Original subtitles

[Narrator] How do you build a brand-new university on a swamp?

We didn't have room for error out here.

[Narrator] What happens when a visionary architect is given

almost 80 million pounds of high-grade steel?

[Ellie] They've created a 33,000 piece titanium jigsaw puzzle.

[Narrator] And how do you create a 4,000-ton building that moves?

[Jamie] When you see that there's wheels at the bottom,

you say, what? How?

[Narrator] This is the age of the extraordinary.

[Hayley] It's like one of those insect-eating plants,

only enormous and white.

[Narrator] Where ingenious engineers have

unleashed unchecked creativity.

Now their secrets are revealed.

As we discover the inside stories of their construction.

This is an incredible feat of planning and engineering.

[Narrator] To try and understand,

"How Did They Build That"?

Have you noticed how architects don't do easy?

It's not enough to design a world-class university building

like no other.

They then go and build it in the middle of a swamp

and give it a massive pair of wings to trace the sun's

daily passage around the earth.

It sounds crazy... and awesome.

[Narrator] Florida, home to the Gators.

Wrong gators. That's more like it.

Over 31% of Florida, some 18,500 square miles,

is made up of wetlands,

which are home to over a million alligators.

Add that to temperatures as high as 100 degrees,

and in July, it can be a fairly unforgiving place.

So when they decided to build a huge new university campus

on an area of swamp,

it was never going to be easy.

[Santiago] From the beginning,

we were working in a wild environment.

This was a real challenge.

[Narrator] The design from one of the world's

most exacting architects comes complete with superpowers.

This building has wings. It does take your breath away.

[Narrator] It was a project that would push engineers

to their limits.

I knew in my mind that it had to be perfect.

[Narrator] A huge cathedral of architectural concrete,

curving steel and glass

with virtually no straight lines in sight

and no room for engineering error.

This is the Florida Polytechnic University's

Innovation, Science, and Technology building.

So how did they build it?

Home to NASA's Kennedy Space Center,

Florida is no stranger to the world of science and technology.

And in the early 2000s, the state decides it needs

to take that to the next level

by creating a new university focused on engineering,

physical sciences and mathematical sciences

that would be like no other in the world.

[Randy] We want to make sure that when the students come

to the university to study engineering,

that they're inspired by the architecture of the university.

[David] The Innovation, Science, and Technology building

is kind of a cornerstone for our campus.

It was important to have this building that, you know,

served as a little bit of an icon for us.

[Narrator] To create it, the university turns to

one of the globe's most visionary architects,

Santiago Calatrava,

who much prefers a curve to a straight line.

On the surface, his idea sounds very simple.

It has to be a building, very versatile.

You see where the small groups can work and all of that.

The idea was really to do a place very open,

very transparent and full of light.

[Ellie] The thing about Calatrava is his designs

and specifications are incredibly complicated.

This means engineers have to really think differently

about the materials they're using and how they're going

to build his vision.

[Narrator] From the Oculus Station House in Manhattan,

and Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin,

to the Auditorio de Tenerife in Spain,

Calatrava's gleaming white signature buildings are

both stunning and phenomenally difficult to build.

Florida Poly will be no different.

Set on a 170-acre campus in the soft Florida marshland,

Calatrava's design will see five vast lakes with curved walls

created in a nod to its wetlands home.

From the sixth,

a gleaming white 162,000 square foot oval structure will rise.

At its centre, a ribbed and glazed auditorium roof creating

a vast atrium leading to 26 classrooms, labs and studios.

On its roof, two huge shades will move with the sun

to protect the interior from the blistering heat.

The perimeter will be ringed by a 39-foot-high steel pergola,

built to provide extra shelter from the intense Florida sun

and high winds.

Calatrava's creation will be unlike any building

any university in the world has ever had.

It was going to require a team of people willing to do

something new and push the limits of construction

because the limits of design were pushed as well.

[Narrator] What's more, they've got just 30 months to do it.

[David] Students needed to begin classes

at the start of fall semester.

[Chuck] There was no extension.

They were opening August 14, 2014.

Everybody on site knew that.

We made t-shirts up that said that.

We've gotta get it done.

[Narrator] The first task is to build a set of foundations

strong enough for the huge structure...

Not usually a problem,

but this site is on acres of waterlogged soil.

