Original subtitles

How do you build an extraordinary twisting

tower on top of two protected buildings

in a country that’s never built a skyscraper before?

We never knew it was so complex

and it was going to take so much time.

How do you construct a stadium

so impressive, it becomes a champion

in its own right?

This was on a scale

beyond anything else that I had ever done before.

And on the edge of the Black Forest,

how do you build a test center

for creating the elevators of the future?

I read it in a newspaper

and I thought, actually, this was a joke.

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 ’em.

To ask... How Did They Build That?

Mercury Tower was one of the last projects approved

by Zaha Hadid.

And, boy, did the celebrated architect go out in style.

Zaha’s team gave the final design an ingenious twist,

and thanks to that dynamic curvature,

the building seems to defy the laws of gravity.

33 stories of glass and twisted steel slicing through the sky,

Mercury Tower is Malta’s tallest building.

But Zaha Hadid’s design is only part

of what makes it surprising...

...because Malta doesn’t have any other skyscrapers.

Instead, the tiny Mediterranean island nation is famous

for its historic limestone buildings.

But in 2016, one local develope decides to change all of that.

I wanted to do something really special.

I really wanted to build an icon for Malta.

A self-made millionaire,

Joseph got into development at a young age.

I started from nothing.

I bought a garage and an apartment.

I transformed it to, like, a mini market,

you know, and I sold it and made some money.

And this was... I was, like, 18 years old, yeah?

He built his real estate career

one concrete slab at a time.

And now he’s bettin’ it all

to build Malta’s first skyscraper.

Joseph is funding much of the project himself.

A big name in Malta,

he’s an unknown on the world stage.

But he isn’t going to let a little something like

that stop him.

So we just Googled "top ten architects in the world."

And before you know it,

Joseph’s dialing up the queen of curve herself:

Zaha Hadid.

Zaha Hadid was a total game changer, a rule breaker,

the first woman ever to win a Pritzker Prize.

Basically, that’s the Oscar of architecture.

Her clients were usually global players,

major governments, global institutions.

They weren’t just a random guy from a little island

in the Med cold-calling her out of nowhere.

But Joseph heads for London.

Joseph pretty much showed up in our office one day.

He met with Zaha, and Zaha was very intrigued.

She had sympathy for anybody who’s got a good sense of humor

and he does have a sense of humor,

so they kind of clicked.

And yeah, she... she really took on the challenge.

Designing the first skyscraper on an island famed

for its historic architecture comes with responsibility.

We were very aware that we were building in Malta.

It’s a small island.

There was a little bit of a nee of not going overboard.

So we wanted to have one element that would stand out.

And this was the twist.

The rest of the tower is actually,

for our standards, quite controlled... maybe.

Then, just months after drawing up her designs,

Zaha Hadid dies at the age of 65.

It was a very, very hard and difficult time,

but it also gave us the challenge to make sure

that these designs...

we would really deliver them in the best possible way.

Honoring Hadid’s vision

with Malta’s first skyscraper will be no small task.

Mercury tower will reach 33 stories,

including 256 luxury apartments and come with a dramatic twist.

Plus, a shopping center and hotel beside it.

But the site is small,

sloping and wedged between historic vaults

and a listed structure.

They’ll have to build over them

without crushing what lies beneath.

Halfway up comes the twist.

It has to be made from steel,

a material the crew has never worked with,

using cranes that could buckle under the load.

And they must build it quickly.

Joseph needs to get his money back fast.

Joseph’s first job is putting together a team to build it.

Malta does low rise: three, four, five floors.

That’s normal. A skyscraper? There’s no local experience.

Yet Joseph insists on using local crews.

He said, "I want a tower."

I want to build it with his own really trusted builders.

But he said,

"I’ve never built anything higher than, I think,

six or seven floors."

Obviously, this was a big concern for us.

There is a lot of challenges there,

but I think that one of the most relevant one was

to adapt everything to... to a local knowledge.

