Original subtitles

How do you build one of the world's

tallest skyscrapers in an area known for sinkholes?

The structural engineering is challenging,

but, you know, that's what we do for a living.

How do you join two mountain peaks

creating a record-breaking cable car

1,400 feet in the air?

It was a daunting task.

The weather is brutal out there.

It's not good.

And how do you build a column-free transit hub

strong enough to hold up

a five-and-a-half acre park on its roof?

You can't just fill it

with five feet of dirt

because that is too heavy for the structure to support.

Welcome to a world where anything is possible...

...the space where innovation

and creativity collide...

Part building, part transformer...

It's incredible.

...where the only limit is human imagination.

This is mind-blowing when you think about it.

We're talking about actually living on another planet.

Unpacking the miracles

and mysteries of construction...

This was engineering

on a scale the world had never seen.

...to ask...

How Did They Build That?

Super skyscrapers aim to project a city's power,

ambition, and success.

And Lotte Tower in Seoul achieves all that and more

with its record-breaking elevators,

and the world's highest glass floor.

And while it might be the sixth tallest building on the planet,

for me, it's head and shoulders above the rest.

Why you ask?

Because they put a bar on the top floor.

Now that is genius.

Seoul, the capital of South Korea,

is famous for many things:

more coffee shops per capita

than almost anywhere on the planet,

one of the world's longest metro systems,

and the longest bridge fountain.

But in 2010,

there's one thing it doesn't have.

A supertall skyscraper.

A supertall skyscraper is officially classified

as anything over 984 feet,

but these things come a lot bigger.

The 21st century has seen a boom

in supertall towers.

Like Taipei 101 at 1,667 feet tall.

And the Burj Khalifa,

an astonishing 2,717 feet.

While Seoul's tallest towers are less than 900 feet.

But Korean entertainment giant Lotte

has a plan to rectify this on a plot of land

next to their theme park.

Lotte wanted to create

the world-class skyscraper

and the, uh, destination for tourists

to represent the city of Seoul

and the Korea as a global landmark.

They call in New York-based

skyscraper specialists, KPF architects,

who are behind the 1,600-foot tall

Shanghai World Trade Centre.

This was going to be the tallest building in Korea,

maybe not the tallest building in the world

but close.

The plan is for an 1800-foot tall,

123-storey supertall, right in the heart of the city.

First, they'll need to somehow secure

the area's unstable sinkhole-prone soil

to support one of the largest

concrete foundations ever created.

Next, the structural system for the tower

needs to be revolutionary,

with cutting edge equipment

to create an enormous concrete core.

This will house the 61 elevators

the building needs,

including the world's fastest double-decker system.

The core will also need some mega columns

to give it some additional strength,

but all that won't be enough to survive

Seoul's three month typhoon season.

This tower will need an aerodynamic shape

and mega bracing to stop it from blowing over in the wind.

And they'll finish by creating the world's highest

glass observation deck.

It's a massive undertaking,

but pulling this off

will create one of the tallest buildings

in the world.

The structural engineering is challenging,

but, you know, that's what we do for a living.

It's 2010,

and work gets underway ensuring there's a stable base

for the 750,000-ton building.

The subsoils in a tall building project

are very, very important.

You're always wondering

what it's resting on.

They dig down 124 feet

to allow for six floors of basements,

cutting into the bedrock below.

Lots of probes were taken,

and indeed, this building sits on rock,

but the rock was flawed.

It had to be reinforced.

One hundred and eight concrete piles are sunk

into the ground.

Each one, three feet across and 100 feet deep.

On top of that

needs to go a super slab suitable for a supertall tower.

The mat foundation had to resist tremendous forces

over a huge area.

So that means one of the biggest concrete pours ever.

Creating the massive foundation,

twenty feet deep and over 230 feet long,

will take just 30 hours

and be poured in one go

to make sure it doesn't start setting

before it's finished.

In November 2010, they're finally ready to begin.

Five thousand concrete trucks

were lined up across the province

to supply this continuous

depositing of 20-foot-thick mat

across ten acres.

Hyung-il: Thirty-two hours without any break.

That was the, uh, first time as well in Korea

to make that kind of huge amount of concrete in one time.

In fact, it's the second largest

concrete foundation ever created

and takes 28 days

for the slab to set solid and crack-free.

Then they're ready to start building

the 1,800-foot tower

and it's gonna get windy up there.