[Chris] The first time we visit it, it was like marshlands.

This area here was soft soils, silts.

So the soil as it was,

it was not adequate to support the foundations

for the building.

[Narrator] Usually when you build on soft soil,

you hammer in piles till you hit solid bedrock.

But not here.

The swamps of Florida are less than ideal.

It's basically like trying to build on top of a massive

key lime pie.

[Santiago] Florida is a place with a lot of marshland

and the hard rock or the bedrock, you know,

it's very deep, so we needed to find a solution.

[Narrator] The bedrock is up to 80 feet below ground,

so traditional piling would be eye-wateringly expensive.

The engineers, though, have a solution

called vibro replacement.

Vibro replacement is a technique we use to improve

poor base-level conditions in areas like marshland

and make it capable of load-bearing.

[Narrator] It works like this.

Holes three feet wide are drilled deep into

the fragile soil and then filled with stones or gravel.

Next, this filler is vibrated and compacted,

which makes the ground as strong as solid bedrock.

[Chuck] When we're drilling into the ground,

if there's any clays, if there's any roots,

if there's any unsuitable soils as we're going down,

it's being replaced with rock.

That's just like concrete,

more than enough to support this building.

The stone columns were completed and they worked like a charm.

[Narrator] With a solid structure for the building

to sit on, the team starts work

creating the enormous concrete slab on top.

Like every aspect of this build, it's far from straightforward.

The math and the geometry is very tough.

It was a series of radiuses and rotations.

I knew in my mind that it had to be perfect.

[Narrator] The plan is to cast two huge curving,

concrete beams, which will link up to form the base.

And on that, they'll then construct the building.

Using a technique called formwork, they build a

massive spider's web of steel reinforcement bars

within huge curved plywood moulds.

Then they fill it with concrete.

Every five feet, we had a pin in the ground

to make that ring beam perfectly formed.

[Narrator] An error at this stage

could have catastrophic repercussions.

We put coordinate points on every single element

that's out here.

The light poles, switches, toilets.

Everything that we did in this building had a coordinate point

and a dimension to it off of a baseline.

[Narrator] With the huge concrete curves cast,

the next challenge is overcoming Florida's weather,

because as they install the 43 aluminium cupola beams

that will create the 250-foot-long roof,

they hit a major problem.

The afternoon summer temperatures are reaching

105 degrees, causing the metal to expand

and changing the dimensions of the beams.

[Chuck] We would have to erect these cupola beams

in the early mornings,

and we couldn't go past 10:30, because they would heat up.

And as we put them in and the members in between

that brace them, they would heat up

and they would go out of plumb.

So we would have to stop, hold that brace where it was,

and in the next morning or at night time,

we would continue our erection,

so that they wouldn't be out of plumb.

It's very complex...

Not only the geometry, but the heat and the cold.

[Narrator] Working through the night and early mornings,

the beams are installed,

ready for the next bit of Calatrava magic, glass physics.

The glass arrives in large dimensions, you see.

And then the glass allows you with an adequate pressure

to curve it and then fix it into the frame.

It's very simple.

[Narrator] It's also something the team has never done before,

to take an enormous, flat sheet of glass

and bend it into an exact curve, which fits the beams.

Luckily, Calatrava has in his previous buildings.

[Chuck] In his brilliance and in his experience,

he taught us that you can bend glass,

so we bent those glass panels in the field.

So all that glass is under tension on the first

and second floors all the way around the building,

and we bent it to the geometry of the radius.

How cool is that?

[Narrator] Calatrava's awesome glazed atrium

is almost complete.

Now he has one more demand of his engineering team.

Was a real challenge.

[Narrator] They have to stop the 22,000-square-foot

glass atrium from becoming a giant greenhouse.

Our roof is one big skylight.

[Narrator] With so much glass, how can they shield the building

from Florida's super-intense sun?

Calatrava's solution is beautifully elegant,

but unsurprising highly complex to build and install.

94 movable aluminium shades will be placed above the roof,

able to extend outwards by more than 60 feet.

Sensors will control hydraulic pistons to open and close them,

optimizing the amount of shade they provide

to the atrium inside.

And while controlling the solar gain,

it will still allow in the beautifully cool morning

and evening sun.