When the team starts excavation

for the foundation in 2017,

they have more immediate things to worry about.

We were faced with this small plot, very tilted,

difficult to set a tower on.

Worse than that,

there are two derelict but protected landmarks on the site

Mercury House, built in 1903 as part

of the island’s telecommunications hub,

which boasts a stunning limestone facade.

And there are two underground vaults created during

the Cold War.

Obviously the most important thing was how are we going

to build without damaging these heritage buildings?

And that includes cutting away

over 4,000,000 cubic feet of limestone...

...before they can lay the tower’s foundation.

There was a very kind of surgical operation

of removing the limestone around them.

In July 2017, the foundation has been laid.

But the difficult work is far from over,

because somehow Hadid’s 397-foot-tall tower is gonna

be built right over the top of the protected Mercury House.

We have to figure out how to transfer the load

for the upper columns to the basement

in order to avoid any damage in this building.

It sounds impossible

to sit a 34,000-ton tower over the top

of a delicate, century-old building.

But the engineers have a solution.

It’s called an A-frame because, well,

it’s shaped like an A.

Two angled supports meet at a peak,

creating a strong, stable triangle.

That shape naturally diverts the weight

away from the house to the ground.

In November 2018, with the A-frame in place,

work starts on the rest of the tower.

For Joseph, the stress is starting to show.

I’m financing this project. It’s different for them.

They’re used to governments, you know,

to... to billionaires, you know, all this stuff.

It was different.

With the pressure of the loan of millions of dollars

and millions more of his own money sunk into it,

Joseph needs the build to be finished quick.

He wanted to build everything in two and a half years,

which is crazy.

In Malta, the team building the island’s

first ever skyscraper

is under pressure to get it finished in two

and a half years.

Even for seasoned high rise crews,

that timeline would be a stretch.

But Joseph’s team has never built a skyscraper before,

and they’re learning as they go

This scale of project did introduce some challenges they

weren’t necessarily used to.

To help, specialty contractors are brought in

for a crash course in skyscraper construction.

But for Joseph, things still need to move faster.

He was able to mobilize a workforce

which could effectively work on a 24-hour operation,

doing various shifts during the day and through the night.

Incredibly, they built a floor every 13 days...

...faster than many seasoned high rise construction crews.

This is how we did it.

And it was a... it was a huge challenge, yeah?

In early 2019,

they reach the ninth floor,

but now they faced Zaha’s distinctive twist.

The twist was by far Joseph’s biggest headache.

Normally, the columns in the building all line up

and the forces flow straight down to the foundation

But twist it, and the columns shift.

The loads no longer transfer easily,

and it puts the tower under serious stress.

We needed something to take this load,

to pull this load back into the foundations.

The engineers design a truss which will transfer

the load across the twisted section of the tower.

The question then is what to build it from.

The starting point was to try and have everything in concrete,

but it was very clear that...

that, that twist could only really

be achieved in structural steel.

The problem is Joseph

and his crew have never worked with steel.

There was one moment when they say, "Oh no,

no, no, no, we have to build it in concrete."

He takes a little convincing.

And still you only have to assemble the element

by bolting or whatever on site.

And this is going to be faster and easier.

So they decide, "Okay, let’s do it in steel."

It overcomes one hurdle, but creates another.

That was when we did the mistake

of not ordering the steel, like, a year before.

Building Mercury Tower is a serious learning curve.

And with no steel mills on Malta,

Joseph settles on Sicily, 60 miles away.

But it creates a six-month delay,

putting serious pressure on his finances.

We never knew it was so complex

and it was going to take so much time to get here.

In March 2019, the steel arrives.

The site is so small,

the huge 300-ton truss has had

to be specially designed just so it can

be positioned into place when it gets there.

We have to subdivide your elements to make sure

that the cranes could handle that weight.

Then they have to be welded together a hundred feet

in the air.

