Original subtitles

How do you build on top of a mountain

in conditions so harsh,

construction workers can’t work alone?

Just about anything

you think about being a challenging construction,

Pikes Peak had.

How do you cut a piece out of a skyscraper

without it falling to the ground?

It is critical we ensure that that does not happen.

And how do you convert an abandoned dry dock

into a museum without it being crushed by water pressure?

We emptied it meter by meter.

We were afraid that the walls might collapse.

Welcome to a world where anything is possible.

The space where innovation and creativity collide.

This isn’t just impressive. It’s revolutionary.

Where the only limit is human imagination.

This wasn’t just ambitious, it was audacious.

No one had ever attempted anything like it.

Unpacking the miracles and mysteries of construction.

Sometimes buildings can change the world.

And this is one of them.

How Did They Build That?

With its hurricane winds, relentless snow,

lightning strikes and temperatures of -40 degrees.

Pikes Peak was once described as "not fit for man nor beast."

Most of us would call that a warning.

Two intrepid architects called it a challenge.

The Rocky Mountains

are the longest mountain range in North America,

with dramatic peaks and valleys that stretch for 3000 miles.

Among them is Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

For generations, the Ute people have called the mountain

Tava Kaavi, "Sun Mountain", because it is the first peak

to catch the morning light.

It’s so stunning, that it’s also the inspiration

for the iconic anthem America the Beautiful.

Americans have been climbing

Pikes Peak for at least 150 years.

With visitor numbers growing,

in 1891,

the world’s highest cog railway was built to reach its summit.

A hairpin turn highway soon followed,

making it one of the world’s most accessible peaks,

just in time for the explosion in car travel.

In the 1950s and 1960s,

everybody was going on vacation at Pikes Peak.

A drive up the highway. It was a perfect destination.

By 1964, it had become so popular

that they decided to build a visitor center.

But with it came an unforeseen problem.

The year after that original summit house was built,

it started melting and sinking into the permafrost.

So for 60 years, they had to, every year,

sort of jack up the floor and level the buildings.

Permafrost is ground

that’s been frozen solid for centuries,

so soil, gravel, and sand all stuck together by ice.

So it’s like nature’s ultimate deep freeze.

By 2015, Colorado Springs’ government

decides that the visitor center has to be replaced.

But with over 400,000 people visiting each year,

they want to create something

that can better sustain itself and support the large crowds.

When we started talking

with what the best experience was,

it was really to experience the mountain, the views,

the vistas, and not the building.

They turned to two architectural practices,

local firm RTA and Baltimore’s GWWO

to design a center

that will make the most of the incredible location.

Everything we did was to bring the mountain forward

and the architecture, sort of make it more background.

Knowing it will be there for years to come,

the team wants to deliver something

worthy of America’s mountain.

We didn’t want to screw it up, right?

We had one chance to really do justice to this story,

uh, to this peak and do it right.

And so I think there was a lot of pressure.

Their plan is to create a super green visitor center,

which will sit low into the mountain

while offering incredible views from its panoramic windows.

But building it at 14,000 feet will be tough.

First, they’ll have to figure out how to get

beyond the permafrost and the frozen rock

to build the foundation.

They’ll need to find ways for the team

to cope with working at altitude.

Then, despite the location,

the design will need to be ultra sustainable,

slashing energy and water use,

and its viewing windows will have

to withstand hurricane force winds

and high speed projectiles.

Finally, they’ll need to protect the local plant life

from the thousands of visitors,

all while battling some of the harshest conditions

on the planet.

Just about anything you think

about being a challenging construction,

Pikes Peak had.

In June 2018, the team starts.

And their first challenge

is getting the foundation in before winter,

when temperatures can reach 40°F below zero.

What’s more, they have to make sure

they don’t end up repeating the mistakes of the past.

We knew from the previous structure

that we couldn’t build on permafrost.

It would, it would melt.

Our foundations had to sit on bedrock.

That turns out to be easier said than done.

