Original subtitles

Today, on "Impossible engineering,"

the Shard, a record-breaking super tower...

Construction never been attempted before on a building

this tall in central London.

Taking structural design to new heights.

It's amazing to think the first 21 stories

of this concrete structure

went up before they'd even finished the foundations below.

It took revolutionary engineering...

Look at the crazy amounts of glass

that this building uses: 11,000 separate pieces.

What a stunning sight.

To make the impossible possible.

Some of the world's most iconic buildings

dominate its skyline.

And, in 2012, a modern marvel

was constructed, altering the city's look forever.

Meet the Shard.

At 1,016 feet tall,

this futuristic skyscraper is the tallest in London.

Wow. Look at that.

It looks like a piece of crystal,

a splinter coming up through the earth.

It's so tall.

And it's such a prominent part of the skyline

that you can't help but notice it.

That's an incredibly audacious piece of architecture

and some very impressive engineering.

The Shard rises up from the heart of downtown London.

This jaw-dropping tower is over three times

the height of the statue of Liberty.

Its facade is made

out of a staggering 11,000 glass panels.

That's enough glass to cover 130 basketball courts.

Beneath the 196-foot spire lies the spine of the building.

The colossal concrete core supports 72 levels,

totaling over a million square feet

of floor space.

Building these buildings is always exciting.

You're building up taller than anybody's gone in Europe.

But this one was particularly difficult.

The population in London is surging.

It's estimated that the city

could reach 10 million inhabitants by 2030.

With limited room to grow,

designers of any new buildings are looking to the skies.

Looking across the London skyline

as we approach from the south,

you can really see, it's just crowded.

There's buildings everywhere.

Building in that tight space is a very, very difficult task.

Finding enough open space

to build a mega tower in this bustling city

is a seemingly impossible challenge.

It's in this congested site

just in the corner of a railway station,

things going on all the way around it.

We had no spare site in which to build it.

It's smack in the center of London

with London bridge station on one side,

guy's hospital tower on the other,

the jubilee line of the two passing very close underneath.

And to add to all of that complexity,

there was a building already on this site

that needed to be removed before construction could begin.

The 25,000-ton weight of the old tower

is problematic for the engineering team.

When you put a building on the ground,

the very heavy weight compresses the soil.

It's like a sponge.

It creates a divot where the building is.

And when you take that weight off,

the ground wants to heave,

wants to respond and go back to where it was originally.

And time is of the essence.

You want to put the weight back onto that ground

as quickly as you can.

Building the Shard on this site

would be impossible without help from a great innovator

from the past.

When it comes to building up... - There we go.

Man has always defied the odds.

Well done. Well done.

The builders of ancient Petra carved vast structures

out of sandstone cliffs

in the Jordan desert... - Very good.

Safely perched on a series of giant stone steps.

Oops.

Sorry!

In 12th-century Italy,

warring noble families in bologna

erected over 100 towers.

Bigger was definitely better.

Mama Mia, what a whopper!

Perhaps the first skyscraper city

was 16th-century Shibam in Yemen.

Adopting ancient techniques, its engineers used mud bricks

to build high-rises that were so impressive,

it's known as the Manhattan of the desert.

In the 1950s, the bustling Italian city of Milan

wanted to build a subway.

But tearing up the city streets simply wasn't an option.

Engineers needed to figure out a way

to build without disrupting city life.

We've come here to a site

where the Metro network is being expanded.

Being here and seeing the scale of this site,

you can imagine the tremendous disruption it would be causing

if you tried to do this in the center of the city...

Really an enormous challenge.

Poor soil conditions made tunneling

beneath the city streets nearly impossible.

This is actually a really good illustration

of one of the key problems here in Milan.

We're down here at the bottom of the excavation.

And you can see this is an area

where they're just getting ready to start to dig a tunnel.

And the engineers have gone to really heroic efforts there.

Around that wall, you can see they've put some rubber gasket.

And they've really tried to keep the water

out of the site.

But, in spite of that, you can see

how much water is still flowing in.

So these are about the worst conditions

you could hope to be digging tunnels in.

Engineer Dr. Christian Veder

came up with a brilliant solution.

Before Veder, a technique

called cut-and-cover was the go-to option for tunnelers.

Let's imagine that I want to dig a trench

down between these buildings.

And you can see what happens

when I do that in this Sandy soil.

Initially, there's no problem.

But if I push just a little bit too far,

you can see that, eventually, I destabilize the soil

and my structures will fall into the trench.

