Original subtitles

How do you rebuild the Panama Canal

ready to handle the world's biggest ships

without taking it out of action?

It was of paramount importance

that the existing operation continued flawless.

What happens when the space race

takes a city to new heights?

But they weren't sure it was going to work.

It just seemed like such an, you know, outlandish task.

And how do you build the world's largest

free-form building

without a million columns to hold it up?

Initially there was a lot of backlash against it,

saying this is not belonging here.

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?

The last time I had root canal, it was seriously painful.

Although, I'm guessing it wasn't as painful

as digging a desperately needed new route in the Panama Canal.

Because that involved shifting around 65 million

cubic yards of earth, against the clock,

in an area notorious for deadly landslides.

And unlike me,

the Panama Canal didn't get a lollipop afterwards

for being brave.

My dentist said I was very brave.

The original Panama Canal

is one of the seven wonders of the modern world.

It's around 50 miles long and stretches across Panama,

linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

Its scale is so immense

that it's clearly visible from space.

Before the canal existed,

ships travelling between the US's East and West Coasts

had to go right around Cape Horn in South America.

That's an incredibly dangerous journey

and could take up to six months.

When it opened in 1914,

the canal changed the world of trade,

and the role of the United States

on the global stage forever.

It relied on locks,

an ingenious invention from the 14th century,

which made it possible to raise or lower ships

so they could pass between the two oceans.

Think about it as a pedestrian overpass

that you take the stairs to go up,

and then you walk over the highway,

and then you go down on the other side.

We take a ship on one ocean

and we raise it to the level of a man-made lake,

which is 26 meters higher.

You navigate 50 miles to the other side,

and you reverse the process, and you take the ship down.

It sounds straightforward.

But building the canal was anything but.

First attempt was by a French team.

Now they had just successfully built the Suez Canal in Egypt.

The problem here was that this wasn't a flat desert.

There were mountains and ground

that was so unstable that the walls could collapse.

It wasn't just the terrain that was tough.

A lot of lives were lost

due to, er, malaria and yellow fever.

And, er, it was then taken over

by the Americans in 1904

and went through another ten years

until it got built.

The United States controlled the canal

throughout the 20th century.

Then on December 31st, 1999,

it was handed over to the Panamanians.

By which time, it's facing a new problem,

a very big problem.

Ships were growing, and we weren't able to cope

with the size of vessels that were being built.

We realized that if we needed to remain

as a main world commerce shipping route,

we needed to expand the canal.

Somehow, they needed to expand the existing canal

without closing it.

If you didn't have the Panama Canal,

you wanted to go from the East Coast of USA

to Japan or to China,

it could take you like 22, 25 days.

So through the Canal, you cut that journey,

uh, by like ten days.

So in 2006,

they decide the solution is to build a completely new

Panama Canal

running alongside the old one.

So we had to keep operating the existing canal

and build the new,

expanded canal at the same time.

Sitting beside the original canal,

the new Panama Canal will run for four miles

connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans

allowing huge modern ships to take the shortcut

for the first time.

But before any work can begin,

the team needs to figure out

how to make sure a nearby river

won't flood into the excavation site.

Next, they must clear over 1,000 acres of land

from unexploded US military shells and bombs.

At either end,

they will need to create enormous locks

which will involve removing 154,000

dumper-truck-loads of earth

and pouring 945 million gallons of concrete.

Then, they will have to come up with a new design

for the enormous lock gates,

each as tall as an 11-storey building,

'cos the old system isn't up to the job.

Finally, they need find a way of saving water

because the lock systems use 128 million gallons of water

for every ship that passes through.

This is the only project in Panama

that has gone to the referendum

to decide whether we want the project or not.

An overwhelm 78% of Panamanians vote yes.

And on September 3rd, 2007, excavation begins.

The team needs to dig and blast

nearly four miles of new channel,

with space for locks

at both the Atlantic and Pacific ends.

We were doing a massive excavation

of more than 49 million cubic meters.

To make life more complicated,

the route runs close to the Cocoli River,

and there's a real risk of it bursting its banks.

For seven to eight months of the year,

the wet season dominates.

