Original subtitles

How do you upcycle a 50-year-old office building

to create a modern skyscraper twice the size?

When I saw the concept of the project, I thought,

it’s impossible to do this, to be honest.

How do you create a huge museum extension

on a foundation not strong enough to hold it up?

A lot of people don’t realize that everything has been touched

by someone’s hand putting it there.

And how do you transform an eight-lane freeway

into five acres of floating public park?

You could not have

a more challenging physical setting for construction.

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?

We’ve all tried upcycling-- a coat of paint on an old table,

a couple of new handles on a wardrobe.

But how about upcycling

a near 50-year-old, 45-story skyscraper?

That’s never been done, right?

Yeah, it has.

It’s a world first that took tremendous vision,

audacious creativity, and a total fresh way

of thinking about sustainability

as well as a sizable coat of paint

and quite a lot of new handles!

Around the world, our towers aren’t aging so well

And the skyscrapers in Sydney, Australia are no exception.

It’s 2014, and in a prime location just behind the iconic

opera house and inside of the Harbour Bridge,

there’s an office building being used

by law and finance companies.

Constructed in 1976, it was Sydney’s tallest tower.

But, built for a different era,

it no longer meets modern needs

Our tenants, and particularly tenants

in a location like this in Sydney,

are expecting a premium asset,

but it had a facade that was performing poorly,

old building services that needed upgrading.

So we were faced with a challenge.

Vacancy rates in the existing building were suffering,

and people were moving to...

to other new, shiny buildings close by.

Normally, buildings past their sell by date

are torn down and replaced.

But the environmental impact is huge.

In the US alone, around 300,000 are demolished each year,

creating over 500 million tons of landfill...

...while rebuilding creates huge amounts of CO2.

The team decides to try something revolutionary.

One of the opportunities that we had was

to look at upcycling what we had.

The vision is bold:

keep two thirds of the original structure,

transform it beyond all recognition,

and slash carbon emissions in the process.

We actually saw the opportunity

to increase the size of the building, maximize views,

really create an iconic project for Sydney.

The developers turned

to Danish firm 3XN to lead the redesign.

They’ve already dazzled the international community

with the Olympic Committee’s ne headquarters in Switzerland...

...and Berlin’s iconic cube.

But this project will test their ingenuity.

There were so many challenges here,

so we took them up and tried to solve them

in a new way and build our architecture around it.

The finished tower will be double the size

and twisted to take advantage o the amazing views over Sydney...

...creating an eco-friendly swa out of an ugly duckling.

First, the team will have

to demolish a third of the original tower

while keeping the rest from falling down.

Then they need to make sure that the old core is

going to be strong enough for a building much bigger

than the one it was designed for...

...before figuring out

how to stitch a new section onto the old tower.

And somehow, they will need

to get 9000 people up to the top floors,

even though the original building

only has elevator capacity for half that.

Finally, they’ll need to stop everyone

from roasting in the fierce Australian sun.

The challenges will be as tall

as the 675-foot Quay Quarter Tower itself,

which might explain why no one has upcycled

a skyscraper before.

When I saw the concept of the project, I thought,

"It’s impossible to do this," to be honest.

The reason most construction starts

from scratch is you know exactly what you’re facing.

Here, that’s anything but the case.

We were in uncharted territories on... on many things.

Had the building actually been built the way it

was shown in the original plans

Had the structure deteriorated over the last 50 years?

could it even stand up to what the team were going to do?

The whole process was going to be challenging,

to say the least.

Despite all that, work starts in February 2018.

Their first challenge:

pull off the world’s tallest demolition project

by removing a huge section of the tower.

We had to think

about how do we partially strip the building out,

partially demolish about 30% of the existing frame,

making sure that the building didn’t fall over.

And doing that requires the largest scaffold erection

in the southern hemisphere.

This isn’t just demolition.

They can’t just take out the base

and let gravity do the rest.