For three months every year,

South Korea is battered by typhoons.

A super big problem for supertall towers.

Wind loads are up there

as one of the most important things

that you have to design for

in supertall buildings,

because the wind speed and pressure

increase significantly the higher you go up.

In addition, these buildings often have large surface areas.

Like a sail, they catch the wind.

SawTeen: The client was very concerned

about the safety of the building.

So we did a lot of wind tunnel studies.

Tests reveal

the safest option for the building

is to round the corners

and gently taper it to a point.

It also needs a solid backbone or a concrete core.

And being a supertall, that needs to be supersized.

On a regular tall building,

the core walls will be one or two feet thick,

but in a supertall structure like this one,

they can be as much as six or seven feet thick.

The core will take 60% of the building's weight.

The rest will be supported by eight mega columns.

Two on each face of the tower.

To cast that much concrete,

the team imports an enormous movable platform from Austria.

This will hold the formwork or mould for the concrete.

The formwork is put in place, it's cast,

the concrete strengthens a bit,

and the formwork is raised up to a higher level.

Moving at speed,

a floor is completed

every three to four days,

the telescopic formwork shrinking as the tower tapers.

Meanwhile, massive steel trusses

are added to give extra support to the core.

Outrigger trusses

are a set of triangular steel beams

that connect the core to the outer columns,

making everything stronger.

It's like a skier with two ski poles,

if they're just standing straight,

somebody runs into them, they just topple over.

But if they have their arms outstretched

with the skis in the snow, they're a whole lot stable.

To make it even stronger,

they use a trick from the engineer's toolbox.

A belt truss

is a loop of steel beams

that run around the outside of the building

and it connects all the outer columns together.

This is to help redistribute any lateral forces

that are caused by high winds.

The outrigger trusses were able to reduce

the wind overturning moment on the core by about a third.

But it's not the wind that threatens to stop

the entire project.

During construction,

some parts of the surrounding areas

started to move.

Then sinkholes appeared.

People began asking, was this massive tower

destabilizing the earth beneath their feet?

In the Jamsil district of Seoul, South Korea,

the team behind the country's highest supertall,

the Lotte World Tower,

is on schedule to complete all 123 storeys.

And then every engineer's worst nightmare strikes.

Sinkholes.

When the sinkholes were reported,

there was a big alarm bell sounding

and nobody knew what caused it.

Although not a threat to Lotte World Tower

with its super foundation,

they are for the surrounding area.

Sinkholes happen

when the ground erodes underneath the surface,

until eventually the top layer collapses,

leaving a crater.

They can be caused by ground water,

flash floods, or even a burst water main.

When two sinkholes suddenly appear nearby,

there are reports that the water level

in the nearby lake is dropping.

Rumours were flying.

This tall building is pulling down

the whole of Jamsil.

Tensions are high in the Jamsil area

while investigations take place.

And then...

As they looked into it,

they discovered it was the, uh, construction

of the nearby subway line.

With the subway located as the real culprit,

on Lotte World Tower,

some 20,000 glass panels are fitted...

...while the team is working through

an unusual building code.

Hyung-il: The building have to provide

some benefit to the public people,

so the way to provide that requirement

is with the observatory at the top.

Seven levels of public viewing space

will top off the tower,

with a pair of glass-floored observation decks

on either side.

Our observation deck is a very small

part of the building,

but it's very, very important symbolically.

Workers are drafted in

to assemble the deck,

and a 64-ton tower crane,

the largest ever used in Korea, is attached directly

to the side of the concrete core,

and for those jaw-dropping views.

It has up to 100 times the rigidity

of conventionally laminated glass.

It's virtually impossible to break.

The result is the world's highest

glass-bottom observation deck,

accessed by the world's fastest double-decker elevator.

In December 2016,

six years after work began,

Lotte World Tower is finished

and joins that very select club of supertalls.

Chae Hun: It was unprecedented constructing such a skyscraper.

Now, it has become such a successful project

with global landmark status.

Within the first 100 days of opening,

it attracts ten million visitors.

The observatory deck

is the most interesting point for me.

We can see directly to the Namsan Mountain.

That is the loveliest spot.

I always bring my guests there.

In the decade since completion,

it's cemented its place as an icon

on the Seoul skyline.

We actually have an annual countdown

for the, uh, New Year.

Chae Hun: It is such a phenomenal event,

like the New Year celebration in Times Square.