This twist was mostly done by an Italian contractor.

I think that the locals didn’t like it.

It was very challenging for him as well.

I could really see Joseph panicking because of los

of control, in a way, which... understandable.

What he told us was that we overdesigned it.

It was too complicated.

"Why did you give me this headache?

Why did I even start this tower?"

He was the developer. He was the investor.

He had lots of hats,

and dealing with all of them at the same time is difficult.

I have messages,

voice messages from Joe from time

to time, saying "Tomorrow!" or "Today!"

A year into the construction,

Mercury Tower’s steel twist is assembled.

And by October 2020, it’s reaching full height.

But the twisting design throws Joseph one final hurdle.

This was a Zaha Hadid building.

Nothin’ about it was simple.

The facade was so complicated, you know?

The twists, the curves...

It was a nightmare for myself, you know?

Used by Hadid’s team on other buildings,

they opt for glass fiber-reinforced concrete

It’s another material Joseph hasn’t used before,

but is perfect for the job, being as strong as concrete,

but able to be molded around the twists and turns.

Her designs are fluid, sculptural, complex by design.

Almost a third of the exterior demands unique panels.

It’s like assembling a 3D puzzle in mid-air,

where every panel has to align within a fraction of an inch.

The technology, the workmanship,

the materials were all challenging.

That’s when it became--

it became really stressful and hard.

In Malta, the team building one of

star architect Zaha Hadid’s last designs

makes the final push to install the intricate exterior,

one sculpted shape at a time.

And in November 2023,

two years past the original deadline

and 53 million US dollars more than Joseph originally planned,

the twisting Mercury Tower is finished.

This building is incredibly striking.

The structure... it’s in-your-face,

it’s on the outside,

and it’s something I’ll be really proud of to talk

to my grandchildren about in years to come.

I mean, it’s once in a lifetime

let’s put it this way,

especially if you’re a local architect.

You will never work on something of such a scale

and with very talented people.

Built almost entirely by locals

with no previous experience working on towers,

it twists 397 feet above the city,

giving residents stunning views of the sea.

And below, a tranquil spa has been created

sitting inside the Cold War vaults without damaging them.

All of the plumbing

and wiring is hidden beneath the raised floors

and false ceilings they’ve created.

The vaults remain untouched.

More than a building,

it’s a tribute to the genius of Zaha Hadid.

This is one of the last projects Zaha signed off.

So we had to be as faithful as possible to what her vision was

for the project.

This extraordinary skyscraper redefines the skylin

and stands as a testament to the determination of one man

And remember, it’s the highest tower in Malta to date.

So if they build one which is higher than mine,

then I have to build another tower, yeah?

SoFi Stadium was designed

to host global events like the Super Bowl, the Olympics,

and the FIFA World Cup.

But the clock was ticking as architects were challenged

with getting it up, ready,

and open for business in record breaking time.

And like all great athletes,

when the pressure was on, they brought home the gold.

And, boy, did they do it in style.

It cost 5.5 billion US dollars to build,

takes 17,000 workers and four years to finish it,

and is topped with a transparen canopy the size

of almost 21 football fields.

I gotta say, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

This structure has the promise to change

the lives of those who live around it.

Because just on the strength of one building,

a city’s fortunes can rise.

And they can fall.

Built in 1967,

the LA Forum was the home

to the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team

for over three decades.

The Fabulous Forum was the epicenter of sports

in Los Angeles for so many years.

But then it fell into disrepair

The teams moved away and the community fell on harder times.

The local economy flatlined. And unemployment?

That shot through the roof: doubling to a staggering 17%.

But in 2014, Stan Kroenke, the owner of the LA Rams,

has a dream of giving Inglewood a new iconic venue.

300 acres will be redeveloped,

a whole new neighborhood built from scratch.

Mr. Kroenke wanted to create a stadium that was world class.