Here they had to work slowly,

stripping off pieces floor by floor from top to bottom,

while keeping the rest of the structure perfectly balanced.

Demolition is just one of the things about this build

that’s out of the ordinary.

In traditional projects,

you know, demolition would happen well before you would

start the foundations of a new tower.

But to the developer,

it didn’t stack up financially for them to do it

from a time perspective.

Instead, they have to tackle everything at once.

So you had demo, you had rebuild,

and you had a stripping of the facade all happening

at the same time.

The strategy should shave over a year off the schedule

and save 100 million U.S. dollars,

but that comes at a cost.

There were some really stressful and tense moments,

in particular at the start of the project.

As work progresses,

in June 2019,

the team begins the job of attaching 430,000 square fee

of new office space onto the old building.

Now we’re adding a very

geometrically-shaped cantilevered structure,

which is going to induce a lot more torsional

and shear forces into that core

To you and me,

that means the new construction will put the old building under

a lot of pressure.

First, they need to cut a ten-story hole into the base

of the tower to reveal the core

This section will

be under the greatest stress holding up the old

and new building.

Reaching the core means removing vital structural support.

It’s like removing the bottom blocks of a Jenga tower

and expecting it to stay upright.

If they get it wrong, the whole skyscraper could collapse.

But the team has no choice.

They need to be able

to test the core strength befor attaching the new tower to it.

So the engineers design an enormous temporary steel frame

to keep the building standing.

Over a thousand ton of steel was brought in to enable this

to be built.

Now that the 50-year-old core is exposed,

the team can test whether it’s strong enough

to take all the extra office space.

If it isn’t, the entire project could be in jeopardy.

That task, you could say,

was fairly daunting in terms of, um, what we would uncover.

They take 3000 samples of the old concrete.

We found that locally, in some areas,

there are some weak materials, and they were problems for us.

It’s essential that they strengthen the core.

And to do that,

the team turns to a material more often found

in road bikes than skyscrapers.

Carbon fiber reinforced plastic is made

by embedding high-strength carbon fibers

in a plastic resin.

The fibers are incredibly stiff and strong in tension,

like tiny ropes, and the resin locks them in place,

creating a material that’s stronger than steel

for its weight.

They strengthened sections of the weakened core

by wrapping it in carbon fiber resin,

but on its own, that won’t be enough.

So the team designs additional concrete support to add

to the original core.

But joining the new and old isn’t easy.

As concrete dries, it shrinks.

If the two sections are joined too early,

the shrinking will pull on the original core,

risking cracks and structural damage.

They can’t allow that to happen

The engineers turn to a simple, but effective solution.

We call it pour strip.

You put a gap between the new structure and old structure,

let the concrete shrink, and after a few weeks,

you connect them together.

After the concrete has shrunk,

grout, a flexible cement that fills any spaces

and dries slowly,

is added to bond the new and old concrete together.

Now the team needs to build the new section

of Quay Quarter Tower,

which will twist to take advantage of the views.

But again, reusing the old building creates problems.

One of the biggest challenges

that we were faced is how do you connect the floors

in the new tower onto the old tower?

The new extension will settle, and each floor has

to line up to within an inch of the old floor.

But that settlement is very complicated to calculate.

As each new floor is added to the new tower,

it compresses more and more,

but the new structure has to connect

to the old one perfectly.

If it ends up even a fraction off,

the new tower could twist out of shape.

In Sydney, Australia,

the team behind Quay Quarter Tower has

to build the new 675-foot-tall skyscraper so it lines up

exactly with the old tower.

But as they construct each new floor,

it compresses the building underneath.

We had a computational model,

but we weren’t 100% sure if that’s a good representation

of what’s happening on site and if the building moves

as per our expectation.

To stay ahead of risks,

engineers rigged the whole tower with hundreds

of sensors measuring stress,

pressure and movement

in real time so they could continually adjust what

they were doing.

There was no room for error.

Over the next tense 21 months, the tower slowly rises,

floor by floor.

