Designed by the late Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid, the 62-story One Thousand Museum Residences project in Miami features a structural exoskeleton comprised of glass-fiber-reinforced concrete that simulates an undulating piece of sculpture. Not merely aesthetic, the tower’s exoskeleton is designed to carry the tower’s gravity loads. A traditional approach to withstanding wind pressure on a 709-ft-tall tower would have required significantly thicker shear walls, resulting in less sellable area for the developer.

As a solution, DeSimone Consulting Engineers used the tower’s sculptural features as a structural exoskeleton. The modified structural element acts as a bracing system that works with a traditional shear-wall system to achieve thinner shear walls. For the project’s bottom half, contractors used 12,000-psi concrete for the shear walls and exoskeleton columns. A 10,000-psi mix was used for the upper half.

Finding an economical and practical solution to form the unconventionally shaped exoskeleton was a primary challenge. Analysis showed that the use of traditional cast-in-place forming techniques with wood formwork would take too long and not produce consistent finish and color. As an alternative, DeSimone proposed using glass-fiber-reinforced concrete (GFRC) for left-in-place formwork. From its Dubai facility, GFRC contractor Arabian Profiles produced a three-month supply ahead of schedule. Overall, this approach reduced the project’s construction schedule by seven months, compared with the traditional forming method.

According to DeSimone, the project marked the first-ever use of GFRC as the permanent formwork of main structural elements in a high-rise building, thus serving as a real-world example of a potentially time-saving approach.

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