He wanted to create something unique that represented,

you know, the city as a global entertainment destination.

Global architects HKS come up with a stunning design

for a huge stadium, complete with a YouTube theater

landscaping, cinemas, and shopping units.

First, they’ll need to figure out a way how

to construct such a tall building right under

a flight path,

and it needs to be able to stan up to Mother Nature

in one of the world’s most seismically active cities.

They need to be able to protect the 70,000 spectators

from the heat of the sun,

but also allow light to flood in.

And they’ll want every seat to have the best view

in the house, all 70,000 of them.

When we designed SoFi Stadium,

we truly believed it could be the best stadium in the world.

It also needs to be constructed quickly,

because LA has been picked to host the 2022 Super Bowl.

This was... on a... on a scale...

beyond anything else that I had ever done before.

Their first challenge is

Los Angeles International Airport.

Because the building is within two and a half miles of LAX,

We’re right between both the north and south runways.

There are FAA restrictions for the height of the building.

The Federal Aviation Authority

won’t let them build above 150 feet.

But to get enough seating,

the stadium has to be at least 250 feet tall.

Designing within that height limit was going

to be a challenge that we were going to have to address...

...quite quickly.

It was determined that we needed

to embed the stadium in the ground.

In the fall of 2016, construction begins.

It takes the team months

to dig a gigantic 22-acre hole that’s 110 feet deep.

Then, Mother Nature throws a wrench in the works.

Before we had a chance to put irrigation in,

the largest rainstorm in the history

of Southern California came through for about a month.

We got this massive,

once-in-a-hundred-year rain event.

Too much water was coming into there.

They couldn’t pump it out fast enough.

Pumping out over 20 million gallons

of water is a massive job.

And sets back their schedule.

But with the Super Bowl looming the team pushes on.

By March 2017,

the site is finally dry, and they’re ready

to tackle their next problem.

Most of coastal California is what we’d call

a very high seismic risk.

In Inglewood, there’s a fault

that runs alongside Newport-Inglewood,

but there’s also the San Andreas fault.

So right from the start,

we knew we had to design with... with seismic risk in mind.

What’s more,

burying part of the stadium puts it at even greater risk.

Shallow underground structures are actually way more vulnerable

during earthquakes compared to deeper ones.

When a quake hits,

the soil around them can literally turn to liquid,

and that puts an enormous pressure on the concrete,

cracking it or even causing the walls to cave inward.

In a severe earthquake,

we would be holding a lot of earth in place,

and the deformation of the earth was going

to transfer directly into deformation of the structure.

They came up with a clever engineering solution:

separate the structure from the soil around it.

Instead of locking the stadium into the earth,

they created a gap, what’s called a seismic moat.

But the gap won’t absorb the force from the earthquake.

The system that was proposed by the contractor is called

mechanically stabilized Earth, and there are actually straps,

miles and miles of straps, that holds the soil in place.

First, they lay down a layer of compacted soil.

Then a long plastic strap

is stretched straight back into the hill.

Another layer of soil goes on top,

then another strap, over and over.

The layers build up,

each strap gripping the earth like a seatbelt.

Mechanically stabilized earth walls...

Instead of fighting against earthquakes,

these walls flex with them.

Think about how steel reinforces concrete.

Here, polymer strips reinforce the dirt.

But making the roof earthquake proof is

another matter altogether.

If you put a heavy roof on top of a stadium structure,

there can be a very significant whiplash effect.

In Los Angeles, California,

the team building the SoFi Stadium needs to find a way

to attach the roof so that, in an earthquake,

it doesn’t shake one way and the stadium another,

tearing it apart.

We decided to keep the roof separate from the stadium bowl.

To do that,

they use a bit of engineering magic called a blade column.

Tall, narrow and flat.

they slice through the space like the edge of a blade.

Their shape is what makes them strong.

If I hold up this card like this, then it bends easily.

However, if I do this, it doesn’t.

