Original subtitles

In this episode... I can't tell you how many times we sat around a table and

said they wanted to do what?

I think we still have to pinch ourselves when we look at this building.

The world's most slender skyscraper.

No one has ever put together a project as unique and as special as this.

And the pioneering historic innovations.

It's deflecting quite a bit. We have to find another way to make it stiffer

against the lateral force of the wind.

I can't even imagine how windy it could be here in a storm.

The forces must be just enormous.

That made the impossible possible.

New York City is the most densely populated city in the United States.

The iconic island of Manhattan draws millions from around the globe to live,

work, and play, and its real estate is among the most expensive in the world.

Engineer John Schakalski is one of the countless inhabitants that call the city

that never sleeps home.

So it's about 8 .6 million people all trying to live in the same space in New

York.

It's incredible because there's never a dull moment. There's always crowded

streets.

Everyone wants to live on the island of Manhattan.

And with nearly 3 million people commuting to this 23 -square -mile

day for work, engineers have nowhere left to build but up.

New York is synonymous with skyscrapers, or the Woolworth Building, Chrysler

Building, Empire State Building.

So as the population continues to grow, you need to come up with creative ways

of how to build supertalls in Manhattan.

Today, engineers are pushing the boundaries of design and technology

than ever before.

is 111 West 57th Street.

With unparalleled 360 -degree views of Central Park in downtown Manhattan, this

record -breaking skyscraper is the thinnest building ever constructed.

Designing a building like this is a once -in -a -lifetime opportunity.

This is definitely one of the most complicated, if not the most

residential buildings around the world right now.

What you don't see is all of the engineering feats that are behind the

You have all these different components that are tied together that are just

incredible.

This gravity -defying giant marks the dawn of a new age of skyscraper.

It takes about seven and a half minutes to get all the way up.

It's a pretty nice ride.

Going all the way up, Tommy.

Once you clear all the surrounding lower buildings at this height, it's another

planet, another world.

This is the reason why we're building this.

So right now we're standing higher than any viewing platform in all of New York.

When you're up at this elevation, you got... 360 -degree views of everything

surrounding Manhattan.

You've got Central Park to the north, Statue of Liberty, the Freedom Tower.

It really is just breathtaking.

111's daring construction team reach heights few have ever been to.

They are the only people to have ever experienced the tower's unrivaled views

over New York City.

Up here, we have ironworkers. They're bolting up, erecting the steel.

It's pretty challenging up at 1 ,300 feet in the air, up to 1 ,400 feet. It's

pretty intense.

Every day, I'm blown away by the amount of engineering and time and planning it

goes into putting this type of a building in place.

Built over the historic Steinway Concert Hall, 111 West 57th Street sits on an

incredibly small plot of land.

Once complete, this 84 -story, 1 ,428 -foot -tall building will be one of the

tallest residential towers in the city.

With a width -to -height ratio of 1 to 24, it is the thinnest skyscraper in the

world. A mix of bronze, glass, and terracotta cover the tower's enormous 1

,257 -foot concrete sheer walls.

At the top... A 170 -foot -high steel crown will make this tower the second

tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere.

What gets me out of bed in the morning is to take on the challenges of

this, putting this job together, and getting it to completion.

So there's no rest until it's done.

But this ambitious project poses serious engineering challenges.

How do you strengthen a skinny structure without giving up floor space?

The challenge is how do we get rid of columns like this, minimize it, open up

the floor space?

You can't just take the columns out.

There needs to be something there that supports the actual structure itself.

And how do you prevent such an incredibly thin tower from collapsing in

winds?

Cynthia Liu and her structural engineering team are experts in coming

unconventional design solutions.

As we can see here, this is the existing Steinway building, and next to the

Steinway building is the new plot we have to work with.

From this angle, you can really see how narrow the new building is.

Before construction began, engineers had a 59 -foot wide site to build on.

In order for the building to stand up tall like this, we have to engineer it

a way so the building can stay as is.

As you can see, the building is slender and it doesn't have a lot of footprint

to sustain the load that applies to the building.

Most buildings will have the load imposed on the rocks.

But here, because the building is slender and it has to take the wind

the foundation of the building, there's a lot of uplifting load.

It needs to be engineered and taken care of so the building doesn't fly away in

the wind.