They can pull their roof, you know,

in a vertical position, but they can also hold the most

convenient inclination of the two roof wings.

The building itself can change its shape

to deliver shadow down below,

[Narrator] This giant sun shade may protect the building

from the sun, but can it withstand

the greatest danger Florida's weather has to throw at it?

[Corina] On the West Coast, you worry about earthquakes.

On the East Coast, you worry about hurricanes.

[Narrator] Next, will it survive the weather?

[Narrator] In Florida, construction of the new

university building's incredible moving roof shades is underway.

And the engineers there have to make sure it will survive

the worst Mother Nature can throw at it.

You cannot ignore hurricanes.

Unless you design for hurricanes, you have problems.

Every element you see here,

especially the exterior envelope, is designed

to withstand the hurricane wind forces.

[Narrator] They decide the solution is to fit sensors

to the louvres, which detect wind speed.

Anything over 25 miles per hour,

and they should automatically retract.

The team is ready to see if the system really does

automatically retract in the wind

and whether it will track the sun.

It's a tense moment for everyone.

[David] I don't think any one person remained in the building.

I think everybody came out to watch the arms move

for the first time.

[Chris] Everybody like, was waiting for that with anxiety.

Is it gonna work?

Is it gonna behave in the way it was designed to?

It was exactly as it was planned.

And it was a gratifying moment, actually, the first time

you saw these things moving.

And it was, whew, you know, like, great.

This is doing what it's supposed to be doing.

It was a sense of achievement for everybody at that point.

When they went up, we were like, holy moley, Batman.

We high-fived it. We high-fived it.

Trust me. We got it.

We're a part of something that's never been done

in the world.

This will be the only one. How cool is that?

[Narrator] The finishing touch is to surround the completed

building on either side with water.

They dig out the five remaining giant ponds,

and don't need any innovative technology to fill them.

[Chuck] They filled the ponds themselves, rain and water

runoff from the roads. They filled themselves.

Pretty amazing.

[Narrator] And not the only thing that's amazing

about the ponds.

We discovered in the ponds, alligators.

Nobody was thinking we will get alligators.

But in Florida, these things are very common.

And it's interesting to have a little, some

pieces of the local fauna.

[Narrator] Ahead of the official opening,

Santiago Calatrava flies in to check on his building.

Finished in his signature gleaming white,

it's a massive moment for the man who designed it

and the people who built it.

[Santiago] It was a lot of enthusiasm by these people

and certainly, the quality of the building emerge out of it.

[Chris] There's no sharp angles.

When the diagonal meets a vertical, usually, you know,

it comes at an angle, but the rounded corners,

rounded corners everywhere. No sharp edges.

No sharp edges anywhere.

And no visible construction joints.

[Chuck] He told all of the workers, thank you.

He wept some.

I saw some tears in his eyes, as there were in mine

and I'm sure a lot of the workers.

And all my workers are giving their heart and blood,

and soul into this.

It's what a builder dreams of.

When you're working with an architect of his calibre,

that's the best feeling that I could ever have.

[Narrator] Right on schedule, 30 months after work started,

Florida Poly's new flagship is ready to welcome students.

[Man] It's unusual. It is really something.

You don't see anything else like this.

It's awesome. It's like, how did they do that?

It was one of the high points of my career,

so I'm extremely proud to have been a part of it.

It does inspire me. I still can't believe I'm here.

[Narrator] 16,000 cubic yards of concrete,

1,400 tons of steel

and 80,000 pounds of glass

have been crafted by hundreds of workers

to create a brand-new architectural wonder

for the world.

[Chuck] I proved to a world-class architect

that we were able to deliver and execute

something not only that is beautiful,

but it works.

I think the stars were aligned.

It was chance for us to take his art

and build a building out of his art,

because this is truly art.

[music]

For our next extraordinary building,

we travelled to Bilbao in northern Spain.

I say building, but it looks more like several buildings,

as if some challenging pieces of sculpture have

fallen from the sky, and against all odds,

landed in just the right place to create one

single architectural masterpiece.

Now, that takes genius.

[Narrator] In 1991, the formerly prosperous docks

in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao were down on their luck.

But that was about to change.

Because after years of decline, the city has decided to fund

the building of a modern art museum right there.