And, obviously, that's completely unacceptable

on a site in a congested urban center.

Veder turned the cut-and-cover concept on its head.

Instead of building one big trench initially,

he built two little trenches down the sides of the buildings.

And into those trenches,

he inserted reinforced concrete walls.

And these then became known as diaphragm walls.

After dropping in diaphragm walls,

Veder built a roof over the tunnel,

allowing city traffic to resume above.

Digging, tunneling and construction

could take place without disrupting life in Milan.

Instead of cut-and-cover,

Veder's technique covered, then cut.

It's now known as top-down.

This method was adapted around the world as a way

of completing major subterranean projects with little

to no interruption to the world above.

So what Veder achieved here in Milan

was to pioneer a really innovative construction method.

And it's fair to say that, standing down here

in one of the new tunnels of the Milan Metro,

it simply wouldn't exist without that construction technique.

In 2009, engineers at the Shard

take Veder's top-down method and turn it on its head.

Normally, a building like this would be built

by building a basement first and digging a big hole

down to the bottom level of the basement.

And then starting the... The core from that lowest level

and building upwards.

Now, we built the core on stilts effectively

but held up the core

while we were building it upwards.

And then we were, at the same time,

digging underneath it and going downwards.

That had never been done before.

It was an innovation for the Shard.

Just 23 piles support the Shard's concrete core

as it rises from a void in basement level two.

As excavations of the underground floors

continue around the pre-sunk columns,

the core rises as if balanced on a tabletop above.

This allowed the engineers to shave, literally,

months off this project.

And the Shard was built much more quickly

and much more cheaply than it could otherwise have been.

This really is an engineering marvel.

Pouring the Shard's 800-foot concrete core

requires an epic engineering solution.

It's amazing to think the first 21 stories

of this concrete structure

went up before they'd even finished the foundations below.

At 1,016 feet, the Shard in London

is taller than the Eiffel Tower.

It has 72 habitable floors,

44 elevators and 306 flights of stairs.

Building this mega tower

required almost 2 million cubic feet of concrete.

The Shard is an incredible building.

It just stands high, proud above the London skyline.

And this incredible bit of architecture really

does put London on the map.

This is a really radical building.

It imposes on the London skyline like nothing else.

It ascends into the air.

And the whole thing shines and glistens in the sun.

What a stunning sight.

The Shard's luxury apartments, hotel,

and nearly 600,000 square feet of office space

have set a new benchmark in skyscraper design.

But huge ambition comes at a price.

The $618 million project

required more than 1,400 workers on-site.

As soon as a project like this starts,

you're against the clock every second of the day.

Time is money.

You need to keep going and keep going quickly.

The slow bit of construction is building a concrete core

that is the real basis of stability for the structure.

It holds the building up,

holds the building solid against wind loads

and is a very, very important part of the building.

And getting that in... in place quickly is a real challenge.

The Shard's concrete floor consists

of over 350,000 cubic feet of concrete.

Constructing it would've been impossible

had it not been for a groundbreaking method

developed over 100 years ago.

Architectural historian Jen Masengarb is in Minneapolis,

seeing for herself

how an innovation in the baking industry

is influencing building construction around the world.

In the 1880s, Minneapolis was known

as the flour capital of the world.

Raw grain was brought here from across the northern prairie,

processed here and then shipped across the country

and around the world.

Flour production in the 19th century

was dangerous business.

Dry millstones could ignite flour dust,

causing catastrophic explosions inside wooden silos.

In 1878, the Washburn a,

one of the largest mills in the city, exploded, killing 18.

Grain merchants were facing a storage problem,

so, clearly, a new solution was needed.

Their answer came from engineer Charles Haglin

and grain trader frank Peavey.

Together, they designed a safer, stronger silo.

So, this is what they constructed:

The world's first reinforced concrete grain silo.

The technique that Haglin developed

for the cylindrical shape

was absolutely revolutionary for its time.

Haglin built a wooden cylindrical mold

and filled it with concrete.

Once the concrete set, the mold

was removed and placed on top of the first section.

Haglin repeated this process

until he reached his desired height.

Many of Haglin's peers

didn't think that concrete could hold grain,

so Haglin's experimental tower was filled and tested.

So, Peavey and Haglin's experiment worked.

They had solved the grain storage problem,

and they could take what they learned here

and use it all over the state.