We had to run out and monitor the system,

take the data, feed it back into the design model.

Then, in March 2021, the team finishes the top floor

This was two years in the making.

We needed a floor that’s meeting at the same level.

It’s a huge moment.

All of those things played out such

that the difference between the existing building

and the simulated performance was only millimeters,

which was fantastic.

The next challenge is making sure

that the environmental savings

from upcycling the old tower aren’t undone

by the fierce Sydney sunshine.

Air conditioning is one of the biggest guzzlers

of energy and office buildings.

In Sydney’s hot, humid climate,

that cooling load can be massive.

And with rising temperatures,

the stakes are only going to get higher.

The architects have a clever solution.

We were creating these horizontal sunshades

that ran up through the building to passively shade the building.

Each of the 5000 exterior panels has a three-foot sunshad

as part of the design.

We were able to reduce the solar radiance on the glass

by more than 30%,

which in turn allowed us to...

require less cooling inside the building

and therefore using less energy, less carbon.

As Quay Quarter Tower nears completion,

they face one last hurdle.

We were doubling the floor plates.

So how did we look after double the amount

of people coming into the building?

They need it to get 9000 people up and down the tower.

If they were designing from scratch,

they’d put in 31 elevators.

But the original core only has 19 shafts .

Their solution is remarkably simple.

We settled on two lifts being on top

of one another inside a single lift shaft.

So you have two points of entry

at the ground and the upper ground.

The double decker elevators link together,

rise through the building, stopping at alternate floors.

And that essentially moves twice the amount of peopl

in that same space, so it’s highly efficient.

In April 2022, four years after construction began,

the radically repurposed Quay Quarter Tower is ready

for its first tenants.

We get to work in one of the greenest buildings in the world,

and, yeah, it’s really beautiful.

It’s striking when you look up towards the skyline.

It’s angular.

It looks like a Rubik’s Cube kind of twisted around.

It’s really added to the Sydney skyline,

and I think it’s a building that everyone should be really proud

of that’s been involved in it.

Behind its 21st century good looks

and an additional 430,000 squar feet of office space,

two thirds of this 49-story skyscraper is recycled,

saving an estimated $100 millio U.S. and 12,000 tons

of carbon emissions.

It’s a bold example

of how sustainability can reshape the skyline

and the future.

This project has taken upcycling to new levels.

We don’t have to demolish. We don’t have to rebuild.

We can actually use what’s existing

and create something beautiful again.

For decades, cities have been developing over parks

and green spaces to build everything from skyscrapers

to roads and parking lots.

But when the city of Dallas realized that they had a lot

of freeways and not a lot of parks, they thought,

"Why not build a park over a freeway?"

In fact, they suspended five acres of tree-lined public park

in thin air 17 feet above eight lanes of traffic.

So now, even when every light in the city is on red,

there’s one place you can

be sure the focus is always on green.

There are more than 26 million cars in Texas today,

traveling along a vast network

of highways linking the four corners

of America’s second-biggest state.

In the boom of the 1950s and ’60s,

America’s highway expansion revolutionized the nation,

fueling prosperity and connecting cities

like never before.

But for others, it was a disaster.

In 1962, when the city of Dallas looked

to improve traffic flow,

they built the eight-lane Woodall Rodgers Freeway.

Its creation ripped apart the Freedmen’s Town

neighborhood in Dallas.

Freedmen’s Town community is a place where

African Americans post-slavery, were able to build their lives.

It was a community that was built away

from oppression and discrimination.

They demolished homes, churches, and businesses,

forcing people to move out of the area.

Typically, those communities of colors don’t have the resources

in order to fight back, to say,

"We do not want this freeway coming through our community."

The new freeway damaged the city in other ways, too.

Woodall Rodgers Freeway was noisy and it was dirty

and people didn’t want to cross it.

It’s 2004, and the city of Dallas, Texas,

wants to reunite its downtown

and uptown communities after a freeway was built

through the middle.