That’s because the wider something is,

the more stiffness it has and the more it resists bending

The blade column’s shape

allows them to solidly hold up the roof,

but have just enough side to side flex

to move safely during an earthquake.

In August 2018, they’re complete,

and the team turns its attentio to one

of SoFi’s more surprising features.

People always ask us,

"Why does this stadium have a roof in Southern California?"

And my answer is:

anybody out there who’s been to a sporting event during the day

no one really wants to sit in the sunny side of the stadium.

To keep the heat out while letting the light in,

They turn to a material called ETFE.

Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene:

it’s a plastic that’s 1% the weight of glass.

Grimshaw Architects built the Eden Project out of it.

The plan is to use it to cover the aluminum roof panels.

There’s approximately 900,000 square feet

of ETFE covering the entire roof.

Those panels are all 60 foot by 60 foot

that fit within what we call the picture frame

up on top of the roof.

But getting the 300 panels up there is far from easy.

Ideally, we would have loved to have clad the panel

in ETFE before we flew it, but here we’re close to the ocean.

In the afternoons, the wind would generally pick up.

So that turns the panel kind of into a kite.

It may be a very modern material,

but putting it on is distinctly old school.

We bundled the ETFE up, we flew it on the panel,

and then we had to have tradesmen

and women out over the roof, unfolding,

tensioning the ETFE panel in place.

In mid-2020, it’s just one of the many jobs being

done on site.

It was the race to get ready to open the building.

They’ve got just 20 months

to turn a massive shell into the world’s most

advanced sports stadium.

You know, managing over 4000 tradesmen

and women a day on site at our peak.

It was such an enormous challenge.

The teams are working day and night

to get the stadium finished before the Super Bowl,

but there’s one last obstacle to overcome.

The infinity screen... It’s 120 yards long,

visible from every single seat, weighs over 2.2 million pounds.

That’s the equivalent of two Boeing 747s.

It should give every spectator a spectacular view.

When I first saw the design for the infinity screen,

the first thing that came to my mind:

how are we going to do it?

In early 2020, they’re ready to try.

Over 1300 pieces arrive from the factory in Utah

It’s all assembled right on the stadium floor,

ready to be lifted into place.

We had 14 strand jacks attached to the... the primary structure,

and it was a very,

very coordinated effort

to make sure all the strand jacks are going up

at the same time,

so there is no deflection between one end to the other.

Because it’s so huge,

we didn’t want any of the LED modules to pop off.

The huge Oculus is suspended on a system

of tension cables,

meaning no single point carries the enormous weight.

It goes up without a hitch.

Four years in the making and si months ahead of the Super Bowl,

SoFi opens for its first public game in September 2021.

It looks great.

Every time I come in,

I make an effort to see the playing field

because the Oculus is so awesome and I have to remind myself,

"Hey, I can watch the game on the playing field."

It’s a fitting new home for the LA Rams,

who go on to win the first Super Bowl held there.

There’s still an allure every time you come into

this building of...

I can’t believe we’re fortunate enough to get to play

in this stadium.

At $5.5 billion,

it’s the most expensive stadium on the planet.

I’ve worked on a lot of really cool projects,

but, this building, the complexity of it,

the challenge of it,

this is definitely a career highlight for me.

But it’s more than that.

By 2022, the Hollywood Park complex has brought

in around $20 million US in tax revenue and created thousands

of local jobs.

When I’ve asked the...

the people checking security or the people in the gardens,

"How’s it going?"

They’ll say, "This is like a dream come true."

I sense the city of Inglewood feels blessed.

We take pride in contributing to the future of the city,

you know, and the future of this community,

and a give back of the public space.

It really has become a global destination.

Imagine that somewhere in the middle of the Black Forest,

there was a skyscraper

that didn’t have a single apartment,

hotel room or office, but it did have 12 elevators,

all leading up to absolutely nowhere.

