collect heat along the whole length of a facade,

as the heat rises, it’s gonna draw cold air up from below

and exhale all the hot air up above.

It’s like creating your own breeze.

By creating a gap between the glass and the wall behind t

hot air will be funneled up.

The curve of the glass should make this more effectiv.

To find out how well it will work,

they build a section to test.

The heat gain was reduced

by around 72% just due to the glass tubes.

It looked good. It worked in the sun.

It was like, "Oh, thank God, this is going to work."

All the team has to do now is attach them.

The tubes are set into place using cranes with suction cups

for the semicircular shape of the tubes.

They’re set into the steel frae and glazed into place.

Which makes for a nail-biting experience

when the 1,100 glass tubes being suction cupped into place

are made in a factory about 8,000 miles away.

It complicates things because if you break something,

you’ve got to wait to get a whole new piece made

and brought to site.

In Houston, Texas,

the team building the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building

at the Museum of Fine Arts must carefully fit

1,100 glass tubes to its exterior.

So they take their time,

treating each tube like it was made of... glass.

Less than five were broken in shipping.

Two were broken on site.

And otherwise, we did really well there.

As the glass is being installed,

the team looks to their next challenge.

In Houston, when it’s 100 degrees,

you want to walk in a cool space

from one piece of the campus to the other.

The idea is to dig two tunnels

that will do much more than just connect

the new building to the rest of the campus.

It’s easier to cool a tunnel.

And then if you have art, it’s an art experience.

It’s not just a tunnel.

However, tunneling in Houston isn’t straightforward.

The groundwater table in Houston is really high.

Here, it’s about eight feet below the surface.

You’ll start running into water.

So to avoid flooding

and prevent the tunnels from collapsing,

the engineers turn to a commony used technique called open cut.

You dig a big trench,

you build a concrete box inside from one side to the other,

and you backfill over it.

It’s fine for tunnel number one.

But for the longer tunnel,

the open cut system isn’t going to cut it.

It goes underneath a main thoroughfare

through this part of town, Bissonnet Street,

and we couldn’t close that

because of all the traffic up top.

This means digging the tunnel deeper,

but then they hit the ground water.

So to combat that, they install dewatering wells

which literally lower the water table

around the excavation site.

Then they dig. Very, very carefully.

We had to go very slowly. We had a small excavator

that would dig out six inches at a time.

Then we would put up an I-beam,

inject grout behind it, and go another six inches

so that we could reinforce the tunnel structure

so we didn’t have any cave-ins

that could have been catastrophic.

It’s slow going, but there’s no way around it.

Only going six inches at a time

took us about 100 working days to complete.

Our other tunnel, which was a more traditional open trench,

took about 60 days.

Both tunnels do get there in the end,

and without any major hiccups.

Back at the museum, it’s ready for a roof,

one inspired by the heavens.

I had the idea of the big Texas sky

coming into a luminous canopy,

where I imagine these giant clouds

that happen in Texas very high up

pushing down and causing the roof to warp.

Just like the real thing,

sections of this cloud-inspired roof will allow in

filtered natural light, protecting the art inside.

So ideally, a roof is a simple structure,

some kind of square grid system. This was not that.

But it proves too complicated

for the steel fabricator’s connection engineer.

The engineer decided he couldn’t do it,

and so he resigned, and they came to us to say,

"How do we get this done?"

The problem is that using traditional steel beams

for this design would require a unique angled connector

at almost every joint.

When you count the two ends of each beam,

there were at least 1,000 different rotational conditions

that had to be considered. We had many conversations,

trying to see what would be the right solution.

When we did come up with this idea of being able

to actually twist the members so that they did

come into alignment, I think it was a real aha moment.

There’s just enough flex in the steel beams

to allow the team to twist them into the roof shape

without having to create unique connectors at each join.

But each has to be meticulously checked

to ensure the stresses haven’t compromised them.

There were 57 different steps

that the contractor had to go through.

He would connect a series of beams to create one cloud,

and then he would create

a series of beams to make another cloud,

those would have to be connected.

And the difficulties don’t end there.

We learned that the whole structure

was not self-supporting until the final roof beam

was set in place.

That means you’ve got to support it as you build it.

It takes a lot of scaffolding, but in 2020,

two years into the build,

the last piece is put into place.

Once the final roof beam was set,

we got to take down all the shoring

and see the roof structure in its entirety,

and it was very impressive,

spiderweb of beams and trusses coming together up top.