Once you got through about seven to 15 feet of permafrost,

there was frozen rock below that.

So all that material is too hard,

too difficult for normal excavation.

Normally you just dig a hole right?

At 14,000ft, with everything frozen solid,

you need to do something a little more dramatic.

Fire in the hole!

They would drill holes,

and then place explosives down in the holes,

blast an area, and then they had to immediately

remove that material or it would refreeze.

They blast 35,000 cubic yards of rock,

and in October 2018, they have a hole

deep enough for the building to sit into the mountainside.

Now they can start the physical work of laying the foundation.

No simple task at this altitude,

where oxygen levels are 40% lower than at sea level.

That reduced availability of oxygen takes its toll.

It’s such a tough environment,

that at the start, the team can only work six hours a day,

and even then some struggle with the job.

The lack of oxygen

can trigger altitude sickness, and that causes nausea,

dizziness, even death, if not treated.

Even the fittest person is at risk.

It was really a roll of the dice on a day to day basis.

Just about every week,

we had to bring somebody down to a lower elevation

that was suffering from altitude sickness.

So we created a buddy system

for all of our employees up there.

So nobody was working alone.

It’s slow work, but by November 2018,

the team has finished the first stage of the foundation.

It’s too tough to construct anything

on the mountaintop until spring,

but that doesn’t mean the work stops.

We wanted a structural system

that would allow as much work to be done

down in Colorado Springs as possible

and precast concrete really fit the bill.

They were actually the thickest

precast concrete panels

that this company had ever fabricated,

and it was because of the insulation.

As spring arrives, the 432 19-inch thick panels,

which will cope with temperatures ranging

from 64 degrees to 40 below zero, have been made.

But getting them to the site will be far from easy.

The 23-mile roadway from Colorado Springs

to the top of Pikes Peak is full

of hairpin curves and climbs over 7000 feet up.

In Colorado, the team building

the visitor center at the top of Pikes Peak

must transport 432

enormous concrete panels up the 14,000-foot-tall mountain.

It was challenging logistics... 156 turns on the highway.

If we couldn’t get around the hairpins,

then we couldn’t do it; the hairpins are real tight.

It was just making sure we had the right trailers,

the right equipment to negotiate the curves.

The trailers can only be 40 feet long,

and are usually only able

to carry one concrete panel at a time.

We couldn’t stack pieces high

to keep the center of gravity low,

because the trailers twist

so bad on the curves, you’d end up turning the trailer over.

It was definitely a challenge.

You know, it was one day at a time.

Once the panels reach the summit, the next challenge

is overcoming the weather to get them into place.

The big panels definitely had wind issues.

When the wind was blowing,

we would really be cautious as to what we were picking.

If winds reach 30 miles an hour, nothing can be lifted.

But this isn’t the only thing they have to worry about.

Mountain tops are lightning magnets,

as high as you can get, closer to the storm clouds,

and the perfect strike zone for nature’s electric fury.

The construction team and their equipment

are the highest objects for miles around.

We are sheltering from lightning strikes, wrap up!

Copy. We’re wrapping up. Thank you.

They had lightning strike detectors,

and once those would go off, we’d have to stop work.

We had targeted around 15 pieces a day.

There were days that we were... six, seven pieces a day.

The tough conditions don’t just slow construction.

They also threaten the building itself.

You could have temperature swings from -40

to 50 degrees within a 24 hour period.

And that kind

of thermal expansion creates a lot of movement.

If the temperatures inside aren’t stable,

the building will twist, crack, and collapse under the stress.

They need an engineering solution.

We’ve got a couple feet of insulation,

and then we have about three feet of crushed stone

that sits on top of the insulation...

Here, all that crushed stone helps the structure

stay at a constant temperature.

It keeps the building from tearing itself apart.

In October of 2019, the concrete panels are in...

and the steel frame is taking shape.

Their next challenge?

Finding the right glass to go in it.

They can see gusts that exceed 200 miles an hour.