Inspired by his experimental silo,

in 1908, Haglin built the Washburn-Crosby elevator one,

part of the Washburn a mill.

At its peak, it could produce almost 2 million pounds

of flour a day.

The most innovative thing about this design

are these 15 cylindrical silos,

each measuring about 100 feet tall.

Constructed by Charles Haglin, they were the first large-scale,

concrete grain silos in the U.S.

To build the silos, Haglin

developed an ingenuous new method called slip forming.

His new technique allowed him to continually move

the concrete-filled mold.

So, what we've got here

is a simple demonstration of how slip forming works.

I've got this bucket of slightly wet sand here.

This is gonna represent our concrete.

And I've got this other bucket here with a hole cut in the top.

This is gonna represent our slip form.

And here's how the process works.

A little of the concrete goes in.

And, slowly, about a few inches every hour, the slip form

gets raised up and up.

And then I add a little more.

And raised up a little bit higher.

The rig is continually forced up by hydraulic Jacks

while concrete is poured nonstop.

The concrete at the top remains wet and fluid.

By the time the concrete emerges from the bottom

of the moving mold,

it's dry enough to support the growing structure.

The combination of the speed of the rig,

how fast the slip forming moves up the structure and the fact

that the concrete has to be poured continuously into the top

so that the top layer never fully cures,

this is the key to making this whole process work.

Haglin's rig was so efficient,

it could scale 8 feet in just 24 hours.

Each cylinder was poured in just 12 days.

Haglin's use of slip form construction

revolutionized the way

that tall buildings are constructed.

And, today, concrete

has become one of the most widely used materials

in construction,

allowing us to build higher and faster than ever.

At over 800 feet, the Shard's concrete core

is nearly eight times taller

than the Washburn-Crosby elevator silos.

Engineers used a super-sized version

of Haglin's pioneering rig.

The giant slip form rig measured 85-by-72 feet.

It was moving upwards at 3 meters a day,

almost a floor a day.

You have steel shutters,

which form the shape of the concrete.

And then they are moved up almost continuously,

6 days a week, 24 hours a day.

Thanks to a high-capacity concrete pump,

the system was so efficient,

it reached the 21st floor in just 10 weeks.

It's amazing to think the first 21 stories

of this concrete structure

went up before they'd even finished the foundations below.

The concrete core is still sitting on just 23 piles

in the center of the basement.

Engineers need to pour the rest of the foundation

before they can continue building up the core.

This includes basement level three's raft foundation...

A massive concrete pour.

It took 32 hours.

We poured the whole thing in one go.

It's as much as 3 meters thick in the middle,

underneath the core.

And it was 5,500 cubic meters of concrete.

They had trucks coming in from three different concrete plants.

It was tremendously exciting

to see all that concrete arriving on-site.

To finish the Shard, engineers

are bringing in some of the tallest,

most powerful tower cranes in the world.

They started with four cranes at ground level.

Those went up to about 160 meters.

But, above that,

we've still got 140 meters of the building to go.

How do we get the structure,

the construction equipment up to that height?

A daring engineering solution is needed.

In 2012, London's skyline was transformed.

Three times taller than the statue of Liberty,

the Shard dwarfs everything around it.

Two of its biggest fans,

physicist Andrew Steele and engineer

David knight are taking in this architectural masterpiece

from every angle.

This is London's Burj Khalifa. This is London's Shanghai tower.

It was built in very trying circumstances

and at speed.

And London engineers are really proud of that achievement.

Built from a central concrete core,

the tower's unique,

hybrid superstructure is pulled up around it.

40 floors, constructed of steel,

29 stories of concrete,

topped off by a monumental, 23-story spire

at the pinnacle of the building.

Building a tower this tall in the middle of London

presents some unique logistical challenges.

When you're building a tower that's over 300 meters high,

one of the real challenges is getting the people

and the materials up to these incredible heights

when you're doing the construction.

And the higher the tower gets, the harder

that challenge becomes.

Construction had never been attempted before

on a building this tall in central London.

And it was a real challenge to get men and materials

up to the top floor.

So how do you get enormous amounts

of building material to the top of a mega tower like the Shard?

It would be impossible without help from the innovators

of the past.

To construct the great pyramids, the ancient Egyptians

had to rely on elbow grease and a lot of determination

to scale their network of ramps.

As cranes were introduced, the treadwheel allowed engineers

to use leg power with impressive results.

Faster, faster!

Only walking pace was recommended.

Erecting a giant obelisk in 16th-century Rome

required even more muscle.