Over the next few months,

Holl’s impossible 50,000 square feet of roof clouds is created.

And finally, on November 21st, 2020,

three years and six months since construction began,

The Nancy and Rich Kinder Building is complete

and open to the public.

It’s so beautiful.

It’s definitely a museum, right,

that go to visit for the art inside, but also the outside.

Inside, the exciting gallery spaces

are brightened by a shell of over 1,000 glass tubes.

It feels very open. The place is designed

in a way that it makes the navigation very easy.

And deep beneath the water table,

day-glow tunnels doubling as gallery spaces

connect the campus’ different buildings.

I love the building,

and I think people really love it. My good friend said,

"Steven, it’s the best museum you ever did."

And if you think it looks good in the daylight,

wait until you see it at night.

For me to have the opportunity

to work on a world-class building

right here for my home city, was a gift from God for me.

Sometimes, even the most revolutionary structures

don’t stay pretty forever. Take the Bayonne Bridge.

State-of-the-art in 1931, but over time, it became

unable to support modern road and river traffic

into one of America’s busiest ports.

So naturally, it got a facelift.

Engineers literally raised the bridge deck 64 feet

without ever closing it to traffic.

And when you look at this bridge now,

you can tell it’s had some work done.

But who cares? It’s fit for the future.

Bayonne, New Jersey, just across the water

from New York City’s Staten Island borough,

is home to an iconic 20th century design.

The Bayonne Bridge was seen as an engineering marvel

when it was first opened.

It was the longest steel arch bridge in the world.

You’re talking about a historical landmark

for the city of Bayonne.

For nearly a century,

the bridge welcomed international cargo

into the port of New York and New Jersey.

But in September 2007,

it’s threatened by an engineering project

2,000 miles away in Central America.

They were widening the Panama Canal

to allow larger container ships

to access ports around the world.

The Panama Canal,

connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans,

is being expanded to allow

huge new container ships to pass through.

Ports around the world

will need to make room for thee new super tall vessels.

Elsewhere, they were just

knocking down old bridges. However, with Bayonne,

the authorities don’t have that option.

Part of the problem,

aside from the high cost and the long schedule,

was that the bridge itself was designated a national landmark.

So we actually would have to leave that in place.

But they have to find a way

of letting these new super large ships through.

They dredged the channel, made it deeper,

so ships might pass through at low tide.

But that only gets you so far.

They had dredged for years underneath there,

but still, the Bayonne Bridge roadway was too low.

With no other option,

the team dreams up an engineering world first.

It came to the point where we have to raise that roadway.

It’s an ambitious plan

that will give this iconic piece of New Jersey

a brand new road 64 feet above the old one,

allowing the new super-sized cargo vessels

to pass underneath.

Sounds simple enough, but it’s not.

First, they need to figure out how to keep the bridge open

while creating piers to hold up the new approach roads.

And they must find a way to mae the existing arch strong enough

to support the additional road deck

and all the construction gear.

Next, they need to erect the new road deck,

which will allow vehicles acros and the superships underneath.

Finally, they’ll need to demolish the old road

without unbalancing the bridge

and keep it open to traffic at the same time.

Keeping a bridge operational

while you build a new bridge within its own structure,

in my experience, this has never been done before.

In New Jersey, engineers need to find a way

to raise the height of the Bayonne Bridge,

so that huge new superships can pass underneath

and keep the roadway open.

There’s only two ways in and out of Bayonne.

Economically, you would have destroyed the city of Bayonne

if you closed that bridge for two or three years.

How do we put a roadway above a roadway safely,

and keep the roadway underneath open?

The team comes up with a bold solution.

The bridge carried two lanes

in each direction before construction.

We reduced that to one lane in each direction

so we could work on one half of bridge

while we carry traffic on the other half.

Construction begins in July 2013.

The first challenge is building the elevated ramps

right next to people’s homes.

The bridge connects to roads

that sit on top of concrete piers.

A higher deck means steeper roads and much taller piers.

And so these approach roads need to be much longer,

stretching into the neighborhood.

In fact, the approach ramps will each stretch

around half a mile into residential areas,

and be supported on 24 new piers.

It’s a big, dirty job.

To build a pier to support the approach structure,

we would utilize a huge drill rig,

with a six foot diameter drill, to drill 20 feet down

through the earth, into bedrock.