It sounds like something out of a fairy tale,

but once upon a time, they actually built it.

The German town of Rottweil is best known for its famous do

and its medieval European architecture.

But in early 2013,

a company called TK Elevator wants to base themselves here

and revolutionize the world of elevators,

which until now has relied on ropes.

Currently, if you want to do a super tall building,

you typically have to use a sky lobby.

So you go up maybe 100, 120 stories,

you exit, and then you go into a set of elevators

that might take you up the next 60 stories.

Above that, the ropes get too heavy

for the elevator system to lift

But TK Elevator is developing something to change all that:

The Multi, the world’s first rope-free elevator

that uses powerful magnets.

With a multisystem, you can enter an elevator

at the ground floor and reach, uh, 200, 300 stories.

Magnets make it twice as fast as regular elevators.

Think maglev train tech, but vertical,

a train that goes up.

But unlike rope elevators,

which have been around for hundreds of years,

This new technology will need some serious testing

to make sure wherever it’s installed,

the magnetic elevator will work safely.

So to do that,

TK Elevator decides what it needs is

an 807 foot tall testing laboratory.

Fitted with 12 elevator shafts,

They must figure out a way

to simulate high winds and earthquakes.

It will offer stunning views from the top,

while it will need to be protected from the elements

and something that the locals will love.

To stay on budget means creatin the 54 story structure

as quickly as possible.

When I saw the design, I said, "Wow."

And then the challenges started.

Of course, now we have to build it.

Before they can begin, though,

there’s the small matter of convincing the town of Rottweil

of their design.

First time when I heard about this project,

I read it in a newspaper and I thought,

actually, this was a joke because a high rise building

in this area was, for me, not imaginable.

Tall structures in Germany are unusual, and especially

in the middle of the countryside.

But with TK Elevator’s research campus nearby,

they’re set on building the testing tower there.

We have lots of engineers here in the area,

so there were no better place to build such a tower.

Now they just need to get the locals to agree.

After several discussions,

the developer agreed to implement

an observation decks.

We said, "Okay, we build something for the tourists,"

and we build Germany’s highest visitor platform on 232 meters.

And we have a very big conference room here.

With the terms agreed to, in 2014,

the team arrives on site and starts digging.

They’re already against the clock.

TK wants the tower open by Autumn 2017.

That gives them a year to finish all of the concrete work,

no wiggle room.

They need a way to create it quickly, and turn

to a system called slip forming

You have your mold,

you pour in your concrete, and then you let it sit.

Then you move your mold up and you pour in the concrete again

and you repeat that process.

It’s one of the fastest concreting methods out there.

It’s usually used

to create a building’s concrete core,

but here they have something more ambitious in mind.

Basically, we built an entire building

with a slip forming technique.

We had a 30-meter-deep excavation pit here, circular,

and at the very bottom there’s a two-meter-thick base slab,

and the whole basement acts as a fixed,

rigid connection of the tower so it holds the whole structure.

By building the inner and outer walls in one process,

the whole structure becomes the core, strong and fast.

But once they start, they can’t stop.

You put in the concrete continuously 24/7.

So it’s very intensive process.

So if there’s any problem arising,

we as an engineer have to find just the solutions on the spot

because the slip forming was moving.

That’s not the only challenge.

You also have to think about temperature

to make sure it’s solid enough before the mold moves on.

With temperatures ranging

from eight to 100° Fahrenheit throughout the year,

the team must make constant adjustments.

But it pays off.

With four months saved,

the mold finally reaches its full height by July 2015.

Now they’re ready to address their next problem:

towers move in the wind.

In high rise building,

wind is a dominant force which works laterally,

so it comes horizontally and, of course,

it tries to bend your building.

Normally, engineers do everything they can

to stop that.

They add a huge weight at the top,

called a mass damper, that sways opposite to the tower

to cancel out the movement.

Here they have something else in mind.