[Hayley] Before the Guggenheim arrived,

Bilbao was not on anyone's cultural radar.

[Narrator] This is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

So extraordinary,

it's described as the most important building of the time.

So revolutionary, many said it couldn't be built.

There was a lot of scepticism about can this be built.

[Narrator] It took pioneering computer tech, combined

with old-school construction skills, to make it happen.

They've essentially created a 33,000-piece

titanium jigsaw puzzle.

[Narrator] Every piece had to fit perfectly on the inside

and on the out.

The Guggenheim in Bilbao is the mind-bending, 250,000-ton

building that revived a city

and shocked the world.

So, how did they build it?

[Narrator] As the 20th century wound down,

Bilbao's steel industry, once its life blood, had dried up.

And the old city port had relocated,

leaving behind a scar.

It had left all this left bank of the river close

to the centre of the city without any real use.

[Narrator] In the 1990s,

the city came up with a bold plan for change.

Fill the empty riverside space with something extraordinary.

A building that can host world-class exhibitions,

but that's also in itself, a huge show of confidence,

putting Bilbao back on the map.

[Juan] The museum was meant to be the catalyst of that change.

You cannot do this by, uh, small jumps.

You have to do this by huge leap forward.

And this project provided that opportunity, I think.

[Narrator] To help Bilbao take this huge leap,

they choose architect Frank Gehry,

creator of some of the world's most extraordinary buildings.

If you want a signature building,

Frank Gehry will not disappoint.

[Narrator] He's one of the only architects

who is a household name.

One look at Gehry's buildings and you understand why.

From Paris' Fondation Louis Vuitton,

to the Lou Ruvo Center in Las Vegas,

Gehry's designs have changed the world.

But the huge museum in Bilbao could be Gehry's masterpiece...

If anyone can work out what's on his mind.

[Juan] His first models, they were strange.

It was difficult to understand exactly how they would work,

but there was some sort of magic in them.

[Narrator] Gehry soon fuses the models to create a design

for a single, coherent, but utterly extraordinary structure.

The heart of the building will be a 165-foot-high central hall

constructed using a lightweight, but super-strong steel frame.

A series of curved bridges, glass elevators and stairs

will connect 20 galleries spread over three floors.

The exterior will be made up of huge, sweeping natural forms,

turning the building itself into a sculpture.

Finally, it will be clad in titanium,

each sheet less than a millimetre thick

and every piece unique.

It's a design no one has seen before, let alone built.

There was a lot of skepticism about can this be built.

Can this be built in time? Can this be built on budget?

So we understood that it was going to be a challenge.

[Narrator] With a budget of around $90 million,

Gehry's build team must be at their most innovative

to pull this off.

[Luis] It's quite complex from the point of view

of construction.

What the client wanted us to achieve here was to help

Frank Gehry to design a world-class building.

And that included many things like new shapes, new materials,

things that had never before been done in architecture.

The Guggenheim is so complex, that 2D blueprints

weren't enough to communicate Gehry's vision.

[Narrator] Gehry's team turns to computer software programs

used in airplane design to create a feasible,

technical construction plan.

[Corina] They had to build a virtual 3D model

of the entire building, so that the engineers

and the contractors knew what to do.

Today this is very common, but back in the 90s,

this was revolutionary.

[Narrator] A design this complex, featuring tall towers

and sharp angles,

means the team has only one material in mind

for the framework...

Steel.

Steel is very much used within buildings

when you want to get speed

and when you want to get industrial production.

And it enables you to do these type of things.

It's lighter than concrete. It makes a lot of sense.

[Narrator] The very industry that collapsed and created space

for this museum is now needed to pull off

producing the complex frames.

Separate elements are parcelled out to workshops

around the city.

Frank Gehry has been able to design it,

but we have been able to build it mostly with local elements.

[Narrator] These factories are used to building ships,

not futuristic museums.

With no two pieces the same, it's no easy task.

[Luis] It's complex because of the shapes.

Every member is a bit different from the others.

[Narrator] The construction crew assembled the series

of interlocking triangles that make up the intricate framework,

and give the residents of Bilbao a first glimpse

of what's to come.

This building has a beautiful steel structure that of course

you cannot see, but once you could start

looking at that steel structure, it was like a skeleton

of a dinosaur suddenly coming up.