Then we inserted a cage of steel and poured concrete in there.

And then we would stack

these precast hollow concrete segments,

in some cases that were 100 tons.

As the columns grow,

so does the anger of local residents.

The first time I had a meeting,

I was mayor a couple weeks. Someone raised their hand

and started screaming and yelling.

The amount of noise, you know, when they were pile driving.

They couldn’t use their swimming pools in the summertime

because of the amount of dust

and everything that was being created.

It was an everyday battle.

Fortunately, the next stage involved using

ow, 300 miles away in Virginia.

So by using precast concrete for the structure,

you actually remove the concrete trucks,

the placement, the forming of it, the rebar.

And then there’s no cure time,

so the erection is a lot quicker.

With the approach ramps under construction,

attention turns to the next challenge.

How to build the new bridge dek 64 feet above the existing one.

So the original deck in the arch itself,

it is suspended by suspender cables.

Because it’s a

National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark,

the new roadway needs to be hug in exactly the same way.

At one point, we had two decks on the same bridge.

We had the existing deck and we had the new higher deck.

So the arch has to carry two live roadways,

plus the construction equipmen, plus all our people.

That is a lot of weight.

Part of the solution turns out to be a stroke of luck.

We found that the original arch was designed for two tracks

of heavy freight railroad, but it never got built.

So we were able to take advantage of that strength

and use it for the second deck.

Even then, the team needs

to further strengthen the old arch.

We did that by using LIDAR.

Laser scanning the whole bridg,

so you know where every nut and bolt is.

You’d have to knock out the existing rivets.

Then you would bring these steel plates

that were specifically designed to fit exactly over the holes

of the existing rivets. We’d line them up, and then

we would put high-strength bolts through

to increase the integrity of the bridge and allow it to handle

the higher weight of carrying two decks at one time.

In February 2017, the new deck is open to traffi.

And work begins removing the old deck,

which has to be done before the arrival

of the first new giant container ship.

Our next task was to remove

10,000 tons of steel and concrete

from the existing roadway.

Doing this could unbalance the bridge

and cause irreparable damage.

We were working from the center back towards the approaches,

removing concrete, steel,

and working backwards to create that opening.

There’s also danger in demolishing the old deck

above a very busy river.

The challenge of this work is working at height,

hundreds of feet above the water.

You can’t have a fear of heights.

It has to be in your nature to really get this job done.

In New Jersey, the team tasked with raising the height

of the Bayonne Bridge faces their final challenge,

removing the old deck

before the arrival of the first new super ship.

This is the world’s busiest shipping channel.

If anything should fall into the waterway,

it was a significant danger

to the ships and the crews passing below.

That would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars of impact

to these shipping companies and to the region.

By September 2017,

the original bridge deck is completely removed.

The first huge new container ship arrive,

and attempts to pass underneat.

The atmosphere on the opening day

for shipping traffic was really spectacular.

We have a park right on the water there.

Everybody just lined the whole shoreline,

and watched as the ship came down.

When you see a ship that large,

the Teddy Roosevelt, come through? It’s a big ship.

It almost looked like

it wasn’t going to fit under the Bayonne Bridge,

and I really got nervous at that point.

I’m like, "Oh my God, tell me that we spent

"all this money to raise the bridge,

and this ship’s not going to fit there."

We watched it glide effortlessly onto the new raised bridge.

It was an amazing experience.

When it did, yes, there was a cheer on our vessel.

It was like, mission accomplished.

Raising the Bayonne Bridge

has meant the Port of New York and New Jersey can now handle

some $200 billion U.S. dollars worth of goods every year.

Since the bridge has been raised,

we have definitely seen the benefits economically.

The port commerce that comes i, the amount of jobs it creates,

it’s only going to get better and better for this area.

It’s a project that not only benefits

the local community, but it also showcases

world-class engineering and ingenuity at its finest.

It was a very difficult project,

and it’s a success for everyone involved.

So I’m very proud of it.

The Berlin Wall, once an eyesore with a dark history,

was the backdrop when a media company

chose to rebuild its headquarters right next to it.

Their vision?

To create a symbol of everything the wall stood against:

peace, hope, and unity.

Once you get a glimpse of this building,

there is no doubt that they succeeded

in creating a structure that stands as a testament

to innovation, resilience,

and the power of design to help heal old wounds.

In 2020, Germany’s capital, Berlin,

is celebrating 30 years of the country’s reunification.