And when I say wet,

I mean nearly ten inches of rainfall every single month.

It was very important that we keep the water out

from the site of construction

to prevent any landslides.

So they come up with a radical solution.

They actually rerouted Cocoli River

to the Pacific entrance.

That's right.

They rerouted the river

out of the path of the canal.

There were a lot of moments of tension.

We excavated a big trench,

put some geotextile to cover the soil.

On top of it, we put some rock mattresses

to hold the ground.

Then, we deviated those waters.

No sooner is one challenge resolved,

then the team faces another.

It used to be a practice range

when the US had military bases here.

American jungle troops

in the Canal zone cross deep streams

almost without losing step.

So there were unexploded ordinances

in that channel that needed to be cleared.

Jorge Q: We hired experts to actually search for them.

And once they found them, explode them...

and clear the way so we could go in

and do the excavations and continue with the work.

It takes four years.

But by 2011,

the 1,200-acre site is given the all-clear,

and construction continues.

The site was pretty amazing.

Cranes all over the place, trucks all over the place.

The peak construction, we have 12,000 people

working simultaneously on the project

between Pacific and Atlantic.

The scale of the excavation work was massive.

We needed to remove around 65 million cubic yards

of material from the site.

That's enough dirt

to fill 20,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

It's then all recycled and used in the concrete

and backfill for the foundations.

The contractor built

a huge industrial platform

to pass these huge rocks

through the different crushing plants

to reach the size required.

Over two and a half years,

millions of cubic feet of concrete is poured...

encasing 290,000 tons of reinforced steel.

The team's next challenge,

creating the colossal lock gates

for each end of the new canal.

The gates in the existing Panama Canal

are what are called mitre gates.

It's a very old concept dating back to the 15th century

by Leonardo da Vinci.

They're very reliable.

But they work like a--

like a swing gate on a fence

that goes like this.

The problem is that these gates

won't work at the size they'd need to be

on the new canal.

The team decides the solution is a rolling gate,

a little like a motorized driveway gate

because it needs much less space to open.

The rolling gate is like a large welded steel box

that is supported on the bottom by a roller

and on the top by another set of rollers...

like you're pulling a wheel barrow.

And, er, it slides sideways

and it goes into a niche on the wall.

And, er, it's a lot more, erm, reliable

for large locks like these ones.

Made in Italy, each of the 16 gates,

which weigh more than the Statue of Liberty,

has to be shipped over 9,000 miles

to Panama by barge.

Some of those shipments took place

very close to the hurricane season

in the Caribbean.

It was always a concern to end up with gates

on the bottom of the ocean.

We were always following the ship,

on the map, like where is it today?

On November 12th, 2014,

the last of the 3,000-ton gates arrives,

ready to be moved into place.

They were placed on top of what's called

self-propelled motorized transporter,

which is like putting the gate on top a huge skateboard

with lots of wheels.

And that allows you to move it in a controlled manner.

It's like parallel parking

an 11-storey building once you get into location.

It was pretty amazing to watch.

Then, on June 10th, 2015, it's the moment of truth,

as they prepare to flood the locks for the first time.

We were all very anxious to see how everything would work.

In Panama, the team building the new canal

is testing that the huge rolling lock gates

will hold back 53 million gallons of water

for the very first time.

The gates themselves, they performed flawlessly.

It's just amazing.

There's still one final challenge.

Every time a ship passes through the locks

in the old canal,

52 million gallons of water are lost.

For the huge new canal, it'll be 128 million gallons,

and that's a problem.

That water comes from the same lake

that supplies drinking water for Panama.

That's fine when there's a lot of rain,

but Panama also suffers from long dry seasons.

We need the water to perform each transit.

And also we provide water to our people in the country.

So it's very important to save the water.

The team turns to a clever piece of engineering

called a water-saving basin.

So in a lock, you're generally moving

a volume of water downstream

and you send it to the ocean in the end.

When you have water-saving basins,

instead of sending that volume down,

you're sending it sideways,

so you're storing it somewhere else

so that you can use it again in the next transit.

It's like having three locks next to the lock,

but shallow.