SawTeen: It's a beautiful building.

Something to be proud of.

Whistler and Blackcomb is thought of as one resort.

But there's a problem because a huge valley

separates the two mountains.

A problem that was solved with the arrival

of the longest and highest cable car

anywhere on the planet.

To paraphrase another memorable twin peaks, you know,

this is, excuse me, "a damn fine" cable car.

February 1966,

and the Whistler Mountain Ski Resort in Canada,

opens for business,

part of the country's bid

to host the 1968 Winter Olympics.

The bid isn't successful, but the resort is.

So successful, in fact, that in 1980,

the neighbouring Blackcomb Mountain

is developed.

Together, they are Canada's biggest ski resort.

Fast forward another 20 years, and Canada bids again

to host the Olympics.

This time, it wins.

We became the games location for 2010.

That was a big deal for us.

The problem is that although Blackcomb

and Whistler are considered one resort,

the two mountains are divided by a huge valley.

The two mountains are side by side,

but they are separated by the Fitzsimmons Creek drainage.

So you were on one mountain or the other,

and you couldn't go back and forth.

What had been an inconvenience for years

is now a major issue.

The conventional solution

of connecting ski runs and lifts

down one side of the valley, across the bottom,

and up the other side,

wasn't gonna cut it for the Olympic crowds.

It could take 45 minutes to an hour,

depending on the time and the seasonality of the year.

Then they have an idea.

Why not just connect the two peaks?

It was a daunting task, because I don't think

anything like this had ever been done in the world.

When it was done, it turned out to be

the longest lift of its type.

For a solution,

the team turns to Europe.

There is a resort in Austria

called Kitzbuhel,

which proves it is possible

to connect two peaks with a cable car.

The problem is, between Blackcomb and Whistler

is a lot further.

They had the equipment.

They'd done it on a smaller scale.

They needed to expand the scale

and then overcome the physics of a larger installation.

For the team, once you're 300 feet

off the ground, the science and challenges are the same

however high you get.

It's incredibly high.

But from the technical point of view,

it's so high that it doesn't matter anymore.

The new PEAK 2 PEAK cable car

will mean being able to cross the 2.7 miles

from the peak of Whistler to the peak of Blackcomb

in just 11 minutes.

Creating it will break world records

for the highest cable car above ground

and the longest continuous lift network.

Once they've overcome some serious challenges,

starting with how to stop the cable sagging.

Because the 1,400-foot drop to the valley floor

makes supporting it along its length impossible.

Somehow, they need to build lift stations

and four support towers

where the mountain is close enough.

But 6,000 feet above sea level,

the weather will make this treacherous.

Next, having engineered a cable

strong enough to carry the weight of itself

and 28 gondola cabins,

they need to work out how to get it

from one peak to the other.

And all this in just 19 months.

I had two marching orders.

One was: $50 million, don't go over budget.

Get it done for December 2008.

So that's a big task.

With just over a year and a half

to join the peaks together,

the team has a mountain to climb.

In fact, two.

The problem is, it's a race against time

getting stuff done before winter.

Not ideal conditions on the mountain.

The weather is brutal out there. It's not good.

In Canada, work to the world's

longest cable car

that will join the twin peak ski resorts

of Whistler and Blackcomb,

is waiting for the winter snows to thaw.

And when spring finally arrives,

the challenge is building the foundations

for the giant lift stations,

one on each mountain.

The Whistler station is three levels high,

that's a lot of--a lot of trucks of concrete, if you can imagine.

All of which is made much harder

by the snow melt turning the roads to mud.

The gradient on the road is fairly steep.

Normally, a truck would carry

ten, 11 cubic meters of concrete.

It could only carry seven, seven and a half meters

because of the elevation and the weight and the--

just the drive up.

Meanwhile, nearly 2,000 feet

below the stations, the team is focused

on the four support towers.

The concrete needed to be set

and cured so we can start attaching steel and frames.

It was a daunting task.

The race is on before the snow arrives

and the roads close again.

We were always aware of the urgency of the job.

We definitely picked up that vibe

from the lead installer.

We definitely knew the clock was ticking.

Our last little piece of concrete

on the Blackcomb side

needed to be delivered by helicopter.

Right there. Hold the height,

hold the height.

It's coming out.

Down! Down!

All yours. Take it away.

By October 2007,

winter brings work on the mountaintops to a halt.

