Tuesday, October 10, 2006
The Big Pour: The "whole nine yards," six hundred times
Much as I would have loved to devote the day to reading and blogging about the North Korean "demonstration," I have been busy for the last fifteen or so hours at the annual meeting of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons and attending to other business in Chicago. I did squeeze in a walk from Clark and Adams to my hotel at 630 North Rush and got a decent picture of the Wacker skyline and the Chicago River from the Michigan Avenue bridge. The construction in the right is Donald Trump's new building, which when completed will at 90 stories be the world's tallest concrete-reinforced building. Dubbed "the Big Pour" in the local press, the building is leading to all sorts of concrete-oriented construction records:
Builders of the Trump Tower, which will be the world's tallest concrete-reinforced building when it's completed in 2009, got serious over the weekend about their concrete.
Really serious.
In what contractors called the "big pour," trucks worked round-the-clock for nearly 24 hours to bring 5,000 cubic yards of concrete to the site and dump it into a single hole called the mat. This steel-reinforced opening that measures 200 feet long, 66 feet wide and 10 feet deep will be a below-ground level anchor for the 92-story building.
Unlike the Sears Tower, Aon Center and Hancock Building, which are all steel-reinforced, the Trump Tower is using concrete because there is less room available on the site for the foundation. Without the concrete mat, say architects, the structure could never climb as high and still stay as thin.
"This mat is the heart of the building," said McHugh Construction's Dale Hendrix, a 45-year senior vice president -- and veteran in concrete -- who coordinated the pour. "This was a really unique challenge, something you're going to look back on some day and be proud of. I love this."
The Trump Tower has a $600 million construction budget, and the concrete-only portion handled by McHugh will be an estimated $130 million of that total. The building is expected to require 180,000 cubic yards of concrete when it is completed, but at no point, said Hendrix, will anything be as complex as the weekend's big pour...
Prairie, the largest privately owned ready-mix company in the U.S., used two shifts of drivers, and each truck carried up to 9 cubic yards, or slightly more than 1,800 gallons.
When completed, the Trump building will return the record for the world's tallest concrete building to Chicago, where it had long resided:
According to Emporis, a construction research database service, the tallest concrete building in the world now is CITIC Plaza in Guangzhou, China, which is 80 floors.
Chicago has seen its share of record-holders: the 64-story Two Prudential Plaza, completed in 1990, was the world's tallest reinforced concrete building until it was supplanted by the 65-story building at 311 South Wacker Drive completed the same year.
Decades earlier, Marina City [TigerHawk original photograph at left - ed.], just a block from Trump Tower, held the title as the world's tallest concrete-reinforced structure. The two distinctive 60-story towers were a four-year project completed in 1964....
There is no city in America that is more proud of its skyline than Chicago, or more justified in its pride.
6 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue Oct 10, 01:15:00 AM:
Awesome.
As a Chicago boy, I am so gratified when others see the beauty in this city the way I do.
Chicago has the world's greatest skyline, in my humble opinion.
By 
D.E. Cloutier, at
Tue Oct 10, 01:28:00 AM:
At night the Ginza district in Tokyo gets my vote for the world's greatest skyline.
By K. Pablo, at
Tue Oct 10, 09:09:00 AM:
By TigerHawk, at
Tue Oct 10, 09:39:00 AM:
By Jason Pappas, at
Tue Oct 10, 04:00:00 PM:
As I life-long New Yorker, my respect for Chicago architecture is unreserved admiration from the buildings of Louis Sullivan to the present. I've visited Chicago several dozen times in the 80s and 90s. But just as I couldn’t utter the words “the Red Socks won” I’ll just say a comparison between our great cities is like arguing over Jefferson vs. Adams.
By pam, at
Mon Jul 05, 11:02:00 AM:
Yeah, there really is something magical about the Chicago skyline...