And a bold new building, the Axel Springer Neubau,

home to a German media empire, is ready to mark the occasion.

I really felt this need

to create something that is truly contemporary,

cutting-edge architecture, ahead of the curve.

Its location couldn’t be more symbolic,

where the Berlin Wall once divided the city in two.

It’s located directly on the death strip

on the former East Germany.

Designing a place steeped in history

isn’t just about putting up steel and concrete.

It’s about capturing its soul.

Every little detail has to honor the legacy that came before it.

That’s the true test of an architect

on a project like this.

The idea comes about in 2013,

with a competition for a building that will honor

Berlin’s past, while representing the digital future

of one of Germany’s biggest media and technology companies.

I said in the briefing,

"I want to have a building that is so beautiful,

"that we will have car accidents in front of the building,

because people are looking to the building."

Renowned architects OMA,

famous for its stunning Seattle Central Library,

win the contract, based on a design that makes a virtue

of the city’s troubled history.

Our site is exactly located where the previous wall

between East and West Berlin was.

And on either side of the wall,

there was that kind of death zone.

Where people were not allowed to walk.

Their idea is for a huge open plan glass atrium

that will represent the no-mans land that once divided the cit.

Measuring 13 stories, it’s a very tall building for Berlin.

Normally, buildings in Berlin

are 70 feet in height,

and this is the maximum line for the height of the buildings.

At 150 feet high, the design looks destined to fail.

We said, well, "I’m not so optimistic

"that the Berlin Senate will approve that,

because they’re very strict about it."

But then the senator who was in charge for that,

she said, "Okay, in this case, we have to make an exception,

"because it is so convincing,

"it is so strikingly beautiful and special,

that we approve that."

The unifying design will transform Berlin

right where it was once divide.

A stunning media headquarters

with a massive 11-story glass atrium at its center.

The new building will be a physical representation

of the coming together of East and West Berlin.

First, they will have to navigate

a tiny building site in the heart of Berlin.

Then, they’ll need to build a structure

with a 150-foot-high void at its center,

without it collapsing in on itself.

Next, they have to construct a delicate glass facade

that can withstand Berlin’s fiercest weather.

Finally, they must ensure that the 3,500 workers

can escape the huge open plan office in the event of a fire.

When I first saw the design of this building,

I thought, "Oh my God, we can’t build it.

How is it possible?"

On May 3, 2016, construction begins.

The first challenge? Excavating 100,000 tons of earth.

That’s 5,500 truckloads

through Berlin’s residential neighborhoods.

Day by day, there was a caravan of trucks coming in.

Minimizing disruption to the residents

takes meticulous planning.

The construction company told all the truck drivers,

"You have to come in in this tight 15-minute time slot."

"If you don’t come in in this time slot,

"then we will talk to you very, very clear

that you have to be here in your time slot."

Nine months later, with the site excavated,

they face their next hurdle.

Building on a plot

that’s smaller than two American football fields,

in a tightly packed city cente.

Standard construction cranes with fixed arms

don’t really work in tight spaces where

there’s not enough room for them to turn without colliding.

That’s why they went with the luffing jib cranes.

These are built for tight quarters.

They can angle their arms and their booms up and down

without smashing into everything around it.

You have to work with them like an orchestra.

And that means very precise sequencing.

So the crane drivers had to be trained.

"You move now and you don’t move now."

They have to be very careful.

By January 2018, the lower floors are in place.

Now, their attention turns to the central atrium

that will honor the city’s history,

of once being divided

between Communist-controlled East Berlin,

and the Allies who controlled the West.

During this time,

newspaper publisher Axel Springer

built his original company headquarters in West Berlin,

right next to the border with the communist East.

Axel Springer wanted to be here,

because this is the old media part of Berlin.

When the headquarters is completed in 1966,

it’s visible across the Berlin Wall,

standing as a beacon for democracy.

We want to fight for freedom and democracy

with our newspapers here on the pole position by the border.

The media magnate is determined

that his homeland will one day be whole again.

Axel Springer believed in a German reunification,

and he was called a fool for his belief.

Springer never lives to see his dream come true.

The Berlin Wall comes down in 1989,

four years after his death.

Fast forward 30 years, and the 150-foot atrium

of the new headquarters, now under construction,

will stand as a tribute to both a unified Germany

and the dreams of Axel Springe.