It took 800 men to raise a vast lifting tower.

Ah-choo!

Plenty of power to get it up as long

as no one let you down.

A more reliable solution

to heavy weight-lifting came 3 centuries later.

Dr. Rhys Morgan is exploring the waterways of Venice,

soaking in a centuries-old seafaring tradition,

which ultimately led to an engineering innovation.

Throughout history, this city

has had an unshakable affiliation

with all things waterborne.

And the mid to late 19th-century was no different.

It was a time of great change in the maritime industry.

And old, wooden galleys propelled by oar and wind

were being replaced by steel-hull ships

and great, big engines.

This new wave of heavyweight ships

posed a huge problem for engineers

at Venice's historic naval shipyard, the arsenal.

Traditional, manually operated cranes

couldn't handle heavy loads.

This seriously compromised

the Italian Navy's boat-building program.

They turned to British engineer sir William Armstrong.

He came up with the perfect solution

to Venice's maritime construction conundrum.

Because of the growing trend of metal-hull construction,

the Navy decided to commission just the thing for the arsenale.

And here it is.

A stunning Armstrong crane.

Completed in 1885, this colossal structure

is an imposing addition to the venetian skyline.

And today, Rhys has special access to its inner workings.

And the way it works is like this.

This huge boiler would generate enormous amounts of steam.

And that steam would flow up through the pipework,

down into these chambers below.

The steam drove these enormous pistons

back and forth, back and forth.

And they, in turn,

helped pressurize the hydraulic circuit.

The water was taken from the lagoon outside.

And the pressure from the pistons

generated huge amounts

of pressure on the hydraulic system itself.

The Armstrong crane can lift what was, at the time,

an unimaginable 160-ton load.

It transformed the fortunes of arsenal.

It was the power that meant

that previously unimaginable weights could be lifted.

And it opened up a whole new frontier

in crane technology.

Over a 30-year period,

nine more of Armstrong's cranes were installed around the world,

ushering in a new era in crane development.

By pushing the boundaries of what cranes were capable of,

Armstrong created a landmark in engineering history

and paved the way for incredible projects

that we see all around the world today.

Engineers at the Shard

took Armstrong's historic crane design

to the next level.

Building this superstructure

meant building some of the tallest,

most powerful tower cranes in the world.

They started with four cranes at ground level.

Those went up to about 160 meters.

But, above that,

we've still got 140 meters of the building to go.

How do we get the structure,

the construction equipment up to that height?

Engineer John Parker and his team

came up with a radical idea.

Mounting a tower crane to the Shard's concrete core.

What was unique about the Shard

was that the tower crane was supported on that slip form.

Usually, you have to fix the crane to the concrete.

We avoided all that so they could both go up together.

As hydraulic Jacks pushed the core and crane higher,

the machinery is kept stable against wind speeds

in excess of 100 miles per hour

by extending the lower section of the crane

into one of the already cast lift shafts.

Installing the Shard's spire

required an even more radical approach.

They then had to use the crane

that was attached to the slip form

to build another crane

which cantilevered off the main building

and allowed them to build this final spire

on top of the structure.

Engineers elevate the tower crane

to a staggering 1,040 feet,

enabling them to install the custom-built steel sections

that form the 23-story spire.

The section could arrive on a truck.

They could attach it to the crane,

lift it up to the top, bolt it in place

and then get the hook back down to lift up the next section

in 20 minutes.

Over 500 tons of steel

is installed in nearly 100 separate lifts.

The Shard was really gonna hit the absolute limit

of how high you could build in London.

With the building at its full height, designers

can finally begin to visualize the monumental shard.

40 floors of steel house almost 600,000 square feet

of office space.

For the hotel and residential accommodations,

concrete is used to enhance acoustics

and limit the building's sway.

¶¶

Safety is a top priority for the builders

and engineers of the Shard.

We know from previous fires in tall buildings

that it's a real challenge

to get people out of the building safely.

And that's an absolute focus

to engineers working on tall buildings like this.

To ensure the Shard's inhabitants are safe

if there is a fire,

its designers need to draw on an innovation

that's over 100 years old.

Professor Luke Bisby is in Edinburgh, Scotland,

recreating an engineering marvel that changed the face

of building safety around the world.

Now, it might be difficult for many of us today

to recognize that fire was once a very serious

and everyday threat to our homes and businesses.

Heating and lighting were both largely reliant on open flame.