I think that was the moment when we started to really

appreciate the, the scale of the building.

[Narrator] The skeleton complete,

they now need to clad it in a tough outer skin.

One that will protect it from the weather,

but that can be molded to fit the building's curves.

Gehry opts for a material more commonly used in aerospace,

titanium.

When you think about it, cladding an ever-changing

and flowing material has a lot more in common

with aircraft-making than traditional buildings.

[Narrator] The next challenge is that Gehry's hand-drawn

shapes mean installation of the cladding panels

must be done in a precise order.

And there are more than 33,000 of them.

[Ellie] They've essentially created

a titanium jigsaw puzzle.

That's fine on a computer.

It's even fine on the factory floor.

But then on site,

a team had to somehow fit that all together.

[Narrator] Next, how will they pull it off?

[Narrator] In Bilbao, Spain, work is underway to clad the

new gallery, designed by one of the world's leading architects,

in 33,000 individual pieces of titanium,

each precisely fixed to the steel skeleton.

[Juan] By bending, they produce this pillowy effect.

When you look at it, it's like a pillow

where it has these little holes.

It doesn't really, but it's the way it reflects the light.

So for being such a huge metal building,

it looks very handmade, very human.

[Narrator] With the curves complete outside,

work moves on to creating the elegantly

flowing interior walls.

Here the engineers turn to a system commonly seen

in domestic house construction.

Drywall fixed to a frame.

Though here, of course, there's a twist.

Normally, drywall is always flat, just a gypsum board

with cardboard on one side.

It's not easy to bend.

To bend it, you need to use a very thin drywall

that can be somehow humidified and then bent.

[Narrator] The construction crew perfect a technique

of using thin drywall, which they dampen and bend

to create flowing forms

that would have been immensely heavy if cast in concrete.

It's not only lighter, but cheaper and quicker.

At first, no other building has this type of complex shapes

with drywall.

[Narrator] The next challenge Gehry sets to the team

is to construct a series of curved walls,

some in glass and others in solid limestone.

A lot of the stone is curved in two directions.

That is very, very complex to do.

You need to cut each stone separately.

[Narrator] Too complex to cut the limestone by hand,

the team turns to computer-controlled

milling machines normally used to shape metal.

It had to be manufactured by machinery that did not exist.

The contractor had to acquire a milling machine that works for

the aircraft industry and to adapt it to carve stone.

[Narrator] Bending the glass is too expensive.

Instead, the engineers opt for an illusion to trick the eye.

[Luis] There are some places in the building in which

you see the glass curving,

but it's not curved at all.

It's flat glass made with triangles

to create that illusion.

[Narrator] The sculptural glass is the final component

in a building that's about to take the world by storm.

In 1997, four years after construction started,

Bilbao's stunning new museum opens its doors

on time and on budget.

The building more than fulfils its brief.

The Guggenheim was built to house great works,

but arguably the building itself outshines them all.

[Juan] It has become an icon for the city of Bilbao

because it has signalled the transformation that the city

has lived through the last 30 years.

[Narrator] Since it opened, the museum has ignited

a whole new cultural scene,

and now brings in millions of tourist dollars,

all driving new business and creating jobs.

For the people from Bilbao, it changed completely the city.

It was a great thing for us.

[Narrator] More than anything,

figuring out how to build the Guggenheim

didn't just put Bilbao back on the map...

It redrew it.

With Manhattan real estate

amongst the most expensive on the planet,

designers of New York's hippest performing arts centre

came up with a genius space-saving solution.

It uses a sophisticated version of what I call

the elasticated waist trousers principle.

If you suddenly find you need a little more space,

then everything just expands.

You can pack twice as much in

while losing none of the comfort.

Neat, huh?

[Narrator] In 2017, on a tiny pocket of Manhattan's West Side,

New York City decided to build an enormous new arts venue.

[Thomas] We have a limited amount of real estate here,

and we really needed to get the best bang for the buck.

[Narrator] A place so clever, it can shapeshift to provide

different venues for different shows.

Everything that underpins the idea behind

The Shed is complete flexibility.

[Narrator] A chameleon-like building that defies logic

and sense, doubling in size at the touch of a button.

When you see that there's wheels at the bottom, you say, what?

How?