And that allows me to use 60% less water

to put three times as much cargo than the original locks.

On June 26th, 2016, the $5.2 billion

NeoPanamax Canal opens for business...

and welcomes a new generation of mega ships

for the first time.

I was like walking on clouds.

We're open, you know, we did it.

We're telling world shipping, "Here we are."

The new supersize canal

with its enormous locks and 16 rolling gates

will allow 2,500 mega vessels

to pass through each year.

In the original locks, the maximum depth is 39 feet,

and in the new locks it's 50 feet.

You can bring a lot more cargo in the new ones.

It may have taken almost a decade to construct,

but its impact is huge.

Before the canal was expanded,

our load was probably about

330 million tons of cargo a year.

After the expansion, we're now able to do

about 600 million tons of cargo every year.

It's a success.

We have gone beyond

what we had originally dreamed of.

The Seattle World's Fair

asked its chair, Eddie Carlson, what he wanted to place

on top of their 600-foot-high Space Needle.

Eddie replied, "A restaurant."

They said, "Woo, thank goodness.

We thought you might come up with something crazy."

Eddie said, "Did I mention it rotates?"

It's the late 1950s.

And the US and The Soviet Union

are locked in fierce competition

for global dominance.

But the battle is no longer confined to Earth.

Humanity has entered the Space Race.

And in 1957,

it feels like the Soviet Union is winning.

First they shocked the world

by sending the first satellite, Sputnik.

Then a few months later,

they send a dog named Laika into space.

So President Kennedy raises the stakes,

setting his sights on putting a man on the moon.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade

and do the other things.

Not because they are easy but because they are hard.

Meanwhile, Seattle is preparing

to host the World's Fair

and decides its centrepiece will capture the moment.

They wanted to build something with legacy.

They wanted build something that would last.

The question is what?

Until Eddie Carlson, one of Seattle's civic leaders,

chances on inspiration.

Eddie went to Germany in the late 50s

and happened to have dinner in the Stuttgart Tower.

And he thought, "Gosh, we need one of these."

He really sort of focused on, you know, the Age of Space.

He got a cocktail napkin and drew an idea

for this tower in Seattle.

He names it "Space Needle",

and invites Seattle architect, Victor Steinbrueck

to bring it to life.

Victor Steinbrueck joined the design team

and was influenced by a statue called the "Feminine One".

Steinbrueck's vision is for an elegant

Space Age tower with a rotating restaurant

perched 500 feet above the ground.

Pulling it off will take some creative thinking

from the ground up...

starting with the foundation to support the three legs

and everything above.

While that above includes building to over 600 feet

when cranes of the day can only manage 120.

And finally, 520 feet in the air,

they need to build a pod with a revolving floor.

It's bold. It's futuristic.

And it needs to be built fast.

Really fast.

The World's Fair is opening 400 days later.

So they had 400 days to get the land,

the permits, the funding,

and actually build the Space Needle.

It was truly a race against time.

It's the 1960s.

America and Russia are locked in a Space Race.

And in Seattle, the team behind the Space Needle

is racing to get it built in time for the World's Fair,

just over a year away.

It's a big ask,

especially when it's still being designed

and engineered when construction begins.

The foundation had to be able to hold up

whatever the design team came up with.

So to play it safe,

the team over-engineered the foundation,

going deeper and creating something

that was strong enough

to hold up pretty well whatever you put on top.

And so the designers, the engineers, the architects

were just trying to keep in front

of the contractor.

They place 250 tons of reinforcing steel...

before pouring 5,600 tons of concrete over the top.

This was the largest

and the longest concrete pour west of the Mississippi.

Multiple cement trucks doing a continuous pour

to have one 30-foot slab of concrete

that goes 30 feet into the ground.

With the super strong foundation in place,

on June 30th, 1961,

they start to build the tripod tower.

While the design is still being finalized,

the team over-engineer the 90-foot steel beams.

They just double-sized everything.

If a beam was supposed to be, you know, so thick,

they just made it thicker.

It's been teased that if there's an earthquake,

it would just bend and then flip right back,

and it pretty much is true.

Raising the steels the first 100 feet

is straightforward.