Downtown was literally being choked off from uptown.

Uptown was thriving,

and it created all sorts of economic disparities.

Local banker Jody Grant remembers a bold idea

that no one had managed to deliver.

I came upon the freeway and the idea again resurfaced

in my mind, um, to cover it and build a park on it.

He needs plans for it.

So he calls a meeting with engineer Tom Shelton.

I went home and I told my wife, "Kay,

"this guy is utterly crazy.

"He wants to build a floating deck on top

of a major ten-lane freeway."

And I told Kay, "I don’t know how to go back to tell Jody

’No, you can’t do it.’"

But the city thinks it’s a great idea.

And after raising $110 million U.S. in public

and private money, Shelton has to find a way.

I challenged my team and our structural team

to really see if we could make the impossible

and turning it into the possible.

This impossible concept will create the world’s

largest suspended park.

First, they’ll have to find a way

to install the entire five-acre park over

the eight-lane freeway,

which doesn’t have many places to put supports.

They’ll also need to create planters deep enough

for 322 trees,

while letting vehicles pass below and without being allowed

to raise the park to accommodat them.

Then they’ll have to find an ingenious way to stop the weigh

of the soil from collapsing the park onto the freeway.

Finally, they’ll need to fill the park with landscaping

and nearly 4000 plants to creat a beautiful urban oasis,

reuniting the communities of Dallas.

You could not have a more challenging physical

setting for construction.

Their first problem is figuring out how

to support a 200-foot-wide

by over 1000-foot-long park sitting over a freeway.

Intuitively, as an engineer,

your immediate reaction is "No, that’s not possible."

The engineering conundrum is

that the freeway doesn’t leave much space for supports.

So the park deck needs to be lightweight,

But with fewer supports,

the beams across the deck need to be a lot stronger.

And so that naturally causes those beams to be even deeper.

But they can’t go deeper, higher, or heavier.

So the team turns to an engineering marvel.

The box beams are boxes where there’s voids in the interior

of the boxes,

and they provide the structural integrity

and structural strength.

Box beams are a game changer for spanning the freeway.

Their hollow design makes them super lightweight,

while their box shape spreads force across all four sides

to keep them strong.

In October 2010,

the first of the 316 prefabricated box beams are

delivered to the site.

Getting them in place means closing the freeway.

But since it carries 180,000 cars a day,

the Department of Transportatio will only

allow limited closures...

...just 20 shifts total for only 32 hours at a time.

The pressure is on.

The beams were queued up.

Cranes were in place,

all the labor and the staff was in place, and the horn blowed.

We started setting that first beam.

Every move must be exact.

Everything had to be well planned and well coordinated.

Everybody had to know what their role was.

Each time, they can only place 15 beams,

then work stops for days or even weeks.

It’s a slow start and stop process.

But finally, after a year,

the entire freeway disappears beneath the beams.

We had a script in place.

Everybody went through that script without deviation

and without exception, and everything worked perfectly.

In August 2011, the team is ready for their next hurdle,

turning the concrete beams into an urban oasis

that city dwellers will want to use.

In the 1970s,

the sociologist William White conducted studies

into public spaces.

He showed that people will make more use

of them when they are easily accessible,

and blend into the surrounding area.

This changes the way public parks are designed.

We didn’t want to elevate the park.

We wanted it to feel like it’s just part of the fabric

of the city.

So the connectivity between uptown and downtown,

you felt like you were just walking through a park.

William White also found that people are drawn

to the presence of trees.

They make spaces more inviting, offering shade,

comfort, and a sense of shelter

We wanted to have about 60 to 70% canopy coverage,

which meant that we were going to plant about 300 trees.

But that gives the engineers a pretty big headache

These trees that he was selecting had pretty significant

root balls to them,

which also then created this pretty sizable, uh,

depth of soil.

The problem is that the freeway has

to have a height clearance of a least 16.5ft for tall vehicles,

and they are not allowed to raise the park.

