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| Helped along by the Doka self-climbing platform SCP - used here for the first time in Austria - the structure shell of the Saturn Tower in Vienna’s “Donau-City” development was erected in record time. Contractors: Saturn Tower JV, consisting of Lieb Bau Weiz, Granit Graz and Ragginger Bau, Salzburg. |
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Helped along by the Doka self-climbing platform SCP - used here for the first time in Austria - the structure shell of the Saturn Tower in Vienna’s “Donau-City” development was erected in record time.
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A city in a city; a new, modernistic centre similar to Paris’s La Défense - this is the “Vienna DC”, as the locals refer to the Donau-City, that has sprung up in recent years in the Austrian capital’s Kaisermühlen district. Spreading across 17.4 hectares of land beside the Danube, adjacent to Vienna’s biggest urban recreation area, the “Donauinsel” island, the Vienna DC has given birth to one-of-a-kind structures such as the Andromeda Tower, the Ares Tower, the Tech Gate Vienna and the Wohnpark Donaucity. They all bear the unmistakable imprint of such famous architects as Hans Hollein, Wilhelm Holzbauer, Heinz Tesar and Ernst Hoffmann.
The latest in this line-up of imposing structures is the 90 m tall Saturn Tower. Its typical storeys were completed in December 2003, and the tower - designed jointly by the architects Hans Hollein and Heinz Neuman - will be ready for occupancy by the end of 2004. Incidentally, the clients in this case are not only Vienna’s Danubeside Development Agency WED AG, but also the IT giant IBM. “But that doesn’t mean the Saturn Tower is going to be our new Austrian HQ”, stresses IBM spokesman Georg Haberl. “IBM will only be using two floors of the tower itself, as training and conference facilities. All the rest of the space will be let.”
The tower will have 28 floors - the first five of these being basement levels housing 330 car-parking spaces and the building services-engineering systems, then the ground floor with a large reception lobby and cafeteria, followed by a management level and 21 further office storeys - and will comprise around 33,000 m² of ultra-modern office space, averaging some 1400 m² per storey. The tower will be topped by a 385 m² sky-lobby and a top-floor terrace offering spectacular views across the Austrian capital and its up-to-the-minute “Vienna DC” district.
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The new office tower is being built by the Saturn Tower JV of Lieb Bau Weiz, Granit Graz and the Salzburg contractors Ragginger Bau. A huge challenge - but with the right degree of commitment, a well-trained workforce and Doka as their formwork partner, the JV managed to construct the structure shell of the Saturn Tower in record time. Indeed, this 90 m tall structure took only six months to build. “We make a point of giving our customers the very best support with their formwork-technology assignments”, says Christian Pimiskern, Platform SCP Project Manager at formwork specialist Doka. “When everything’s right, work can be fun and it’s no problem at all to get a structure this size finished on schedule.”
And on the Saturn Tower, everything certainly was right - very much so, in fact. Despite the fact that work had fallen behind schedule during the excavations, creating huge pressure to make up for lost time throughout the shell construction phase, and threatening to torpedo the entire schedule. And although the many and varied architectural details of the tower also involved a great deal of extra work. For the Saturn Tower would not be a typical Hollein creation if it were not for the recesses and oriel elements in its façade – elements that give it extraordinary visual tension, with individual offices occasionally projecting like arms from the side of the tower. “For example, in the 19th storey, there are floor extensions that project more than four metres out of the side of the building”, explains Hannes Benedikt, Technical Manager of Doka’s Vienna Branch. “Structural shapes like these are of course fairly complicated, and make big demands of the formwork technicians and the workforce.”
Nothing is impossible, though, particularly where the companies involved all pull together. And where these companies’ formwork partner has a system in its range that is specially developed for high-rise construction projects. Using the unique Doka self-climbing platform SCP, the site managed to make good the time that had been lost during the excavation phase, and to complete the last typical storeys on schedule just before Christmas.
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Technology to put you ahead
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The actual innovation is in the climbing mechanism. As soon as the concrete has cured, the Doka platform SCP can be raised to the next casting section in just one single lift.
By greatly simplifying the climbing operation, the SCP saves a lot of time - and thus money - with every lift. When there are 29 “climbs”, as on the Saturn Tower, the resulting savings are very substantial.
The innovative Doka self-climbing platform SCP not only helped to save time, but also made work easier. The floor-slabs and walls of the structure core, which also houses the stairways and the shafts, had to be cast in one single pour. The Doka platform SCP is ideal for this, as all of the wall formwork - around 900 m² of Top 50 - is suspended from it. Furthermore, casting the walls and floor-slabs in one single pour also saves on cost-intensive reinforcement connections. What is more, the high lifting capacity of the Doka platform SCP meant that the 400 m² platform could also be used as a storage area for reinforcement steel etc. This saved on both valuable crane time and on the amount of space needed for intermediate storage on the ground. Another benefit was the pleasant working environment for the site crew behind their “all-round formwork enclosure”. Shielded in this way from the wind and weather, the crew found that working up at these windy heights was no problem, even at low temperatures.
For General Superintendent Hannes Url, the Doka self-climbing platform SCP was definitely the right choice: “The most important thing for us was the safety of our people” he says, “and getting the fastest formwork system we could for this complicated assignment. The SCP platform enabled the site to meet both these goals highly satisfactorily. Also, the support that Doka supervising foreman Roland Mayr gave us in erecting the platform was simply superb.”
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Floor slabs with Dokaflex tables
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On the Saturn Tower, the structure core was erected using the self-climbing platform. For the floor slabs of each storey, the formwork technicians opted for the tried-and-tested Dokaflex tables, as used on just about every larger building.
To save time, however, large-area 22.5 m² tables were used here instead of the standard formats. “With these storeys, we always followed one or two floors behind the core, so as to avoid downtime if any problems occurred”, says Pimiskern. “Of course, we could also have poured the core and all of each storey monolithically, but the method we used is perfectly usual in high-rise construction.” Hannes Url was in no doubt about the merits of this solution either: “In the typical storeys, the custom tables helped us to move ahead extremely fast. With the wind speeds of up to 100 km/h that we had to contend with on the site, the Dokaflex table was definitely the best solution. Any other floor-slab system would probably not have had much of a chance against high winds like these.”
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| As soon as the concrete has cured, the Doka platform SCP can be raised to the next casting section in just one single lift. By greatly simplifying the climbing operation, the SCP saves a lot of time - and thus money - with every lift. When there are 29 “climbs”, as on the Saturn Tower, the resulting savings are very substantial. |
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| The Saturn Tower’s structure shell is already a most imposing sight. Many different Doka formwork systems are in action here, among them the innovative self-climbing platform SCP for the central shaft core of the building. |
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The visibly very satisfied site management team. From left to right:
Jörg Rath, Section Foreman
Hannes Url, General Superintendent
Hannes Lechner, Section Foreman
Hans Brunner, Project Superintendent
Bernd Csida, Project Superintendent
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