Without a wide base to support the tower, how can engineers brace it

wind?

To achieve the impossible, engineers will need to draw inspiration from the

pioneers of the past.

Cork Harbor, a vast network of busy shipping channels on the south coast of

Ireland, where engineer Magda Heidikevich is searching for a relic of

navigation.

For hundreds of years, the beautiful Cork Harbor has been a very busy port.

It was a gateway for trade and migration and a very important naval base.

The waterways connecting to the city are very shallowed places and require

careful navigation.

Otherwise, the ships can run aground.

There used to be floating lights to indicate the shallow waters of Cork

However, they would move around and can be even destroyed in stormy conditions.

A more permanent structure was needed to withstand the force of the tide.

Despite being blind since the age of 22,

engineer Alexander Mitchell had no problem visualizing a solution.

In 1833, he patented a device that enabled him to build a structure where

could before.

This is the Spitbank Lighthouse.

It was built in 1853, 166 years ago, and it still

withstands the powerful forces of the ocean.

Protruding from the water on nine 46 -foot -long wrought iron stilts, this

iconic beacon stands in stark contrast to traditional stone lighthouses on the

shore.

What Mitchell decided to do was place nine stilts that would be sitting... on

the seabed. However, that wasn't good enough to withstand the powerful lateral

forces of the tide and also lateral forces of the wind.

He had to extend those stills down to the ground, but those stills could be

pulled off from the ground. So he had to anchor them down.

So the very crucial part of the solution are the ingenious anchors that Mitchell

came up with.

To secure the stilts 16 feet below the seabed, Mitchell relied on his own

brilliant invention.

Drawing inspiration from the corkscrew, he deployed crews on floating rafts to

turn the supports and twist them into the ground.

Fastening the framework to the seafloor has locked it in place against the

wildest winds and waves.

meters above the seabed. It's really windy, very strong lateral wind forces

tidal forces.

I can't even imagine how it could be here in a storm.

The forces must be just enormous.

But the structure is not going anywhere.

It's very stable.

The anchors holding this structure stable in such strong wings would become

handy when building a tall skyscraper.

Spitbank Lighthouse has become an icon for the city of Cork.

Standing proud in the bay is testament to the resilience of ground anchoring.

When Mitchell designed the structure to withstand the forces of waves and winds,

he made it stronger than anyone could have imagined.

I doubt he thought that this structure would still be here 166 years later.

Mitchell's novel solution of anchoring to the ground wasn't just meant for the

sea. Today, when people want to build taller, they have to take into account

strong lateral forces that the structure must withstand.

What an amazing engineering solution.

In Manhattan, engineers have taken Mitchell's ground anchor concept and

supersized it.

in order to secure New York's third largest tower to the ground.

New York City is best known for its iconic skyline.

But in this densely populated metropolis, Engineers are running out of

build, so they are forced to come up with an innovative solution that allows

them to build not only super tall, but super skinny.

At 1 ,428 feet high, 111 West 57th Street is the world's thinnest

tower.

This remarkable 84 -story residential building features a 1 to 24 width to

height ratio, soaring high above Billionaire's Row.

But securing New York's third tallest tower to the ground is a major anchoring

system challenge.

So engineers have taken Alexander Mitchell's ground anchoring concept to

next level.

Tasked with fastening the building in place, engineer Cynthia Liu is heading

down to the lowest accessible part of the building.

In order for the building not to tip over, we have 192 rock anchors.

This is the rock anchor that's used on this job, which is, as you can see, it's

pretty heavy, and it's hard to lift, even a small piece like this.

And we have about 50 of them in this wall here.

The rock anchors we have here, we use them as heavy as you can get on the

market.

Once the foundations of the historic Steinway building are carefully

and incredible 192 gigantic steel rods are drilled nearly 80 feet down into the

bedrock.

In this case, they're not screwed in, but instead they expand to lock into the

rock. As lateral wind hits the tower, the anchors can withstand a tremendous

uplifting force of 57 ,320 tons.

This is the design drawing that we issued for this building.

You can see all the little dots representing the rock anchors.

All the forces are transferred to the rock anchors in the area.

The rock anchors transfer to the rock underneath, so the force is transferred

from the top all the way to the bottom.