The team's attention turns to the cables

that will span the almost three-mile chasm

between the twin peaks.

And they wanna use the same system

as Kitzbuhel in Austria.

These are kind of like a rail on the--on the train,

so our cabins are running on these rails,

and the third one is the one which is moving.

They turn to a specialist factory

in Switzerland to manufacture

the 16 and a half miles of cable.

First, we calculate

what must the diameter of the rope be,

what strength it must have,

and we told them, "Look, we need this kind of rope.

It has to be that big

and it needs this kind of strength.

Can you produce it?

And we need it in that length.

And we will have a problem to transport this rope

up to the mountain.

So take care that it's not too heavy."

Easier said than done.

Weaving the super-strength cable

so that it's long enough and light enough

could take well over a year.

Time they just don't have.

The solution is to have one machine

weaving from each end,

massively reducing the schedule.

Finally, in spring 2008,

the five drums of cable,

each weighing 99 tons are finished.

Now, they need to be stress tested.

This rope was pulled with a machine,

everything is monitored,

and we measured the force,

and everyone was very eager

this rope fulfills what we have requested.

It's make or break.

If the cables fail, there's no time

to refabricate them before the Olympic deadline.

It had to be four and a half times

what the normal load

on the line is on a daily basis.

With cabins, with people, everything loaded up.

To test it, each cable is stretched

until finally it...

...snaps.

Thankfully, all of them are far stronger than is needed.

That was a big moment when we got the stamp

by the Swiss government that said,

"You're okay. You're good to go."

Back in Canada, work picks up pace again.

And the team needs to complete the support towers

and lift stations, ready for the 500 tons of cable,

which has to be freighted 380 miles

from Vancouver, Washington to Blackcomb.

But the team has a very big question on their mind.

How are we gonna move it on the mountain?

We managed with a special company

from Canada to come in with a special truck.

The monster truck is fitted with 48 wheels

that turn independently,

generating massive traction.

But just one drum of cable is too much.

This truck had problems.

They had to use bulldozers and dumpers

in the front and in the back, pull and push.

But then, as the convoy slowly

inches its way up the mountain...

...disaster.

It's early summer 2008, and in Canada,

the team behind the Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resort

is racing to get 500 tons of cable up the mountain

so the world's longest cable car system

can be installed in time for the Winter Olympics.

And with the tow bar broken,

they turn to an innovative piece of engineering.

When a rod got broken,

they, uh, substituted this rod with this huge Kevlar string

and then they could start moving or crawling up again.

We took 18, 19 hours a day

for five different ropes.

When we got all five of them,

then we had to start stretching them

across the valley.

Each weighing as much as 65 cars,

the cables are too heavy to be carried by helicopter.

They would pull the helicopter

right out of the sky.

What we have to do then is take a straw line,

which is a lighter rope,

a lighter line that the helicopter can manage.

It takes precision and patience.

We had to send the most experienced guys over there

so that every step works perfectly together.

If this rope gets damaged during the rope pulling,

PEAK 2 PEAK will not open in December 2008.

It's taken six weeks,

but finally, they're anchored at each end.

And the twin peaks of Mount Whistler and Blackcomb

are connected for the very first time.

We got the approval from the authority on the 5th

or 6th of December, so it was nearly to the end.

And everyone was so happy that we could achieve this.

On December 12th, 2008,

PEAK 2 PEAK opens, ready for the Olympics.

When I have seen the first people

coming into the station, leaving their cabins,

seeing their smile on their faces,

this was the pay-off.

In just two years,

the team has managed to create

a record-breaking cable car.

We were fortunate enough to walk away

with three world records.

So we had the longest free-span lift system,

we had the vertical drop to the valley floor,

and then, we had the continuous loop

from up Blackcomb across the Whistler

and back down to Whistler Village.

You know, it just added to the glory

of building this project.

Now it takes just 11 minutes

to ride from one peak to the other.

I wanna ride it back and forth all the time and not go skiing.

You can see both mountains in one day,

whatever the weather, whatever the season.

Moving an incredible 4,100 people an hour,

every day, all year round.

The PEAK 2 PEAK has become

a symbol of Whistler.

People literally come from all over the world

to ride the PEAK 2 PEAK.

On the opening night of the Olympics,

the PEAK 2 PEAK Gondola proved ambition, innovation,

and good engineering can achieve almost anything.

Finished on time.

The project broke even

after about six or seven years of operation.