Everything started getting squeezed,

and it naturally made the depth of the soil so minimal

that the trees could not be planted in that soil.

The team thinks inside the box.

So we had this idea where we would create trenches

in the superstructure.

And that creates another problem.

The design would not work if the trenches were

completely filled with soil,

the weight would just be too immense.

In Dallas, Texas,

the team building Klyde Warren Park over eight lanes

of speeding traffic must find a way to reduce the weight

of soil on the deck to make sure it won’t collapse.

They came up with this idea of this geofoam.

It was the first time that many of us had worked

with that type of feature.

Geofoam is made from expanded polystyrene,

kind of like a Styrofoam cup, but way tougher.

It can handle serious pressure without breaking a sweat.

It won’t absorb water, and it’s insanely light,

weighing a fraction of what soil does.

The geofoam is a bit of a challenge, though,

in that you have to cut each piece to fit tight

to whatever is...

it’s filling, so it can become very labor intensive,

much like building a jigsaw puzzle.

The geofoam is packed in to leave deep pockets

for the trees, while creating shallower areas of soil

for smaller plants.

It takes four months to complete.

But finally, in December 2011,

they’re ready to create a park on the concrete deck,

starting with the 18,500 cubic yards of soil.

Once you saw the deck with the soil in place

and you walk across it,

we knew that vision was going to come to reality.

Now they can add all the hard landscaping

and 4000 specially selected native plants chosen

to fit the conditions.

On very cold days, there may be cold coming from below,

sometimes it may get really hot on the deck.

So we wanted to go with the most durable plants that we knew of.

Finally, they bring in 322 mature trees.

When we started to plant trees,

we started to realize this is going to work.

So that’s when we knew that we had hit a home run.

In October 2012, after three years of construction,

the incredible five-acre Klyde Warren Park is unveiled

to the public, the largest suspended park in the world.

Klyde Warren Park has really created a heart and soul

for the city of Dallas.

This park has been successful beyond our wildest imagination.

I mean, we never thought there’d be, you know,

1,300,000 people a year in this park.

People just enjoy themselves,

and that’s a wonderful thing.

But somebody came up with a good idea.

- It’s working, it’s working. - It’s working.

An incredible feat of engineering,

the eight-lane freeway is hidde beneath 40,000 square feet

of lawn and 65,000 square feet of plaza.

I believe Klyde Warren Park is a step

in the right direction for reconciliation

of communities that have been destroyed by freeways.

I hope that individuals will see that taking one step is better

than taking none at all.

Just look around.

You can see all the different varieties

of people and cultures.

It’s really great. It really is.

And its success has been felt way beyond the city limits

There are more than 70 of these deck parks being modeled

after Klyde Warren Park just around the U.S. right now,

because Klyde Warren Park is a perfect example of how

to take advantage of a recessed highway

and connect a city again.

When we think of San Francisco, we think of fog,

the Golden Gate Bridge,

and Steve McQueen burning rubber down its steep streets.

And now there’s the city’s stunningly revamped

Museum of Modern Art.

At a whopping three times its original size,

it’s safe to say that this iconic museum stands out

in a big way.

From the moment it opened for business in 1995,

San Francisco MoMA was a hit.

And not just for the art inside

This was superstar architect Mario Boda’s first

project in the U.S.,

and he was determined to create something iconic,

a geometrical masterpiece.

Composed of stacked boxes clad in red brick with a giant black

and white stone oculus,

Boda’s vision was for a landmar that would stand out

from the other downtown buildings.

Its location in the neglected South Market

neighborhood was chosen in hope that the museum would

be a catalyst for urban renewal

And it worked.

But fast forward 20 years,

and the museum is already overfilled with art and burstin

at the seams before it receives a very generous loan.

The founders of the Gap stores, Doris and Donald Fisher,

lent them one of the largest private collections

in the world, over 1000 pieces of modern art.