Pieces of rock up to three quarter inch diameter

will blow around at those high wind speeds,

which will impact crack the glass.

Tough conditions require tough glass.

We ended up settling

on a tempered window system that’s got a laminate

in the glass, so that if something actually

hits windows, it stays in place and doesn’t fall out.

With such extreme conditions,

they still can’t take the risk that the windows

could smash into pieces.

The only way to be

sure is to carry out the toughest of tests.

We actually shot a two by four through them.

It’s a success.

Those windows are very special.

They can withstand hurricane force winds.

With the building wrapped in protective glass,

the team faces a very different challenge.

The Living Building Challenge

is the most rigorous eco-certification.

It pushes new buildings to work

in harmony with the natural environment,

go energy positive, and slash water waste.

I mean, it’s next level sustainability.

Difficult in a city.

And a building on top of a mountain?

It seems nearly impossible.

We had a really big engineering problem with our water usage.

Each year, the old center had to truck 530,000 gallons of water

up the mountain

and send 670,000 gallons of wastewater back down--

not exactly environmentally friendly.

Eco-challenge number one is getting

those figures down as low as they possibly can.

We’ve reduced the water usage

by using low flow fixtures,

we use vacuum flush toilets like you have on an airplane.

And in the future, they’re ready to go even further.

Fresh water is then only used for cooking

and for drinking water and washing your hands.

But then all of that water is treated

and then reused a second time to flush the toilets.

As the build nears completion,

the eco-measures continue.

The super insulation and underfloor heating

slash the building’s energy demands,

while the timber and stone used to finish

inside and out are locally sourced

to reduce the carbon footprint.

The last job is to protect America’s mountain itself.

It takes hundreds of years

to really establish this high alpine vegetation,

and it was being radically diminished

by sheer numbers of people walking.

At the top of Pikes Peak, Colorado,

the team must find a way to prevent thousands

of visitors from damaging the local plants.

The solution: control where they walk.

Living Building Challenge really

encouraged us to concentrate the foot traffic on improved

pathways and then restore the high alpine tundra.

When we elevated those walkways,

they’re put on very simple little posts or piles.

So the amount of surface area that we’ve impacted

on the mountaintop is greatly reduced.

It also provides the ultimate Rocky Mountain view.

In June 2021, just three years after breaking ground,

the incredible $60 million US

Pikes Peak Visitor Center opens to the public.

This project’s the premier project of my career.

There’s not too many people

that design buildings at 14,000 feet,

so this one was special.

I’m just super proud to have been part

of such a transformational project.

The elevated walkways and huge, tough windows...

offer breathtaking,

uninterrupted views of the Rocky Mountain range.

It’s really incredible when you stand, you go in the lobby.

You really are, you know... 360 degrees, you have views out.

You can just see for hundreds of miles.

You can see where the plains meet the mountains,

and it’s incredible.

This building is also pretty clever,

cutting energy use by 45%,

and they’ve slashed their water use by 350,000 gallons a year.

It will be one

of the most sustainable buildings in the entire world.

And we did it at 14,000 feet.

There’s something unique about that mountain.

And to be able to say that we were part of this,

I think, is a huge achievement.

And I’m hoping that anyone that visits finds

that same inspiration that we did.

A must-see invisible museum?

Sounds like a contradiction, but not in Denmark,

because after 80 years,

anchored inside the castle ,

the Danish Maritime Museum had to move,

and it found the perfect spot to build

in a new home just a few ship-lengths away.

But attached was one very tricky condition:

it must not block views of the castle.

To paraphrase the great English playwright,

"To be seen and yet not to be seen,

that was the question."

And here, folks, is the incredible answer.

Helsingor in Denmark is famous for its historic

and dramatic Kronborg Capital.

Positioned right on the narrow Oresund Strait between

Denmark and Sweden,

the castle once commanded the sea.

Ships that were passing through had to pay a toll

to the king.

So for hundreds of years, Kronborg has been situated

in a very important maritime position

in Danish history.