Highly successful when you have a budget

of that amount, 52 million.

And I did go over-budget by 2 million,

but I was forgiven.

The Transbay Joint Powers Authority

didn't just want a transit hub.

They wanted something that could serve

a hundred thousand people a day

and still feel like a place you wanna be.

A terminal designed not just for today's traffic,

but for a future system that hasn't even arrived yet.

All of it anchored by a park sitting 70 feet above the city.

It's the 1990s,

and San Francisco, famous for its hills,

cable cars, and vibrant neighbourhoods,

and of course, the Golden Gate Bridge,

is booming.

Especially, South of Market.

The rise of social media

and software companies have made South of Market

one of the most economically important areas

of San Francisco.

It would become home to Airbnb, Anthropic,

and Instagram and Twitter had started there.

But one thing lets it down.

Public transport.

In particular, the Transbay Transit Centre.

The original transit centre

had gone through years and years of disuse and abuse.

People dreaded to go there.

Built in 1939,

by the late '80s, it was down on its luck.

And then in '89, the Loma Prieta earthquake

finishes it off.

It was seismically damaged

and the area became old, dark,

uh, dilapidated, and really needed to be redone.

So the city launches a competition

to design a new transit hub fit for the 21st century.

Pelli Clarke & Partners,

the architects behind the Petronas Twin Towers

in Malaysia, take top spot.

They saw it as the Grand Central of the West.

And this was meant to be a place

that you'd feel really ennobled

and enlightened by coming into it.

At the heart of their vision

is a radical idea.

South of Market was 99% paved,

uh, or constructed

with architecture or infrastructure.

One of the distinguishing qualities

of our submission was to create a full rooftop park.

Our proposal was about making the largest green space

open to the public in the neighbourhood.

Pelli Clarke & Partners' vision

will see a new one-and-a-half-million-

square-foot Transbay Transit Centre.

The length of four city blocks,

with 11 different transit systems,

it will serve 100,000 passengers a day.

But creating this six-storey structure

in an earthquake zone presents numerous challenges.

First, they need to find a way to protect train platforms

sixty feet underground from earthquakes

and the high groundwater near The Bay.

Then they need to create bus decks with 37 bays,

which need to be column-free to allow space

for 300 buses per hour to move about.

Somehow, they must also support a five-and-a-half-acre parkland

on the roof, complete with 16,000 plants

and 600 trees, as well as 14,000 tons of soil,

without the whole thing collapsing.

And finally, they need to create a facade

that allows natural light in,

but also keeps the building cool.

In fact, the entire building needs to look pretty cool too.

Summer 2010,

and work begins demolishing

the old terminal.

The new one has to be tough enough

to survive any future earthquakes.

The geotechnical engineers predicted

that the maximum earthquake would be magnitude 8.0.

So on soft San Francisco soil,

they had to construct this huge building

with a five-and-a-half-acre park

on the roof in an area

that's at high risk of being hit by an earthquake.

It's the fall of 2013,

and in San Francisco's downtown South of Market district,

the team behind a brand-new transit hub

must ensure it can withstand a magnitude 8.0 earthquake

and still be operational.

The fact that it's got a roof park on top,

putting extra mass at the top of the building,

these elements may not have been tested before.

The first challenge is the site itself.

Transbay excavation

was really four city blocks long.

Essentially, a big hole in Downtown San Francisco.

And it actually straddles

the old bay shoreline.

So The Bay was extended and infilled

in the late 1800s.

What that means is because the site

is close to the shoreline

and the soil is waterlogged,

if the soil gets violently shaken from this earthquake,

it liquefies and then it loses all its strength.

And if it loses all its strength,

that means it can't hold up the building

that's on top of it.

So you can see why that's a problem.

The issues with the soil don't stop there.

There's silty sands fill at the top.

Lower down, we have bay mud.

No two sections along the Transit Centre are the same.

Working from the bottom up,

they decide to create a two-storey concrete box,

sixty feet underground,

where the train platforms will be located.

So the train box was in some ways

the main structure that holds everything up.

It's very, very rigid, very, very sound,

and inflexible to the forces of seismic events.

But before they can build it,

the team installs a temporary structure

to stop the site from flooding.

The shoring wall basically mixes cement

into the soil itself.

It's three feet thick and impermeable to water.

And we have to put that in down

about 120 feet continuously

around the entire perimeter.

Despite being so thick, there's still a danger

the water pressure will be too great.