And, in combination with the fact

that many of our buildings were made largely from wood,

this is obviously not the best combination.

In 1874, Connecticut businessman Henry Parmelee

developed a system

that helped combat the threat of fire.

With inefficient fire extinguishers,

factories in many U.S. cities were burning to the ground.

Insurance costs were skyrocketing.

Parmelee was determined to control the premiums

on his piano factory,

so he came up with an ingenuous form

of fire prevention.

So what we're gonna do here

is try to recreate a simplified version

of Parmelee's invention.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start a small fire here.

Any fire in a building is a bad situation.

And fires are particularly a problem

in industrial buildings of the type

that Parmelee was using because,

if you have a localized fire such as this one,

that fire can then spread to other flammable contents

of the building.

During evening and even some daytime shifts,

many areas of Parmelee's factory were unattended,

so human detection wasn't a reliable solution.

So the problem that Parmelee faced was,

how do you detect a fire

and then put that fire out if there's nobody around?

So the solution that Parmelee came up with

is actually here next to me.

And the really critical piece is this little cap right here.

And what I have here is a little, metal valve.

And, on the underside of the valve,

I have a secondary piece of metal.

And we've attached that in this demonstration

just with some wax.

Now, Parmelee actually used a low-temperature-melting alloy.

What I now have is essentially a valve

on the bottom of this pipe that is temperature sensitive.

And so the system that Parmelee

had invented basically consisted of a reservoir of water.

That reservoir is connected through a hole

in its base to this copper pipe.

That copper pipe runs across and down to the valve

that Parmelee had created.

Now, let's see what happens

when we introduce fire into our system.

And, as I do that, the valve gets warm,

and the wax that is holding the plate in place

should release the copper plate.

And the valve almost instantaneously,

sensitive to the temperature,

releases water down onto my fire.

And so what Parmelee had invented

was really the world's first

automatic fire suppression system

that both detects and reacts to a fire very quickly.

Parmelee called his invention the automatic fire extinguisher.

It was rapidly adopted in the U.S. and Europe.

His game-changing piece of engineering paved the way

for modern sprinkler systems around the world.

Engineers at the Shard

are taking Parmelee's automatic fire extinguisher

to the next level.

They're incorporating one of the world's most advanced

fire suppression systems into their mega structure.

The sprinkler system is all centrally controlled

by a building management system.

Total fire engineering control here,

getting the water around the building

to where the fire is likely to be.

Driven by 200 kilowatt motors,

two mega pumps feed water to seven sprinkler zones.

Three pumping stations are located at different levels,

insuring even pressure for the building's hydrants.

Access for firefighters is via three shafts.

Each includes stairs and a fire elevator,

allowing occupants to leave by the same means.

This is one of the first buildings

where people can use the lifts rather than just the stairs

when being evacuated in fires.

¶¶

The designers of the Shard

are pushing the limits of architecture.

To build this audacious structure

required, literally,

acres of glass, 56,000 square meters,

which is equivalent to nearly eight football fields.

Their goal is to make the Shard the most beautiful structure

on the London skyline.

The Shard in central London

is rewriting the engineering rule book.

Its 73 stories are a mind-blowing sight.

This jaw-dropping tower is over three times

the height of the statue of Liberty.

Its facade is made

out of a staggering 11,000 glass panels.

That's enough glass to cover 130 basketball courts.

Beneath the 196-foot spire lies the spine of the building.

The colossal concrete core supports 72 levels,

totaling over a million square feet

of floor space.

It's just incredible.

It's this audacious piece of architecture,

a splinter of crystal bursting out of the earth.

And, amongst this grand center of London,

all these different buildings,

the Shard just towers above all of them.

For structural engineer David knight,

its stunning looks come down to one material

that appears to rise straight out of the river Thames.

Look at the crazy amounts of glass

that this building uses, 11,000 separate pieces.

It's extraordinary.

It just extends above me in a great, big ribbon of glass

up to the sky.

To build this audacious structure,

required literally acres of glass,

56,000 square meters,

which is equivalent to nearly eight football fields.

But glass is weak.

So how do you create London's tallest building out of it?

It would be impossible without some inspiration

from an architectural risk taken 150 years ago.

Engineer Dr. Rhys Morgan

is in the city of Liverpool in the U.K.

To see the building that holds the secret

to modern skyscraper design.

In the 19th century,

as cities like Liverpool grew ever more dense

and space for buildings became smaller,

architects were faced with a real problem.