But this tower is gonna be 605 feet tall.

And right now, the tallest cranes

can only reach 120.

The team comes up with a very clever solution.

They built this derrick crane into the structure itself

and anchored it to the steel structure.

It lifts sections into place

until the tower is taller than the crane.

Then the crane is winched up a level,

fixed to that frame, and continues the job.

A team of welders follow behind

securing each of the steel beams.

By the time they finished,

they'll have fitted 74,000 bolts.

This isn't a job for the fainthearted.

At the time, workers believed that wearing a harness

was actually more dangerous than not

because of the huge steel beams swinging around.

And with no elevator through most of the build,

they often climbed into skips to be lifted to higher levels.

Now that sounds crazy,

but thankfully, the Needle was built

without anyone being killed.

Six months into the 13-month build,

they hit 500 feet and their next challenge,

installing the rotating flying saucer

which will include an observation deck

and a restaurant with a rotating floor.

If they can figure out how to do it.

They weren't sure it was going to work,

they didn't know about the engineering

and the gearing.

It just seemed like such a,

you know, outlandish task.

And so they built some test beds in a warehouse,

where they really built the track

and put a table on top of it,

and they ended up with two half-horsepower motors

that would power this thing.

Imagine this huge revolving floor

was going to be moving with a motor with the same power

as the one in your vacuum cleaner.

The secret? The floor sits on an almost

frictionless bearing system

which glides with only the tiniest bit of effort.

Five months before the deadline,

the team has a plan.

First, the six sections that will form

the outer ring of the observation deck

are lifted into place.

Eight more are then carefully lifted

and lowered onto the wheels and tracks

to create the revolving floor.

They were worried about the transition

from what turned and what didn't turn

and, you know, and they turned it on,

fortunately, it all worked.

With the opening of the world fair just weeks away,

the last job is to mount the steel beacon

on the top of the tower.

Don't miss it, the Seattle World's Fair.

April 21st to October 21st.

At a cost of $4.5 million,

the 605-foot-tall futuristic Space Needle

opens to the public

on April 21st, 1962.

When you look back and see what they did,

it's really unbelievable how they in, you know, 400 days,

were able to go from construction start

to opening the doors.

It was an incredible success.

But some 60 years later,

the Space Needle is showing its age.

It didn't look so good.

The view had been obscured with walls

and popcorn machines.

Architects Olson Kundig

are hired to breathe new life into it,

with a brief calling for maximum transparency.

Anything solid that could be removed,

we've removed and replaced with glass.

Their vision will see the flying saucer

observation deck transformed

as they replace balconies and walls

with 20,000 square feet of glass.

Before they create the world's first

and only rotating glass floor.

Exciting ideas, if they can pull them off.

We now had to really figure out how to do this.

The answer lies in a platform

more usually seen at sea.

We did a suspended platform.

We hoisted it 500 feet in the air.

It's how they hang off the bottom

and do maintenance on oil rigs.

Despite being harnessed, it's not a job the team

will forget in a hurry.

You're up at 500 feet,

standing on a scaffolding that's being suspended

from the bottom of the Space Needle

with a single-cable railing at the outer edge.

Stepping out onto the platform for the first time,

it was nerve-racking.

Then they need to get 176 tons of glass,

including the barriers which each weigh 2,500 pounds,

500 feet in the air.

You're dealing with wind,

you're dealing with potential spiralling,

worst case scenario, dropping.

The devastation of having

that glass panel come down...

Can't even imagine.

It's late 2017 and the team rebuilding

Seattle's iconic Space Needle

is installing 176 tons of super tough glass,

500 feet in the air.

Getting the panels, many weighing

thousands of pounds up

without cross-winds spinning them

out of control is no easy feat.

So, they come up with an ingenious system.

They had a frame that they built

around the glass and on that frame

there were fans that could be controlled remotely.

If it was starting to twist,

they could operate one fan or the other

to keep that glass in plane.

And by carefully planning the lifts

to the times of day with the least wind,

they get them to the top.

It was a relief when it made it to the top

and we found that this process was going to work.

Now, they have to get them into place.