Since 1923, it had been home

to the Danish Maritime Museum.

Then, at the start of the new millennium,

the castle receives amazing news that isn’t so great

for the museum.

Kronborg was selected UNESCO World Heritage

and they wanted to renovate the castle.

So they wanted us to move as well.

A very fitting location is found right at the foot

of the castle.

They saw this old dry dock that was the remnant

of an old industrial heritage and was also part of a tradition

of shipbuilding that suited the Maritime Museum very well.

The dry dock, where large ships had been repaired,

was part of one of Denmark’s largest shipyard wharfs.

But when the industry

went into decline in the 1980s, it closed.

It feels like the perfect location, but there’s a hitch.

Danish heritage regulations

stipulate it can’t block views of the castle.

The museum couldn’t be more than one meter above the surface.

Um, that was a restriction

that made it clear that we have to go

down and to make the museum underneath the surface.

In 2006, the museum asked architects across Denmark

to come up with a design

that will fit the new museum inside the dilapidated dry dock.

The winner?

Copenhagen’s recently established Bjarke Ingels Group,

are the only ones who think completely outside the docks.

They wanted something spectacular.

They wanted to attract a new audience.

So the question in our heads was,

"How can you make an invisible icon?"

We thought,

"What if we preserve the dock as a 1 to 1 artifact,

an artifact so big that you could never put it in a museum?"

And then we put the museum around the dock.

So we dig a rectangular room underground,

allowing the dock to remain as a courtyard.

It was a radical solution and everyone loved it.

This bold design will create an extraordinary museum,

with the old dry dock as the central exhibit.

77,000 square feet of galleries and offices,

all below ground level, will be wrapped around the outside.

But to build it, they have to drain the dock while keeping

the groundwater from causing it to cave in...

and to stop the water pressure

underneath from making the dock float.

Only then can the museum form

around the outside of the old dry dock.

Finally, they’ll need to design bridges to bring people

into the museum that won’t obscure the dock from view.

It’s a big project

for the young architecture practice to take on.

I think it was like a leap of faith.

I was four years

out of architecture school, and suddenly was leading

this pretty complex engineering project.

In September 2010, they’re ready to start work

turning the dry dock into a museum.

The name dry dock is a little confusing.

It’s built at sea level so you can float a ship in,

close the gate behind it, and then temporarily

pump out the water, allowing work below the ship’s waterline.

The dock in Helsingor has been

abandoned for 25 years and has fallen into disrepair.

It was just left full of water,

and the steel gate that enabled it to be emptied of water

was taken away.

Before they can drain the dock,

they face a major challenge.

All the construction were below surface,

and it was also below the water level.

Surrounded by sea,

the natural groundwater level

here is high and is pushing against the dock walls.

The water inside the dock balances out those forces.

So there’s a danger that the old walls won’t be strong enough

to hold back the groundwater when they drain the dock.

And that’s not the only problem.

If the dock walls give way,

seawater will surge in, dragging tons of sandy soil with it.

That sudden shift

could destabilize the ground beneath the town,

putting Kronborg Castle,

just a few meters away, at serious risk of collapse.

They need to find a way to hold the sea back.

We ended up to do a slurry wall, which is kind of a way

to dig a very deep wall, um...

that you normally use for when you do metros.

You dig a trench around your site

and as you remove the soil, you replace it with slurry.

It’s powdered clay that forms a stiff gel,

and when mixed with cement, creates a waterproof barrier.

In order to reach solid rock,

the walls need to be sunk to an incredible 130 feet.

I’m not sure they excavated any slurry walls

that deep in Denmark, so it was like a first try for me.

It takes them six months just

to get the barrier in place.

They can now pump the water out,

carefully, to protect the fragile dock.

We were afraid that the walls might collapse,

so we emptied it meter by meter,

making sure that the walls didn’t suddenly collapse.

They have to slowly pump out 17 million gallons of water.

