Projects
Seoul Tower Competition
Seoul
Mixed-Use Towers
competition
The structural engineering concept for these towers realize a goal held by many well known structural engineers in the past – to provide lateral stiffness in a building through its shape rather than through a collection of beams, columns and walls. On a simple level, the structure behaves much like a rolled-up sheet of paper. A sheet of paper normally is floppy, but it can be quite stiff when it is rolled up into a cylindrical shape. The structural concept of each tower, extending to 500 m max, is fundamentally a rolled ‘sheet’ – not of paper, but of reinforced concrete. The sheet of concrete forms the inner surface of each spiral form. The sheet is punctured for window openings, but behaves more like a continuous plate element than a collection of beams and columns. The curled shape of this sheet is maintained by the floor slabs acting as diaphragms.