We had to design and engineer

this purpose-built robot for just that.

It has suction cups that grab onto the piece of glass,

those cups are constantly monitored for suction.

So if one were to fail, you'll get an alarm.

Watching that first piece of glass being placed

with Mount Rainier behind it,

it was certainly a moment of pride.

Finally in July 2018,

the 20,000 square feet

of glass balconies and walls are in.

The team moves on to its next huge challenge...

installing the glass floor.

Dr. Kwami: Each pane is made up of multiple layers of glass

which have different properties like strength

or being scratch-proof, and which are heated

and bonded together.

If even one of them were to fail,

there are more left

to keep you safe.

One more thing,

they also need to make it rotate.

Rather than having, say,

two motors that we had originally,

they had about ten small motors.

And even without the motors running,

a person could physically push the track back and forth,

and that's how well that track glides.

In April 2018, with the new motors installed,

it's time for the moment of truth.

I remember when we were like, "Okay, turn it on."

So we turned it on, and you could see

it just starting to like...

And it was just-- it was beautiful.

In August 2018,

the 100-million-dollar renovation,

complete with glass revolving floor,

opens its doors to a million visitors a year.

The architecture itself and the style,

people think is really iconic and I agree with that.

The visitor response

has so far exceeded

what I imagined, it's hard to even describe.

With 200% more glass,

the reborn Seattle Space Needle is a sight to behold.

We all went through something

really difficult together

to be able to put this together,

but we all have so much

pride in that experience.

It's probably one of my greatest accomplishments,

is to be a part of this project

for our family, for the city, for our community.

I feel really good.

Being from Seattle and growing up here,

to be a part of such a major milestone

for the Space Needle is incredible.

And I'm gonna tear up actually talking about this.

The team behind the Dongdaemun Design Plaza

faced an almost impossible task,

to build a world-class hub for design, fashion,

business, and culture, right in the middle

of one of the busiest, nonstop trading districts on Earth.

So instead of interrupting the energy,

they built something that could keep up with it.

The awe-inspiring result is less a building

and more of a 24/7 sensory experience

where culture, nature, and innovation

flow seamlessly into one.

It's August 2007,

and renowned British architects Z-H-A

are hired to design an incredible new plaza.

The huge 900,000-square-foot plot

is in the Dongdaemun area of Seoul, South Korea.

So our initial approach was to make something

kind of strange, enigmatic, you can--you can't pin it down,

but inspired maybe by organic forms

you find in landscape.

Responsible for buildings

like the Guangzhou Opera House in China,

their work is often inspired by nature,

and always pushes at the frontiers of creativity.

Z-H-A's vision for Dongdaemun Design Plaza

is for a one-of-a-kind structure

never seen before in Korea,

or for that matter, anywhere else.

It will require a reimagining of the engineering

from the ground up.

Starting with how they're gonna keep it standing,

because the architects don't wanna fill it

with a bog-standard concrete core

and lots of columns.

But the plaza will have huge cathedral-like spaces

and one end of the building will feature

a floating cantilevered overhang,

some 100-feet long.

While holding up the undulating roof

will take an extraordinarily complex system of supports.

Then they need to work out how they're going to produce

the tens of thousands of unique aluminium panels

to clad the outside without it taking years.

There are also some strong local reactions.

Initially, there was a lot of backlash against it,

a lot of negative commentary

saying this is not belonging here,

this doesn't connect with the culture.

Despite this, the team presses on.

Their first challenge is going to be the concrete core.

Normally, these are very straightforward boxes.

Ugly to look at, easy to build.

They have elevators and stairs inside.

So it's a functional things, but actually it works

as a structure too.

Traditionally, they're hidden away and never seen.

But in the plaza, they're gonna be in full view,

so Patrik wants them to be made

from perfectly finished concrete.

As architects, we have a kind of love

for well-done concrete,

which is a very robust, beautiful sculptural material.

And it doesn't stop there.

They need to curve and flow,

and that means creating complicated moulds

to cast them in.

If it's a straight concrete wall,

you can have a form work straight,

which is quite easy.

But if the shape is slanted and curved,

it's totally different story

because the form work has to follow the curve.