Only now will they find out if the slurry walls

will keep the sea at bay.

When you see that the water table is lowering

and on the back side, it’s still stable,

that’s where you can say, "Okay, we did a good job."

That was a good feeling.

With the dock drained, there’s another problem.

Before, the water inside wasn’t just holding back the sea.

It was also pushing down against pressure from below.

When you emptied the dock,

it not only looks like a ship, it literally becomes a ship...

because the water pressure around it wants to push it up.

When the dock is empty, the ground water

beneath it creates a pressure much greater

than the dock’s weight.

It’s the same as when you push a beach ball underwater.

Unless you weigh it down, it’s going to pop right back up.

Right now, it’s being held in place

by the old concrete skirt that provides

the downward force needed to keep it in place.

All the soil out there is the ballast

that keeps the dock down.

The problem is...

they’re going to remove 82,000 square feet

of that ballast to create the museum.

If we removed the soil and emptied it,

it would pop four meters out of the ground.

must find a way to stop the old dry dock from floating up

on the groundwater now that it’s empty.

What we had to do was to drive earth anchors into the ground.

But there’s a problem.

The limestone under the dock is very, very soft.

It was completely unexplored.

Nobody had been crazy enough

to try and anchor anything into this type of limestone.

Only... only we.

The idea?

They will have to sink anchors over 100 feet into the ground.

We drilled down.

We fill in a cement and water grout and put in the anchor,

and then it’s left to harden.

And when the cement has cured up,

you can... you can tension the anchors.

The plan is that these will hold the dry dock down.

Keeping the structure down was a big challenge,

which we solved with a lot of earth anchors.

And he means a lot.

It takes a staggering 461 anchors

to pin everything into place.

Now they can finally dig around the dock to create the museum.

But doing so could disturb the old dock walls.

The knowledge of the quality of the concrete was zero,

so we had to make sure it would not collapse.

We had to add that reinforcement

by drilling several hundred reinforcement bars

inclined into the old structure.

In January 2012,

construction begins on the underground museum spaces

that are going to wrap around the dock.

It will take 20,000 tons of concrete, steel, and glass,

and the team turned its attention to the bridges

that will sit inside the dock to get visitors in and out.

We very quickly realized the only thing

that would be visible were the bridges,

but also that they stood the risk of actually blocking

the experience of the length of the dry dock.

The worry?

If the bridges are too solid,

visitors won’t be able to see the dock

they have carefully preserved.

We wanted them to be as transparent as possible.

And then we came to the idea of,

"What if there was no structure?"

What if it was actually two paper thin bridges,

one at the top, one at the bottom,

with only glass in between?

They turn to China,

a world leader in steel production.

But the sections of bridge are so complex,

production falls months behind schedule.

Finally, after a 13,000-mile journey by sea,

the steel pieces arrive in Helsingor in August 2012.

Now the team has to hope they got the measurements right.

Lifting off 100 tons of 20-meter-long,

eight-meters-wide steel pieces

and then seeing whether they fit,

was definitely one of the most thrilling days of,

uh, of my architectural life.

In just one week, the sections are put into place.

But there’s another engineering challenge.

People walking on the double decker bridges

will create vibrations that cause each bridge

to move differently.

Too much movement will smash the glass walkways.

The team turns to a clever maritime solution.

We hung up in the middle of the span,

a couple of anchor chains that then, you could say,

held the lower bridge from the upper bridge.

The anchor chains are basically stabilizing it.

Chains help absorb the vibrations

from people walking.

They also forced the two bridges to move together,

making sure that the height

between them remains almost constant,

which protects the glass panels.

And with them, the transformation is complete.

The first surprise after we put in the steel bridges

was how much these planes that are just

a little bit sloped, how sculptural the space became.

After three years of construction,

on October 5th, 2013,

the incredible Danish Maritime Museum is open to the public,

turning a forgotten dry dock into the star of the show.

I love that you can look inside the dry dock

and see as it originally was.

I think this is industrial reality and I love it.