We put in four layers of internal bracing,

very large 36-diameter tube-steel pipes.

By fall 2014,

the concrete pour for the train box is complete.

And work begins on the bus deck above,

which has to both be column-free

and strong enough to hold up that huge rooftop park.

It weighs about 50,000 tons.

So it's effectively equivalent

to a three-storey steel

and concrete office building sitting on top.

But this means the building will be wider

and heavier at the top than the bottom.

Not a good idea in an earthquake zone.

Buildings that are larger at the bottom than at the top

are more stable, especially in earthquakes.

But with the Transbay Transit Centre,

the architects wanted to create

more public space at ground level.

But to do that, they had to find a way

of strengthening the building.

To ensure the top is super strong,

the team has to build a huge 456-ton

external steel frame called an exoskeleton.

Its unique design will make it a first of its kind in the US.

These elements are bigger than anything

that had been tested before.

We did extensive analysis of the joints themselves

to predict what they would do

and use that to inform the design.

The exoskeleton will be held together

by enormous nodes that have to be specially cast.

And assembling it is far from a breeze.

If you can imagine, you know, five or six

structural steel elements

all coming together at really unique,

complex geometry.

It was more efficient

to cast those large pieces off-site

as a single element

and marry them together in the field.

And some of these sections are enormous,

up to about 25 tons.

With the massive exoskeleton complete,

the team moves on to creating the facade,

turning to mathematical physics for inspiration.

We had an idea of a very lightweight metal screen,

which is perforated so it allows air

to flow through it.

One of my partners contacted Roger Penrose,

who's a famous mathematician in England,

who had this purely mathematically derived,

non-repeating pattern,

which we thought would be a wonderful way,

in a city which celebrates sort of mathematical progress

and technological innovation.

Over the next six months,

the lattice panels are attached to massive frames,

moulded around the exoskeleton columns.

It allows ventilation and you still have views

of daylight outside,

but also from the outside looking in,

we wanted people to be able to have a sense

of what the use of the building was.

With the facade underway,

the team turns its attention to what will be

Transbay Transit Centre's crowning glory,

a five-and-a-half-acre park

seventy feet in the air.

It has to feel like a real authentic park,

which means that there are hills,

there are large trees,

there's a variety of lush vegetation.

The plan is to have 16,000 plants

and 600 fully grown trees,

but making that happen isn't going to be easy.

The soil that was installed on the roof deck

is very heavy, it's a dense material.

You can't just fill up the whole area

with five feet of dirt

because that is too heavy for the structure to support.

Although the trees will need deep soil,

many of the other plants require much less.

The strategy was to build a concrete tray

on top of the roof, and then put in void formers.

It allowed them to either fill these

completely with soil

or to partially fill the voids with geofoam,

which is incredibly light, like a Styrofoam cup,

before putting a thinner layer of soil on top.

We replaced a good portion,

over 50% of that soil, with foam,

and we only had the deep soil

where we had large tree specimens.

In January 2017,

the five-and-a-half-acre roof is ready

for 320 different species of plant.

This is really a mini botanical gardens

in the centre of the city that's open to everyone.

It includes 600 mature trees.

We focused on selecting subtropical trees, uh,

Mediterranean climate trees,

native California species,

because San Francisco has

a very specific weather pattern.

We wanted people to feel like they were arriving

into a landscape.

After eight years and $2.2 billion,

the renamed Salesforce Transit Centre

brings greenery to a forgotten neighbourhood.

It truly does make you forget

that you're in Downtown San Francisco.

You are blessed with seeing hummingbirds

as you're just walking by.

The 1,500-foot-long building

snakes its way through South Market,

wrapped in perforated white aluminum

to cool it down...

with massive light columns

funnelling daylight into the building.

It serves 45 million passengers every year.

It's a project of a lifetime.

It's transformative to the city.

And as an architect, that's what you hope

is to see buildings come to life and be full of life.

Standing strong against earthquakes,

its five-and-a-half-acre park,

made up of 13 distinct gardens,

is an urban masterpiece.

Jets of water are triggered by the buses

as they move below,

and these jets move down the length of the park

at the speed that the buses are moving.

In the beginning, there's always naysayers.

I can tell you that all of those folks enjoy it today.

In a world where imagination,

innovation, and creativity

define the spaces that surround us...

How Did They Build That? shows again and again

that humankind will overcome the seemingly impossible.