Building on Mitchell's remarkable concept, the team has installed one of

highest concentrations of ground anchors seen on any skyscraper in the world.

Each rock anchor is about three inches in diameter, and they vary from 50 feet

to 75 feet deep below the rock. So that's holding the building.

Without the rock anchors, the building definitely will turn over in the wind

load. So definitely we need the rock anchors to hold the building down.

Now that a strong foothold has been established, the Super Slender

can rise into the clouds.

The first stage of this megaproject is complete, but engineers face more

impossible challenges.

Sixty vast apartments will each occupy at least one entire floor, as well as

six two -story penthouses.

But high winds equal high stakes.

Even once secured into the rock, The superstructure is exposed to the

elements. Protecting it from bending and breaking is the top priority for

project director John Schakalski.

So down here, we're about 50 feet down below street level. And you can see that

these massive columns act to take the load of the structure from the wind and

transfer it down floor to floor to floor into the foundation.

As you get into the superstructure where you're trying to create these luxurious

apartments with grand views of all of Manhattan, you don't want a giant column

like this in the middle of your living room or dining room.

So you can't just take the columns out. You need something there to hold up the

building.

Both floor space and rigidity are crucial in a residential high -rise.

Defending the slender tower from breaking in the wind might be impossible

without the innovators of the past.

Chicago, the Windy City.

Known for a skyline punctuated by soaring skyscrapers.

This view never gets old.

It's one of the world's great skylines.

Architect and historian Tom Leslie is in search of a daring innovation amongst

the city's towering giants.

Chicago is the city that really pushed the development of tall buildings

than any other city.

This was a real laboratory for tall building construction.

So the big development was to move away from brick construction and to replace

that with steel.

As buildings get taller and taller, they start to get so tall that the steel

frames are too flexible. They move too much in the wind.

And there's a limit to how tall you can build a steel frame.

Beyond that, engineers are looking for another way to help stiffen the

buildings.

To demonstrate the problem, Tom has scaled it down.

So we have here a working wind tunnel that's used to test skyscrapers, see how

they respond to wind.

We're going to use it to test this model of a frame.

We have girders, we have beams.

So we have here a curtain wall.

It has no structural capability on its own. It's very much like a glass skin

that you would hang on the outside of the structure.

We've turned the wind on, and as you can see, it's having quite an effect on our

building frame.

It's deflecting quite a bit, and it's moving quite a lot. It's not a building

any of us would ever want to be in.

We have to find another way to help stabilize it, to make it stiffer against

lateral force of the wind.

So one way we can stiffen the frame is we can take pieces of the building that

we already have, elevator cores, fire stairs, things like that, and we can put

very massive stiff core around them. But a large core, or even column, take up

valuable floor space.

So what we've done is we've taken our giant core, and we've put it right in

middle of the building structure.

It's bearing on several of the beams, which in turn are sitting on the

So you can see that the central core is working. It's stabilizing the building.

But you can also see that the frame is still moving quite a bit.

The other problem with such a massive core is that it's taking up more space

than we'd like. We're not able to rent out the space that's within the core.

When faced with the challenge of bracing a tower without compromising floor

space... Engineer Fazler Khan conceived an ingenious way to utilize pre

-existing structural components.

His remarkable space -saving technique was the shear wall interaction system.

We can take the wind resistance that that massive core has and spread it out

into a pair of shear walls.

tall planes that line each side of the building and resist the wind.

This spreads the resistance that the core has out, which will give us the

floor plates that we want.

With rigid exterior walls, the size of the inner core can be reduced.

And Kahn's clever addition was to connect the components with stiff

floor plates so that the whole system worked as one.

We've turned the wind on, and as you can see, all of the pieces of the building

are working together. We're taking advantage of the stiffness of the shear

walls, the stiffness of the core, the stiffness of the floor plates.

All of them are working together to create an integrated wind -resistant

And Kahn was able to prove his theory worked on a scale never seen before.

is the Brunswick building, the world's first tower to be supported by sheer

interaction.

The Brunswick's exterior structure is four massive sheer walls.

On the inside, there's a set of sheer walls within the building core.