There was a lot of failures...

In Seoul, South Korea, the team behind

the futuristic design is figuring out

how to create two pairs of perfect curved

concrete cores that will hold up the building

and at the same time, look stunning.

They built so many mock-ups

with the slanted concrete walls there.

A lot of failures, but in the end,

they could prove it can be done.

Proving it can be done and actually doing it,

aren't quite the same thing.

It takes seven months,

painstakingly pouring the concrete in sections,

each held up by a forest of supports

to create the four cores.

That though is only the beginning.

So, the brief was a design centre

with multiple big exhibition halls, some offices,

a great library space with a mezzanine inside.

And there were a number

of permanent museums also to be integrated.

All in all, these add up to almost

a million square feet.

Then it needs an undulating roof over the top,

which they're planning to support with a thing called

a space frame.

A space frame is a three-dimensional truss system.

And what that means is instead of trusses

that just go one way across the building,

they go in both directions,

and this creates a grid that spreads the weight of the roof

throughout the whole frame.

The advantage of the space frame

was the members are very small.

Small members make a perfect curved line.

It's perfect for creating the curving roof,

but it won't be strong enough to support the 100 feet

of cantilevered overhang.

This cantilever is massive.

To make sure that doesn't happen,

the engineers add a steel frame

called a mega truss.

Bae-Won: Mega truss is a very heavy structure.

Heavy, very heavy.

And this one is over 300 feet long.

It's an enormous job.

But over the next six months,

the frame for the roof and the bulge

slowly come together.

While inside,

the team faces its next challenge.

Staircases are important elements.

It's a piece of, you know, 3D spatial sculptures.

Although the staircase is supposed to appear to float,

just touching the building at the top and the bottom,

it's too heavy.

Meanwhile outside,

the team is wrangling with the enormous roof.

We started working together on how to make

that huge roof with so many panels.

They settle on hard-wearing aluminium,

but the science of curving the panels

means they can't be more than three feet square,

so covering it is going to need a lot of them.

There are 45,000 panels

and they are all different.

Too complicated for most metal workers,

the team takes a very modern approach.

We realised by that time

that we need to go for robotic

or computational fabrication processes

for the sake of control and precision.

Now they just have to find some robots to do it.

Jong-Ruhl: They found one in Germany,

a company, they can do it.

They take three years to-- just to make the metal panels

and also cost is so high, so that cannot be an option.

The problem is the roof's wonderful curves.

When you bend a material, the inside of the curve

is compressed and the outside is stretched equally,

so you get this nice natural curve.

When you want to bend it in two different directions,

things get complicated.

Compression and expansion

both happen at the same time on each side.

This means there's no natural curve to follow,

and it wants to buckle.

Now imagine dealing with that 45,000 times.

Having unsuccessfully scoured the globe,

the team turns to a local steel manufacturer for help.

Instead of throwing in the towel,

Mr. Park starts looking at other industries,

like shipbuilding,

where they use a system called

Multi-point forming.

MPF or Multi-point forming

is a bit like one of these desk toys.

A metal panel is placed over a series of pins

attached to hydraulics.

The pins push into the panel,

and create the desired shape.

The pins can then return to their original position,

ready for a new panel and a new shape.

This means that one mould can create endless shapes.

The machine they create can turn out

a hundred unique panels a day.

And cuts the timeline for the roof panels

from three years to one.

Now though, they've gotta fit all 45,000 of them

in the right place.

Even then, it takes a year and a half

to clad the entire roof.

But finally in March 2014,

the Dongdaemun Design Plaza is ready for business.

A stunning, spectacular building,

unlike anything else in the city.

You get amazed when you go in there,

so many different spaces.

It has really like a wow effect.

Since opening, it's attracted over

100 million people,

and it's huge spaces have hosted spectacular events,

including Fashion Week.

It's really futuristic, it's really cool.

It's also a place where the city comes to hang out.

It's very sunny right now and it's just that--

this overhang right here is just a nice way to,

you know, take some shade.

It's a nice spot.

It became one of our flagship projects

which we are still very proud of.

Blockbuster.

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.