WSP Group – engineering consultants

WSP Group

Beekman Tower is World Structure of the Year!

den 8 november 2011

Congratulations to WSP Cantor Seinuk, who picked up the World Architecture Festival’s Structure of the Year for 8 Spruce Street, Beekman Tower. The 267m, 76-storey iconic Beekman Tower, designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry, is a landmark project which redefines the skyline of lower Manhattan.

Shaping New York’s new skyline

The project is New York’s highest residential tower and the first high-rise development since 9/11. It offers 903 high-end residential units, luxury amenities and unobstructed 360 degree panoramic views and sits above a 6-storey podium that comprises a new 10,000m2 public school as well as a 2,100m2 ambulatory care centre for New York Downtown Hospital.

The building is defined by its undulating, asymmetrical steel curtain wall with curvaceous folds and crinkles reminiscent of the folds in a piece of draped fabric.  State of the art BIM design tools ensured that the detailing worked coherently and that the complex cladding system could be installed without a hitch.

Winning innovative design

Beekman Tower is a reinforced concrete building. Our structural design incorporates cast-in-place, concrete flat plate floors supported by reinforced concrete columns and shear walls.  The shear walls were centralised around the core with no walls dissecting the typical residential floors, which provided the architect/developer great design opportunities unobstructed by the structural elements.

The World Architecture Festival judges said: “The design of Frank Gehry's complex sculptural tower required innovated and integrated engineering by the WSP Cantor Seinuk team.  Significant structural challenges had to be overcome to deliver the tower, which includes residential, school and hospital facilities. It uses low-level transfer slabs and ultra-high strength concrete to create open space at lower level, and challenging cantilevers to maximise the size of floor plates at high level.   It is state-of-the-art tower design delivering outstanding world-class architecture.”