[Narrator] The world's only arts and entertainment venue

that rolls out the razzle-dazzle in the evening,

then magically disappears before morning.

It's kinda like a super-sized version of a trundle bed

that you only take out when you have guests over.

[Narrator] A hybrid of giant railroad engineering,

cutting-edge materials, and extraordinary vision.

This is The Shed in Manhattan.

So, how did they build it?

[music]

[Narrator] New York has perhaps the most famous

entertainment district in the world.

Nearby are galleries and museums that combine

to create a feast for anyone seeking a cultural hit.

It's all been here for years.

It's also, perhaps just a little old fashioned.

But in 2012, just one mile west,

an opportunity arises for something fresh.

An ingenious new development is underway to create America's

largest private residential development in history

called Hudson Yards.

It's being built on a huge new deck

created to sit above an enormous railroad storage depot.

Along with 18 million square feet of high-end living

and working units,

a small space is kept for a new super-flexible arts centre.

At the heart of it, they wanted to have a cultural centre.

The idea we had was that The Shed could be

a commissioning centre, a place where things are made

and presented across all disciplines,

so across performing arts, visual arts, popular culture.

So it would be a place really that is for all types

of creativity.

[Narrator] Despite a very modest footprint,

the building also needs to be able to take big crowds.

It's a big ask for a tiny space.

But led by Elizabeth Diller,

architects Diller, Scofidio and Renfro

come up with a radical design called The Shed.

Really a tale of two buildings.

One half will be a permanent structure

built onto one of the skyscrapers.

115 feet tall,

this section will house eight floors

of permanent exhibition and performance space.

But here's where the fun begins.

This part will be completely encased in another structure,

a huge steel shell that despite weighing 4,000 tons,

will be able to move out across the piazza,

instantly doubling the size of the building

and creating a 17,000-square-foot

multi-use performance space,

complete with climate control

and state-of-the-art staging systems.

It will be an incredible building

with the ultimate flexibility the clients want,

but also needs a big leap of faith.

[Alex] I looked at this design,

and I kept turning it around, going,

there's very little it couldn't do.

Let's make it happen.

[Narrator] In 2015,

work gets underway on the fixed half of The Shed.

This is the easy part.

It's built using a tried-and-true steel frame

construction method permanently fixed to the concrete slab.

But then comes the hard part.

The team has to figure out what they're going to build

the 4,000-ton outer shell from

and how they're going to make it move.

Even for the most experienced engineers,

it seems like a crazy idea.

My first reaction had been to say,

why would anybody want to do this?

That's not practical. That's not possible.

So I had to train myself literally to instead say,

well, how could we best achieve that?

[Narrator] In search of inspiration,

the team turns to commercial cargo docks.

[Jamie] A gantry crane, which is a crane that rolls in and out

on two sides of the boat

and is able to pick things off the side of the boat,

so that technology is actually very influential

in the design of The Shed.

When you think about the movable shell,

it's the same idea of two wheels with a frame on top of it

that rolls in and out over a fixed building or a boat.

[Narrator] The team decides to build the moving half

of The Shed using a 4,000-ton steel frame.

And, to make sure it's super strong and able to hold up

to whatever is thrown at it,

the architects settle on a design based on triangles

called a diagrid.

[Scott] We have a series of these verticals

and a series of intersecting diagonals that creates

this overall structural form.

And when we move it, we want it to be lightweight

and we want it to be stiff.

So this idea of a diagrid structure

ticks all of those boxes for us.

[Narrator] The team may have a design for a super-strong shell,

but now they need to get it to move.

Inspiration again comes from the gantry crane

and its huge sets of motorized steel wheels

running on tracks embedded into the ground.

But unlike a container port with its strict safety procedures,

these need to be safe enough for the public to wander over.

That means the tracks have to be both immensely

strong to cope with the weight, but also very shallow.

Getting something that's straight enough,

flat enough, stiff enough,

so that it doesn't deflect as The Shed moves,

this is really where all the magic happens.

[Narrator] At just 272 feet long,

this super-sized railroad will be one of the toughest

in the world.

Its tracks are six inches deep, much the same as a normal train.

But these have to move the incredible 4,000-ton load

from the building above.

So they're made three times wider and five times heavier

to be strong enough to shift The Shed.

