PLANNING AND ARCHITECTURE
Brian Dean, Owen Martin, David Emery, and Peter Chancellor
This paper describes three examples of innovative tall building designs undertaken by the authors' firm in Australasia. These involve the design of building structures up to 88-storeys and as a multi-discipline group, the firm's innovations have embraced structural, M&E, façade and fire engineering disciplines.
The paper describes a number of innovative stability designs for tall buildings with minimum impact to the functional planning. The first case study involves a novel off-set outrigger stability concept, for the Aston Apartment building in Sydney. Further case studies are the 88-storey Eureka Place Apartment Tower currently being designed for Melbourne's Southbank and the 86-storey World Tower building currently under construction in Sydney.
Aston apartments is a slender 30-storey residential tower accommodating 145 serviced and owner occupied units. Its slender form and difficult positioning have required unique structural design solutions.
The reinforced concrete framed structure is 90 metres high and is only 13 metres wide in the north-south direction, resulting in a slender height-to-base ratio of 7:1.
An innovative wind resisting system using "offset outriggers" has been developed by Connell Wagner for this building, a first in Australasia. The "offset outriggers" shown in Figure 1 significantly reduce building deflections and core bending stresses. The offset system enables the outrigger arms to be placed across the full building width at locations away from the plane of the lift cores and mitigates some of the disadvantages of conventional outrigger systems, such as the outrigger arms obstructing occupiable and valuable floor space.