To tie these two systems together,

Kahn designed very, very stiff concrete floors that ensure that when one system

moves, the other system has to move as well.

things that were already there and so the floor plates in the brunswick

are all open between the core and the exterior wall more than 80 percent of

every floor is rentable which is an incredibly high number for the era

sheer wall interaction the brunswick building opened in 1965 as the tallest

reinforced concrete structure in the world

The Brunswick was a building that was miles ahead of its time when it was

and it's a building that was influential for generations, even down to today.

At New York's Guy High megastructure, engineers are taking Kahn's pioneering

technique to new heights.

Just like in Chicago, they are bracing the high -rise with a sheer wall

interaction system on a colossal scale.

111 West 57th Street is on track to become the thinnest skyscraper in the

But in order to endure high winds, it will need a very sturdy structure.

So engineers are bracing the high rise with a shear wall interaction system.

So here we are on the lower floors of the actual superstructure, and you can

how big the shear walls are. They're over five feet thick down at the base of

the building.

They're pretty massive.

The shear walls here extend about 60 feet below street level to 1 ,257 feet

the air.

They are some of the tallest shear walls on the planet.

The interaction system at 111 West 57th Street has five shear walls all working

in unison.

The east and west walls form the exterior structure.

and flank three core shear walls, including the elevator shaft.

As 1 .3 million cubic feet of concrete is poured one floor at a time, the

configuration rises like an oversized I -beam to over 1 ,247 feet high.

As the mammoth shear walls climb to the highest levels of the tower, they

undergo a transformation.

So here we are on one of the upper duplexes in the tower.

And as we get higher up in the building, the sheer walls take a step in two

directions. They lengthwise, they shorten up, and widthwise.

So you can imagine this wall was over this wide down in the subcellar. And as

you got up into the building, it's about a foot and a half thick. By having

thinner walls up top, it increases the usable floor space.

apartment space actually on the floor plan.

Not only do the shear walls taper in width, they also take steps in length to

create the tower's feathered profile.

85 stiff concrete floors tie the system together, forming one massive monolithic

structure. Should wind hit from any direction, the load is transferred

the rigid components.

downward into the 66 -foot thick concrete foundations.

So the giant columns you saw down in the basement no longer exist up here, which

opens up the entire floor space.

By pushing the limit of concrete construction, the monumental project at

West 57th Street can climb into the sky.

The shear walls act just so much more than regular walls. They're transferring

all the forces down into the foundation.

Without the shear walls, there's no way this building would have been possible.

All the engineering that's gone into the design of the shear walls, being able

to handle all the outside forces, is just unprecedented.

With the monster shear walls topped out, the building stands proud over New

York.

But left untouched, a colossal concrete pillar could be an eyesore on the city

skyline.

Architect Dana Getman has a creative solution to make the super -slender

out. This tower is really unique in that the east and west facades are the

structure. And to really take advantage of that, we clad it with this beautiful

terracotta, which we designed with a waving undulation of shapes that will

create a shadow pattern as the sun casts across the facade.

When we started the design process, we really looked at the DNA of New York

buildings. We really wanted to get that richness, but in a contemporary design.

But the building's distinctive form makes facade installation extremely

challenging.

It is unique to have double shear walls on the exterior of your building. Most

of the time when people install a curtain wall, you slide it to the edge

hang it from the floor above. But when you're installing it on a shear wall,

it's a little bit more complicated.

With solid concrete obstructing the way.

The team has come up with a one -of -a -kind installation method to navigate

unique wall configuration.

The team here on site built a custom gantry to be able to take the facade

to their position on the shear wall.

Once hooked up to the crane, facade panels are flown out over the city

hundreds of feet above the street.

The enormous pieces are traversed around the outside of the sheer walls to the

installation team on the gigantic two -stage hanging gantry.

They have to change hands several times in a precise and delicate procedure to

fix them to the east and west sheer walls.

The result is a striking hybrid of New York's Art Deco heritage with the

-edge architecture of the future.

I am incredibly impressed with the team here on site and how smoothly the

installation has gone.

When you look at the building from a distance, you see the waves of shadow

you really see the impact of this building on the skyline.

We couldn't be happier with it.

But to realize their dreams of creating extraordinary apartments, engineers face

yet another challenge.

So our units are 15 foot 6 from floor to floor, and that creates the need for a

larger piece of glass in order to maximize the views that we have.

To create more impossible engineering, the team will have to go back in time.

Oh, wow, I can see the ripples.