I remember once we attended a meeting with the client,

and we discussed the possibility of using such a damper

to set the power into vibrations intentionally.

These elevators will be used

in buildings around the world,

so they have to be able to cope

with wildly different situations.

So the plan is to be able to us the damper to simulate wind

and even earthquakes intentionally.

This is exactly the opposite

than a structural engineer is usually doing.

And we said the client, "Okay,

let’s give us a chance to think about that."

It’s August 2016,

and the engineers building

Germany’s TK Elevator test towe

want to see how their prototype elevators cope

with seriously bad weather.

The plan: to put a motor underneath a damper at the top

to make it swing, so the tower vibrates intentionally.

It’s brilliant because it lets you test how elevators perform

in real wind-like conditions.

But doing this is a risk.

We had to find any way to make sure

that the vibrations are not too much.

And finally we said, "Okay,

let’s do that in a way that deflections is limited

to 250 millimeter around

and do this only several times during the year.

This is the first building where a mass damper was used

for both reducing the wind-induced vibrations,

and then secondly,

bringing in vibrations in a controlled manner

for testing elevator technology under wind conditions.

But there’s another danger from the wind.

Tall towers have a tricky problem: Slow wind.

Sometimes it can build up vibration

with something called vortex shedding.

The rounded shape

of the tower makes this even more likely to happen.

Regular swirling air patterns can lead

to a side-to-side motion.

If that swaying happens at the same rhythm

as the tower’s natural tendency to move,

the motion gets stronger and stronger.

Vortexes... I would describe them as like little tornadoes

that peel off of a building and can...

can cause the building to sway,

which ultimately cause the structure to fail.

But the team finds a solution

that will also transform the ugly duckling.

We didn’t feel that a concrete shaft

by itself was the appropriate expression

to stand in this beautiful landscape.

We wanted to give it a cladding, a facade.

For us, it was not only a facade, which was nice to see

so it needed to improve the structural behavior

of the tower significantly.

Stage one is to use a tried and true idea.

The helix is a shape that is often applied

to steel industrial chimneys,

and those serve to stabilize it in the wind

by forcing these vortices either downward or upward,

in... in which case their energy is dissipated.

Then it’s stage two:

turning it into a thing of beauty.

They settle on an unusual fabric.

Teflon-coated fiberglass has a benefit

that it really picks up the light well,

so it’s like having a Greek column standing

in the landscape made out of marble.

We used it at the roof of the Munich Airport Centre.

It’s very durable and it’s fireproof.

Lasting at least 30 years,

the material keeps clean by repelling oil and water.

What’s more, it can be woven and welded into any shape

It’s lightweight, self-cleaning, and beautiful,

creating that flowing shape that architects want.

But this wonder material alone won’t be enough to deal

with the next problem: how to attach it?

The special thing for installing this facade,

normally used for stadium roofs and so on...

so for large horizontal structure.

here, we had to install it in a vertical way

up to 800 feet height, and this was a real challenge.

A temporary platform is designe

to move down the tower in sections.

It’s basically an elevator so you can bring in the material.

You go down, bring the material,

you move up again, and install it, and move down again.

Finally, in late 2017,

all 182,986 square feet

of beautiful panels are in place.

In October 2017,

built in two and a half years a a cost of $42 million US,

TK Elevator Tower is completed on time,

ready for the first locals to try out the viewing platform

It’s just put Rottweil on the map

and it’s a great thing.

And coming into town from the south,

it’s a spectacular sight.

The twisting form cuts a striking figure

on the Rottweil skyline,

ready for the ingenious magnet elevator test to begin.

This was a very special project for such an area,

a high rise tower, 240 meters high,

close to the Black Forest.

It’s actually incredible.

When you see the final building,

you’re forgetting all challenges and difficulties and you say,

"Wow, I was involved in this project"

and that makes you proud.

We had a big opening ceremony and everybody was so proud,

and so was I.

♪ MTV ♪