It’s an incredible gift,

but one that comes with a rather unique problem.

Given the number of works, their quality,

and our desire to have them on view

on a near permanent basis, that demanded more space.

This wasn’t just any extension.

It had to work next to an iconic building,

but also be special in its own right.

To pull it off, they turned to architects Snohetta.

The brief was looking for that kind of feeling

of good dance partners.

They complement each other. They don’t overwhelm each other.

But this new dance partner does need to wow the public.

Part of Snohetta’s charge was to create spaces

for the improbable, the impossible, the yet to become.

Snohetta’s radical design will see part

of the original museum demolished,

and ten incredible wave-covered stories go up in its place.

To do that,

they have to use the foundation that is already there.

But this was engineered for a building half the size

and they need to reinforce it on soil that’s far from ideal.

Even then, the foundation won’t hold up the weight

of the new building unless they’re very careful.

They need to build a skeleton strong enough

that it will self-support,

allowing them to create huge open spaces...

and create a rippling facade that’s light enough

and won’t cause the building to lean over.

Finally, somehow, they’re going to turn the wall

of a neighboring parking garage into a piece of living art.

It was a stunning design,

but presented some pretty serious engineering challenges.

Not only that, as part of the deal,

the museum needs to be finished within three years.

We had to minimize that impact on the people of the city

and the people that work there.

- In June 2013... - Three... Two... One!

...work begins demolishing part

of the original museum where the new extension will sit.

The problem is that the foundations

on the demolished sections are connected to the rest

of the museum, and if they remove them,

it could cause the entire thing to collapse.

But the foundation slab is too small for the new extension

The solution would be to sink new piles.

However, that’s too expensive.

The original engineers didn’t ever envision the foundation

slab needing to support something of this size,

so they can’t replace the foundations,

but a traditional concrete

and steel extension this big will be too heavy.

As if that isn’t enough,

the soil underneath isn’t remotely up to the job.

The soil in this part of San Francisco is...

it’s not very good.

Down deep is a layer of clay material called old Bay clay.

It tends to squish like a sponge,

and so controlling how the load is distributed down

to that lower clay layer was very,

very critical in our design.

Get it wrong,

and they could end up like the neighboring

58-story Millennium Tower.

San Francisco’s Leaning Tower,

its foundations just weren’t up to the job.

It sunk 16 inches and leans over a whopping 26.

Determined not to make the same mistakes,

the engineers take inspiration

from something rather surprising...

an egg carton.

What we did is strengthen that lower slab

by casting a series of perpendicular walls

on top of it, crisscrossing like an egg crate

and then cast another slab on top of that.

The combination of the slab and the walls act together

to very effectively transfer all of the tower loads.

It’s a great engineering solution

that saves $1 million U.S.

and saves three months off the schedule.

It was pretty innovative and difficult to do on a tight site.

With the ingenious solution in place,

in April 2014,

the team turns its attention to the building itself.

It has to be super strong to cope with the open areas

of gallery, but also light.

They settle on structural steel

The beauty of structural steel is when you have

these long spans, you can do so relatively efficiently.

Concrete would have been much, much heavier.

Even so, the design is so complicated, it requires a lot

of steel to pull it off.

There are multiple cantilevers and overhangs

that make the engineering

of the building substantially more difficult.

We had some very, very deep girders.

The weight of the ten-story skeleton means

that the team needs to reduce weight wherever else they can,

including the extraordinary exterior.

So the facade has an organic quality,

and that organic quality is related to the maritime climate:

the fog in San Francisco,

the cliffs along the Pacific Ocean that were an inspiration.

But what just looks like some fanciful artistic thing has

a huge technical impact.

Now the team just needs to decide how to build it.

The people they were talking to was precast concrete guys.

Well, precast concrete is heavy. I mean, super heavy.

Precast concrete would weigh over 60 pounds

per square foot.

And you have to have a massive frame to hold it in place.

It would be too heavy for the foundations.

