Owner: 1000 Museum LLC
Contractor: Plaza Construction
Lead Design Firm: Zaha Hadid Architects
Structural Engineer: DeSimone Consulting Engineers
MEP Engineer: HNGS Engineers
Civil Engineer: Terra Civil Engineering LLC

This 703 ft-tall, 62-story condominium tower in downtown Miami “is arguably one of the world’s most challenging builds,” says Brad Meltzer, president of project contractor Plaza Construction. It features a one-of-a-kind undulating exoskeleton comprised of 5,000 pieces of lightweight glass-fiber reinforced concrete manufactured in Dubai as a permanent formwork system that he contends “is a first in high-rise construction.”

One Thousand Museum is the first and only residential tower in the Western Hemisphere designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, who died in 2016 before the project was completed. External curving “X-braces” work as a bracing system in unison with traditional shear walls to achieve thinner and more efficient internal shear walls, says the submission. The shear walls and exoskeleton columns were placed with high-strength concrete, including 12,000 psi from base to mid-height and a 10,000 psi for the remaining heights.

The tower’s design called for column-free floor plans, but initial layouts included numerous interior columns to maintain an 8-in. slab thickness. By using 11-in.-thick floor slabs instead, the structural design required only two internal columns, and the resulting floor plan includes clear spans up to 45 ft from core to glass.

One Thousand Museum’s 12-ft-thick foundation mat is supported on 227 piles and measures about 147 ft by 149 ft. The 30-in.-dia auger cast-in-place piles were designed to minimize the potential for settlement—critical since one edge of the building’s podium sits just

6 in. from a neighboring building, submitters say. Piles were drilled 165 ft below ground, with one more than 170 ft—the deepest pile ever driven in Miami-Dade County at the time, the team says.

Crews cast the roughly 9,500 cu yd of concrete required for the mat in one continuous placement over 26 hours, which required nearly 1,000 concrete trucks.

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