But with a huge hole at the center of the building,

there’s nothing to hold up the upper floors and roof

until its complete.

A typical building has a grid of columns

spaced every nine meters or so

that supports the floor plates top to bottom.

But if you want a big atrium in the middle of your building,

you need another way of supporting those upper floors.

Otherwise, that wonderful open space

becomes a forest of columns.

In Berlin, Germany, the team building

the Axel Springer Neubau’s 150-foot-tall atrium

must find a way to support the roof and upper floors.

We needed a lot of scaffolding

to hold up the upper half of the building.

And they mean a lot.

It was roughly 132,000 cubic meters

of scaffolding which had to be filled.

We built that up until we reached the roof,

the scaffolding growing taller with every floor we built.

It’s slow progress, but as the scaffold grows,

the team is able to build the top floors and roof

that will enclose the atrium.

In some places, we’re hanging four floors.

In some places, we’re hanging two floors,

because of the shape of the atrium that we’re carving out.

By September 2018, the upper floors are in place.

The next engineering challenge?

Making sure they stay there when the scaffolding comes dow.

There aren’t enough columns

to support the upper floors from below.

So they have to hold them in place from above,

using something called a transfer structure,

a heavy load steel grid, built into the roof.

we’ve effectively built a table at roof level

and we’re hanging the upper floors from that tabletop

It’s a brilliant piece of engineering. If it works.

You never really know if a transfer structure

can hold the load until you strip the scaffolding away.

That’s the heart-stopping moment of truth,

and there’s no safety net.

The crew used powerful hydraulic presses to jack those floors up.

The upper five floors were lifted for roughly an inch.

They peeled away one layer of the scaffolding,

then slowly eased off the hydraulic presses,

letting the steel frame gradually take the weight.

This is a moment where we thought,

"Perhaps the whole building is going to crash now."

And it didn’t. That was quite a moment.

By October 2018, the huge shell of the atrium

is in place and the team faces its next challenge.

The 150-foot-high glass window needs to be strong enough

to survive winds that can reach

close to 80 miles per hour in a storm.

Stiffness is important to glass. A thin piece of glass,

maybe over a few meters, the wind blows on it,

you don’t really notice.

You make that glass bigger and bigger.

All of a sudden, you know, it moves. It moves alarmingly.

To increase the stiffness of the glass facade,

the team turns to some very simple, but effective physics.

Think of this sheet of paper like a flat wall of glass.

Too much force, and it buckles and gives way.

But if you corrugate the surface of that glass,

it spreads the force evenly through the ridges and valleys,

making it able to withstand the same kind of force.

We modeled it physically.

You could already see how much stiffness

that simple corrugation created.

The corrugated window

requires over 1,500 panes of glass, with no two alike,

and engineered to fit within a bespoke 3-D super frame.

I was really a bit afraid.

Isn’t it too complicated to erect a facade like this?

It takes nine months, using a team of 100 fitters

to piece the complex 3-D facade together, from bottom to top.

It worked like a puzzle,

but really smooth that the facade grew up,

in a way, organic.

So it was really happy to see how it grew up.

With the atrium almost complete

and just three months until opening,

the team faces its next obstacle:

How to control a fire in an open space

that measures over four million cubic feet.

Atriums and fire, they don’t really go well together.

Without internal walls, the smoke can spread rapidly.

But their plan is to try to tun the void to their advantage.

Can we not use the atrium as one big chimney?

So we will make sure that the smoke will only collect

on the upper part of the atrium.

It’s a radical idea

that calls for some serious equipment.

They installed massive smoke extractor fans in the rof

that can clear smoke from the lower atrium

in a matter of minutes.

It’s kind of something new,

and something that has never been done before.

So to prove it works,

they have to conduct a live fire test.

The fire started, and everything was full.

You can’t see people standing just a few meters beside you.

I was praying that these machines please start,

and that everything works out.

If it fails, the building can’t open.

And then you hear the sound of the machines starting,

and the fog lifts and lifts. That was a good day.

In spring 2020,

after three years of painstaking construction,

the 600,000-square-foot Axel Springer Neubau

opens for business.

It was a very emotional moment.

A building that not only looks to the future,

but is connected to the past,

and heals the space where the wall once divided the city.

I think we’re extremely proud on what we’ve achieved.

It’s just great. It’s fantastic.

It has exactly the right balance, and I’m biased,

but I love it in every corner.

♪ MTV ♪