23 feet underground,

77,000 square feet of museum space

wraps around the outside of the dry dock

and a triumph of engineering.

It has this play with

the old industrial dry dock, and then this modern facilities.

And I think they kind of talk to each other.

It’s like an adventure.

You’re coming on board a ship

that’s built around an old dry dock underground.

Denmark has a new iconic building, and without an inch

of the museum spoiling views of the castle,

thanks to an extraordinary design vision.

In many ways, the way that the building

is very no compromise is maybe also

a testament to being young and actually believing

that you can you can fight for things

and make them happen.

And then the magic happens, and it actually does come true.

These days, it’s not unusual to see a building with a garden

growing on its roof or along a balcony,

or even climbing up its walls,

but literally cutting a building in half

and planting a massive garden in the middle,

leaving 17 floors of skyscraper to delicately balance on top?

Now that’s something you don’t see every day

unless you’re on Robinson Road in Singapore.

The city state of Singapore

is the second most densely populated country in the world,

strategically situated at the heart of Southeast Asia.

In the 19th century,

the small island became a busy trading hub

and a magnet for big business.

By the 1960s, it was becoming a financial powerhouse,

leading to a boom in building.

Skyscrapers were fast replacing all of the forest vegetation,

and the city was at risk of becoming a concrete jungle.

When Singapore became an independent country in 1965,

its first prime minister decided something had to be done.

It started with the founding father,

the late Mr. Lee Kuan Yew,

with the vision of a garden in the city.

And in 2014,

a tough new planning law guarantees the public

access to greenery.

It mandates all of the new development to replace all

of the green area that is affected by the construction

into the development site.

It leads to some

of the most incredible green spaces in the world.

Development continues and building space becomes scarce.

What’s left often comes

with big problems, like 18 Robinson Road

in the business district.

It is a very unique site, being formed by the amalgamation

of three plots of land, and it’s actually a triangular shape

surrounded by a lot of existing high rise towers.

It’s difficult to build on, and finding space

for any greenery is an even bigger challenge.

That pushed us beyond the boundaries.

We can’t rely anymore on the ground.

We have to put something somewhere.

Then, in 2013, developers bring in Kohn Pedersen Fox,

the architects responsible for New York’s Hudson Yards...

and the towering One Vanderbilt,

who see an opportunity as well as a challenge.

We really allowed that requirement

to be formative in our thinking about the site.

So we came up with a hybrid solution.

It took those office floors

and pushed them as high as they could go.

And then with space left over,

we created intermediate rooftop sky terraces

that made the building much more interesting.

The idea they come up with for this tiny,

triangular plot in downtown Singapore is extraordinary,

but complicated to build.

Their first problem is creating a foundation and a basement

in the soft marine clay soil without causing the busy subway

that’s just 16 feet away to cave in.

Then they need to squeeze in parking

for a hundred cars where there’s no room for a ramp.

Next, a 600-foot-tall tower can start to rise from the ground.

But with a chunk carved out for the green space

at the seventh floor, they’ll need to figure out how

to keep the 20 floors of office above from falling over.

It’ll be a major test of the team’s ingenuity.

To try and make a building such as this work in such a very,

very tight site is... is... is very challenging.

In September 2013,

work starts to clear the small

triangular site on the edge of the business district,

but they immediately face a huge problem.

The dig site is only 16 feet away from Singapore’s

busiest subway line, the MRT.

Any excavation works that you do next to such a critical

infrastructure carries a huge risk of tunnel movement.

Singapore’s soil makes that risk even greater.

Marine clay is typically a type of very soft clay

where you cannot even put machines seated on it.

It’s like butter.

When the soil is almost liquid,

any digging could cause the ground around it to fall in,

and that in turn could cause a subway tunnel to collapse.

It is extremely critical

we ensure that that does not happen.

for the 18 Robinson Road skyscraper

has to overcome the problem of soft,

unstable soil, which could threaten both the tower

and the subway that runs within feet of its site.