They also have to be perfectly installed.

[Jamie] The rails need to be constructed at very

tight tolerances to make sure that the building doesn't

lock up because we are talking about moving a

very heavy building over them.

[Narrator] The next big technical challenge

is designing a completely unique wheel system

that will run on these special tracks and spread out

the massive load.

[Thomas] So a bogey is a pairing of wheels.

This is a four-wheel bogey, so there are two wheels

side by side, and there are also two rails,

so there's some depth to it.

They came in as a pair and essentially a crane came

and lifted them and put them right exactly on the rails

where they go.

The maximum that one wheel is designed to handle is

about 800,000 pounds.

We don't know of anywhere else where these wheels exist

in the world.

[Narrator] With the six-foot wheels

and oversized tracks in place,

the next challenge is designing a system that will move

the frame back and forth across the piazza.

It needs to be powerful enough to move the entire structure,

but also not be visible at ground level.

[Thomas] If you were to go to a retractable stadium roof

for a sports facility, the motors that actually drive

the wheels are located directly at the wheels.

They're somewhat greasy. They're mechanical machinery.

They can be fouled by the public if they were down there,

but so it's better to have them out of harm's way

in a secure location.

[Narrator] Their solution is to hide the motors up in the roof.

It's not unlike a baby carriage, where

we're giving it motor force up at the top,

so all of that force essentially goes through the building

and is translated down to the rolling wheels on the rails

at the bottom.

[Narrator] To make the motors move the frame,

they turn to the tried-and-tested

rack and pinion system.

This was first used on the Mount Washington Railway

in New Hampshire over 150 years ago,

so that its locomotives could easily climb the steep tracks.

For The Shed, they mount 12 electric motors under the frame.

These then power the small rack and pinion system

located on the roof of the fixed Shed building,

which in turn moves the frame.

It doesn't take a lot of power to actually move the object.

You're really overcoming the initial friction,

and then you're sliding the building out.

So the equivalent power of moving The Shed

is roughly equivalent to two Tesla cars.

[Narrator] Some 20 months into the build, the moment arrives

when the team will see if their calculations are correct.

It's a tense moment.

Will the gliding arts centre

produce a stellar dress rehearsal?

[Jamie] The night before we moved The Shed,

there was a lot of trepidation.

The proof is in the pudding and I was actually surprised

at how quietly it moved the first time.

Not a squeak at all. It was virtually silent.

[Scott] That day when we moved it for the first time,

it was slow in terms of the movement,

but it was flawless as well.

Everything went exactly as it was expected to go.

[Narrator] The next challenge is to create a weather-proof shell

that's strong, lets in light, looks amazing,

but also doesn't weigh an ounce more than it needs to.

[Scott] One thing that was very important is

we've got a moving building.

We're trying to minimize the weight as much as possible.

[Narrator] So when it comes to the glazing,

the team turns to a cutting-edge material

rarely used in construction.

Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, or ETFE for short,

weighs in at 100th the weight of glass.

ETFE is another product that has migrated

from the aerospace industry,

and is now used for all sorts of large-scale covering.

[Narrator] The biodomes of the Eden Project in England,

in the Allianz Stadium in Munich,

both show how ETFE can be used.

[Hayley] Not only does this material

have insulating properties,

it's also super flexible to work with.

ETFE is a system that is made by inflating two panels of plastic

with air on the inside.

They're continuously pumped in with new air,

so that they don't start deflating or anything like that.

And they're able to create this very ethereal look.

And it allows the building

to be lighter, and then it's easier to roll it.

[Narrator] 38 months after construction began,

it's a big moment for the architects and engineers behind

this groundbreaking building.

April 5, 2019.

There's first night nerves as The Shed finally takes its spot

in the New York limelight.

[Jamie] To see it delivered exactly as promised,

that was a pretty big wow.

[Scott] We took this basic, simple idea with all types of

complexity, and we developed it.

And I'm proud of some of those technical challenges.

The Shed will always be very special to me.

[Narrator] It's taken three years

of bold design and engineering

and cost $475 million,

but now this theatrical masterpiece in motion

has finally arrived on the New York arts scene.

[Alex] It represents the possibility for change,

for adapting to the world that is changing.

It's one of the most flexible spaces.

There's very little it can't do.