The team building the new extension

of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art needs to make it

as light as possible,

because the old foundation wasn’t engineered

with a building this size in mind.

Part of the solution lies in th material they choose

for the facade.

Fiber Reinforced polymer, or FRP, is a mix of fibers--

in this case glass fibers-- and resin.

Not only can it be molded into any shape that you want,

it’s very light and very tough.

The fibers are super efficient, very strong.

So we end up with strengths that are higher

than steel per pound.

Although used in marine,

automotive, and aerospace industries,

as well as construction,

covering the 200-foot exterior will be a risk.

It had simply not been used at this scale in the past.

And the challenges don’t end there.

There was 700 panels on this building, and every one

of them was different.

So essentially it was 700 molds for 700 parts.

Each panel is modeled

on 3D software before individua molds are cut

by a computer-controlled machine.

It’s a slow process.

Our concern was the ability to manufacture

and fabricate this many unique panels

in the schedule that we had.

The computer worked all night long

and made four molds every night.

And then we lay the resin

and the glass fiber into the mold by hand.

The guys basically take these rolls of wet glass fiber

and set it into mold and roll it down onto the mold’s surface

with hand rollers.

It’s a lot of craftsmanship in this stuff.

Once each panel is complete,

they apply a decorative finish and add the aluminum frame

that will be used to attach it to the building.

Once on site, the pressure is on to attach the 700 panels,

each unique and measuring up to 5 and a half feet wide

by 26 feet tall.

If there is a strong wind,

panels will catch like a sail,

which could be incredibly dangerous

for the workers 200 feet in the air.

They put their life on the line every day.

Even with all the safety measures you can put in place,

it’s... something might happen.

After 28 weeks, the 700th panel is in place,

completing the incredible exterior.

A lot of people don’t realize that everything has been touched

by someone’s hand putting it there.

The building is nearing completion,

but there’s still one challenge left:

creating an oasis

on the third floor where the view looks out onto

the parking garage.

We knew that big parking wall would be the primary facade

of our space, and who wanted that?

The solution?

Creating one of America’s largest vertical gardens,

and in one of the narrowest spaces possible.

In such a space that’s so compact,

building a living wall would be a challenge.

The position of almost 20,000 plants is carefully

mapped out before they’re planted.

The wall itself is made from recycled plastic bottles,

which have been turned into felts.

It’s super water efficient

and provides a growing medium for them.

It’s both sustainable and very, very cool.

The vertical garden’s green credentials

don’t stop there.

The 4399 square feet of plantin will provide much

of its own water.

We collect the dew in the night

The fog comes in and the leaves get a lot of water on them.

And then in the day, we have a grill

that catches all the water that drips off the plants,

and then it’s redistributed back into the system.

Along with stormwater and water collected

from the air conditioning system,

This will provide 60 percent of what the garden will need.

On Saturday, May 14th, 2016,

the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reopens.

Three years in the making, it’s right on schedule.

The cutting-edge facade,

modeled by computers and constructed lovingly by hand,

complements the original building perfectly.

SFMoMA is pretty close to the top in terms of challenges,

but also enjoyable projects.

The galleries are now three times the size.

Being able to see the finished project

with the art inside,

and the reception that the building was given by the city

of San Francisco, it was very, very satisfying.

Fantastic pieces of architecture,

but then the art inside is fabulous,

so it’s a great stop on anyone’s visit to San Francisco.

Our visitors and members love the beauty

of the architecture of the building.

They love the airiness that the building provides them.

A... really a sense of respite from the world outside.

While bringing the outside in,

the huge vertical garden,

with 37 varieties

of local plants, has transforme the neighboring

parking garage wall.

We turned that wall

that everyone hated into this thing now that people love.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is proof

that great architecture

and imaginative engineering can transform people’s lives.

Buildings need to grow and they need to change.

So I’m happy with what we did.

I feel we respected the building in a very clear way.

♪ MTV ♪