Lotte Super Tower, Seoul

Doka has scored yet another sales success by winning the formwork contract for the 555 m Lotte Super Tower. The client, Lotte Construction, rated the Doka concept as the “technically most sophisticated and best-quality formwork solution”, as it adapts more or less “on its own” to the many changes in the cross-section. Quite apart from the core’s enormous height, then, its complex shape presents another set of highly challenging requirements. In front elevation view, the core breaks down into three sections which are roughly equal in height but which are completely different geometrically. From August 2011, the Doka climbing formwork system SKE100 will be setting the pace on this CIP concrete core as well, raising some 2500 m² of Large-area formwork Top 50 and three concrete placing booms with the aid of 117 automatic climbers SKE100.

“Foldable” protection screen on rollers

To enable the slab-forming work in the top four storeys of the rising core to take place under optimum safety conditions, sheltered from the weather, the self-climbing Doka protection screen Xclimb 60 is to be fielded here. This gapless enclosure of the under-construction storeys has to adapt to the decreasing circumference automatically, i.e. without needing any time-consuming modifications. To achieve this, the climbing profiles (which are normally arranged in parallel) are mounted at an acute angle to one another so that the individual elements of the protection screen can automatically move into one another on rollers during the climbing operation.

Column formwork with own rebar crane

Gigantic CIP concrete pillars, known as “mega-columns”, run up the outsides of the structure. Between the first and last casting steps, their quadratic cross-section tapers from 12' to 7'. The self-climbing solution ‘SKE50 plus’ is used here in conjunction with ‘Top 50’ large-area formwork elements. To speed up the construction workflow still further, each column will have its own crane for lifting in the rebar. These cranes are ‘climbed’ together with the formwork solution.