They had to build upwards, but, in doing so,

they had to build thicker and thicker walls

to support the increasing weight of their structures.

So they needed a new engineering solution.

Local architect Peter Ellis provided the answer.

He came up with a revolutionary design

for his high-rise building.

This is the oriel chambers building,

tucked away in Liverpool’s financial district.

And, although a relatively unassuming building,

it contains one of the world's most important engineering

and architectural blueprints.

In 1864, U.K. Architect Peter Ellis

designed a structure

which holds the key to modern skyscraper design.

This is the oriel chambers building,

tucked away in Liverpool’s financial district.

And, although a relatively unassuming building,

it contains one of the world's most important engineering

and architectural blueprints.

The oriel chambers building

doesn't need exterior supporting walls.

An iron framework carries the load of the structure

on the inside.

This allowed Ellis to create a facade

on the outside that doesn't have to support the building.

Ellis' iron frame structure not only carried the weight

and provided structural stability,

but it also opened up a whole new world

of architectural possibilities.

Walls could be thinner and lighter.

Previously unimaginable amounts of glass

could cover the building's exterior.

Ellis created the glass curtain wall.

In 1864, it was a really radical idea.

And Ellis was criticized by his contemporaries

for creating an architectural aberration.

Architects may have been skeptical,

but developers saw the potential.

The building has 56 road-facing bay windows

over five floors.

The windows flood the interior with light,

creating premium office space.

150 years later, the benefits are still clear.

It would've been a real luxury

to work in here with the abundance of light

coming in through these bay windows

or oriel windows, as they're properly called.

And, to compare it

with the building across the street

where the stone construction

means the windows are very small,

this would've been an amazing place

to work in because of the light coming in from all directions.

And you also didn't have to use electricity

to use lighting in the wintertime,

a real advanced idea for the 19th century.

The fact that these chambers were built in 1864,

over 150 years ago,

makes it one of the world's first examples

of a glass curtain wall

installed on a multi-story office building.

And to think that he was derided for it

and was so far ahead of his time is quite extraordinary.

Ellis' groundbreaking work on the chambers building

has inspired American architects for centuries...

And is still shaping the skylines

of the world's greatest cities.

It's incredible to think that, without Ellis' pioneering use

of the curtain wall concept,

the glass-clad super towers of today,

which dominate cities across the world,

might not ever have been invented.

It's a real masterpiece of engineering.

Engineers at the Shard

are building on Ellis' glass curtain wall

to create their own one-of-a-kind structure.

13 acres of glass cover the Shard.

What's incredible is that, from outside the Shard,

it looks like it's a structure made entirely of glass.

But, actually, this glass takes none of the weight.

That's all borne by the steel

and the concrete structure inside.

An incredible piece of engineering.

The steel and the concrete makes the building stand up.

That's provides the strength and the stiffness,

stops it swaying about, supports all the loads.

And one of the loads it supports is the weight of the cladding,

the weight of the glass.

Unlike the rectangular oriel chambers building,

the Shard's extraordinary super structure

allows its designers to hang eight sloping facades,

defined by the tower's iconic vertical fractures.

It's often called the Shard of glass.

And the idea was to have

a beacon here that would shine out.

And this sloping shape is very good

at reflecting the sunlight and making it shine.

Creating a vision of glass on this scale

calls for extraordinary measures

never before attempted in London.

The steel super structure of the building

is enveloped by 11,000 panels of glass,

each of them weighing 300 kilograms.

And the only way to install them was for each of them

to be installed individually by a specialist engineer.

And looking at it from up here, you can see that's not a job

for the faint-hearted.

The final glass section is fitted,

signifying a milestone for the Shard.

It is good to be at the cutting edge

and driving things forward

and doing stuff that's never been done before.

This seemingly impossible architectural achievement

took less than 4 years

from breaking ground to grand opening.

It's the result of brilliant planning,

design and testing by hundreds of engineers.

I'm personally excited because I see symbols of London

that now include the Shard.

It's very exciting

to be involved with something like this.

This is, uh, it's a one-off.

It's a once-in-a-lifetime achievement.

By learning from the great pioneers of the past,

adapting, upscaling,

and making innovations of their own,

engineers have changed the face of skyscraper design forever.

The Shard isn't just an amazing piece of engineering,

but it's captured the public imagination too,

become a tourist attraction in its own right.

And that surely is amongst its greatest achievements.

The creators of the Shard

have succeeded in making the impossible possible.

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