To do that, they need to build a soil retaining wall.

As you go down, step by step, you excavate and you cast,

you excavate, you cast.

With this sort of top down construction,

the movement attributed

to the soil around it is highly minimized.

Straight retaining walls

to hold back the soil surrounding the site

will require large struts to support them,

and that will eat into the size of the tower they can build,

making the project less financially viable.

Then the engineers get an idea:

using circular retaining walls.

We were able to inscribe three circles.

Circles have two advantages.

They are strong because they

distribute any pressure evenly across their circumference,

but their shape is also the most efficient use of space.

We have a 30 meter diameter, a 20 meter,

and a 10 meter to form a snowman shape

to deal with the compression lateral force

that comes into the site.

With the snowman foundation in place,

in late 2016,

the main structure of the building starts to take shape.

The bottom of the tower is several stories

of retail space,

and that is done with pretty standard construction.

But when it comes to building the office space above that,

that’s when things get really structurally challenging.

Normally, tall buildings have a concrete core

at the center.

This acts as a spine to help hold the building upright.

But with a slice hacked out of the building,

where do you put this center core?

We have to think out of the box

to see how to carry this 21-story office tower

at the top.

It forces the team to come up with an innovative solution.

The core is offset.

It’s a little bit of like a ballerina solution,

where the building is really coming down

almost on a point, rather than sort of broadly spread.

The problem is that creates enormous downward forces

on one side that could twist the building.

It’s too much for the core to cope with on its own.

A traditional solution

would have had the columns at the perimeter,

and those columns would have run straight to the ground.

In our case, we weren’t able to do that

because of the location of the subway line.

We had to angle the columns in section...

to get them away from the subway.

We came up with the idea of just having two mega columns,

which run from the top to the building,

all the way down to the basement.

They are called Mega because it is actually made of

composite steel of a 1.8 meter diameter,

which is taller than myself.

You are using a combination of both steel and concrete

to create that structure that not only have the strength,

but also have that rigidity, that sort of stiffness

to control the deflection of the building.

With the support in place,

the 21-story office building can now climb above the sloping

garden terrace, finished with a metal and glass exterior.

Those metal panels give it a presence,

like sunlight shimmering off the surface of a lake.

At the start of 2018, the tower is almost complete.

But back down at ground level,

they still have one final hurdle.

City regulations state they need space to park 100 cars.

Traditional car parking is just impossible to the site.

We found that a parking ramp

took up almost all of the footprint.

The solution is technology

developed 9500 miles away in the U.S.

It’s like a robotic car parking system.

To be the first in Southeast East Asia has also a risk.

We are not very sure whether the system will work.

It’s ingenious!

You drive your car into a huge lift

and leave it parked on a platform.

The platform is laser guided through the parking garage

using a series of navigational markers.

That is where the beauty of engineering starts to shine.

Cars are shuttled automatically

to a vacant parking spot somewhere

in the enormous basement.

You shut your car off and let the robot do the job.

It reduces CO2 emissions,

which, in addition to all the plants that make up the gardens,

contributes to the building’s sustainability.

I think all of us, especially engineers,

has a duty to build, to design, in a lean and optimized manner.

In January 2019,

the astonishing 260,000-square-foot

18 Robinson is unveiled,

an iconic building that rises from its tight site

to redefine what a skyscraper can be.

It’s a beautiful sculpture.

It’s like this crystalline architecture.

The building is entirely responsive to its environment.

I just find it really refined and quite unique.

The top 20 stories

seem to teeter precariously into space,

creating room below for a magnificent garden in the sky

that puts nature at the heart of Singapore’s urban sprawl.

When you just want to disconnect from this busyness of life,

you go to the sky garden.

You have a seat, take a deep breath.

Then it’s just over.

You have very nice space to live.

For a very small plot,

it has a big impact on the surroundings.

This building is an exemplar of how you can take

a very, very tight city center site

and make a building work properly.

♪ MTV ♪