So that's the glass floating on the team.

Soaring over New York's prestigious Billionaire's Row is the city's latest

project.

111 West 57th Street is the world's thinnest skyscraper.

Rising into the sky, it towers above the neighbors and the city below.

Construction of the third tallest tower in New York is nearing completion.

The project's final phase is underway, preparing 60 luxury apartments for

habitation.

All right, are you going all the way up?

Yeah.

When you're done, we've got to pick up on one.

But to make the whole development worthwhile, senior project manager Pat

and his team have one last challenge to conquer.

So right now we're in Ahoyt, which runs the north side of the building.

You know, looking north from east to west, we're dead center looking over

Central Park. It's a pretty incredible spot.

The units that we have for this building are going to be the only units on 57th

Street that are going to have a dead center view over Central Park.

Pat's team must take advantage of the tower's unrivaled views of the city.

Not an easy mission to accomplish in such enormous living spaces.

So our units are 15 foot 6 from floor to floor.

That creates the need for a larger piece of glass in order to maximize the views

that we have.

We need to find a solution to make sure that we can see them perfectly from the

units.

To find vast window panes worthy of the unprecedented panoramic youth, the team

must look to the pioneers of the past.

St. Helens in the north of England.

Legendary for industrial innovation.

Where physicist Susie Sheehy is heading underground in search of a development

that shook the world of glass production.

These tunnels are actually below a glass melting furnace.

And all around here there would have been coal fires that would have been so

for the workers working down here.

What they were aiming for was to make large panes of glass for windows that

clear and strong and free of blemishes.

So they'd take molten glass and pour it over a metal tray where it would cool

down. But the result was something that was imperfect. It was blemished and

rough. So then they'd have to grind and polish it.

Even then, the panes they made were not super big. It was only up to a couple of

metres. So to get something even bigger and better, they'd actually have to come

up with a totally new solution.

But for Sir Alistair Pilkington, the answer was crystal clear.

In the 1950s, he developed a revolutionary new process.

So this place is the solution that Pilkington came up with. And it's

incredible. I've just seen in front of me here this huge...

really flat sheet of glass absolutely beautiful

Pilkington's float glass innovation

quite literally broke the mold it's so flat because they pour

molten glass onto a bar of molten tin and that's so flat that it comes out in

these enormous sheets they're just incredible

This cutting -edge plant has modernized its machinery, but remains true to

Pilkington's technique.

Oh, wow.

I can feel the heat radiating off this.

For any glass production process, a sand -based mixture must first be melted to

a scorching 2 ,912 degrees Fahrenheit.

But what sets this extraordinary method apart is what happens next.

Woo!

Nice.

In the 1950s, Sir Alistair Pilkington invented the float glass process, a

revolutionary method to manipulate the size and thickness of glass.

After a sand -based mixture is melted at nearly 3 ,000 degrees, it is fed into a

molten tin bath chamber.

So this is about 25 kg, so it's quite heavy.

We just step to the side and place it into the box.

That's amazing.

And now I get to push it in.

Yeah, if you just stand back, just push it gently in.

That's it.

Did I do?

All right.

Just leave it there, and you'll see it melted away now.

Oh, wow. I can see the ripples. Yeah, yeah, that's the tin. So that's the

bath of milk? That's the actual tin. That's what the glass is called. Wow.

If you look at it straight up there, that line that you can see, that's the

actual glass there. So that's the glass floating on the tin. It just looks like

a mirror.

Does, yeah? Yeah.

As a liquid, molten tin sits perfectly flat.

Glass from the furnace is slowly poured over the lake of metal.

And being less dense than the tin, it floats atop the surface, spreading and

cooling in a flawlessly smooth sheet.

The glass leaves the bath with so few impurities that it's crystal clear and

incredibly strong.

Properties that would make for great skyscraper windows.

So this section is where the solid glass comes out.

And it's really beautiful and flat and clear, perfect for windows.

But when they first started using this float method, they had glass that was

just six meters long.

But now... They've perfected it to the point where they can just get a

unbroken flow of glass over this 600 -meter length.

And this one here, it works 24 hours, 7 days a week, and hasn't switched off for

more than 7 years.

It's so reliable.

It's an unbelievable method.

The float line can run continuously for 20 years, producing around 479 million

feet of glass, enough to wrap around the Earth.

three and a half thousand times.

So as it comes out here, I can't see a single imperfection in these panes.

This method just produces perfect glass.

And that's only possible because of this slow glass method.

70 years after Pilkington's inspired idea.

New York's greatest engineering minds are using float glass to provide views

unlike any other on Earth.

Pat Feehan is overseeing the installation of 111 supersized insulated

units. So on the exterior facade, this is the exterior facade of the glass.

So there's three individual pieces of float glass made up into these glazed

units. They have two pieces of laminated glass on the exterior facade.

And then one piece of a slightly larger, thicker glass on the interior beside

with a 12 -millimeter argon gap.

The technology that goes into the glass in particular allow us to make the

panels that we can make today. And if it wasn't for the float glass, we wouldn't

be able to make panels like this.

The tower's massive glass panels owe their immense strength and clarity to

float glass method.

To the actual essence of the glass itself.

Pretty fundamental, but the technology that's come around along it that have

allowed us to get larger panes of glass, stronger glass, to allow us to push the

material as far as we can go.

Although each apartment has solid east and west sheer walls, they're completely

open to the north and south.

The team's task is to fill a void over 59 feet wide and nearly 16 feet high on

each floor with huge panels of crystal clear glass.

to minimize view -obstructing joints.

The largest panel, which will form the centerpiece of each apartment, weighs

over one ton, as much as a small car.

Installing these massive window panes at extreme heights is an intense

operation.

And the team will have to carefully pull off a daring act of engineering.

In New York City, engineers are preparing to install massive glass

on a groundbreaking new residential skyscraper.

So right now we're getting ready to install this panel, so we're going to be

flying it out from this floor.

The tower crane's going to come down with the hook. We're going to hook it

and we're going to send that panel out and install until 69.

It's not a typical install because the panel is so large, gets caught in the

wind, it could flow around.

Everyone has to be on their game a little bit more.

To be doing this work, you have to be able to deal with the heights and be

to deal with working on the slab edge, which is not an easy thing to do.

The fearless installation team pushes extreme construction to the very edge.

The oversized heavyweight panel is lowered five floors down.

One wrong move could spell catastrophe.

We're going down to level 69 where this panel's going to get installed.

With the success of the installation hanging in the balance, the team needs

work quickly to secure the panel into the interlocking weather seal.

Hold that.

So, you know, we have one panel now installed of over 6 ,500 total on the

building.

And selling panels one at a time, you know, it doesn't feel like you're

anywhere, but after a while, they start to add up. We're on the 69th floor right

now, installing panels. We're approaching the end, which is kind of

There's a lot of amazing things about 111 West 57th Street, but I think one of

the key things and one of the biggest selling points is the view that we have

here. The technology that has gone into making glass has progressed so much over

time that it allows us to make panels the size that we have here, to have them

as clear as they are, to have the views that we have.

You know, we have the whole entire skyline to look at. It's kind of

For the team behind this daring project, the engineering achievement is

immeasurable.

Looking at a postcard 20 years from now at the skyline of Manhattan, it's going

to be a building that I built on that. It's kind of incredible.

Every day we look at the building, see it grow.

It's really incredible, and we feel like very lucky to be part of the team to

work on this.

No matter which aspect you look at this building, it has definitely enhanced the

New York City skyline. It's taken pieces of old New York and new New York and

combined them together and created something that the world has never seen

before.

The super -slender skyscraper that has defied the impossible.

Pushing the limits on tower construction further than ever before.

A new landmark vanishing into the clouds, changing New York's skyline

Standing testament to the incredible work of some of New York's greatest

engineering minds.

111 West 57th Street represents impossible engineering on a staggering

Every stage of this groundbreaking enterprise poses unimaginable

When we first started this project, I knew we were doing something special.

This is one of the most unique superstructures that you could ever put

But by building on the work of the pioneers of the past, overcoming huge

challenges, and pushing the boundaries of innovation.

I'm incredibly proud to be working on this project. It's incredible, and it's

more than I could have asked for.

We really saw it as an opportunity to do something that both spoke to the past,

but also looked to the future, and to see it not just through design, but now

almost complete.

physically here is really an incredible experience.

The engineers are succeeding in making the impossible possible.

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