Original subtitles

How do you create

a 300-foot ski jump

that floats in the air,

while battling sub-zero temperatures

and 60 mile an hour winds?

It's one of the absolute toughest places to be.

What happens when one of the world's

most exacting architects designs a museum

where the imagination takes flight?

The fact that he thought

that buildings could physically move

is pretty radical.

And how do you keep a high-rise tower

standing in the middle of an earthquake zone

with no internal spine

or supporting columns?

We're less than a tenth of a mile away

from the Newport-Inglewood Fault

which is the cause of the 1933 earthquake.

Welcome to a world

where anything is possible.

The space where innovation and creativity collide...

Part building, part transformer.

It's incredible.

...where the only limit

is human imagination.

This is mind-blowing when you think about it.

We're talking about actually living on another planet.

Unpacking the miracles and mysteries of construction.

This was engineering

on a scale the world had never seen.

To ask...

How Did They Build That?

130 years ago,

a Norwegian looked over the edge of a mountain

and said to his buddies, "Guys, I'm going to jump off

and see how far I can go."

And instead of having him committed,

they made it a sport.

You've got to love Norwegians.

And Norwegians love ski jumping.

So much so that they created the gravity-defying

world's longest cantilevered ski jump,

and it literally floats in space.

When people say that Norwegians are born

with skis on their feet, it's not far from the truth.

The sport of ski jumping was invented here

almost 200 years ago.

I think it's one of the first national sports

we had in Norway.

In 1886, the very first ski jump competition

took place on the hills above Oslo.

And 20-odd years later,

they built the first national ski jump

at Holmenkollen.

All our heroes, er, you know,

came from ski jumping back in the day.

The largest crowd ever to see

a single winter sports event.

150,000 people

converges on Oslo's Holmenkollen hill.

Over the next 100 years,

it was updated and extended 18 times.

It was the most legendary ski jump in the world.

Holmenkollen is special

and I think it's always been special,

not only for me, but for everyone

that is, you know, connected to ski jumping.

The sixth winter games get a spectacular wind up

in Oslo.

In May 2006,

Norway is awarded

the 2011 World Ski Championships.

The problem is the Holmenkollen jump

is no longer fit for purpose.

It was very narrow hill,

very old fashioned, very steep.

There was, uh, no protection anywhere.

It was not safe anymore to be--to be short.

Not only do they need to replace it,

but they also have to honour

Holmenkollen's proud heritage.

It was important to make a ski jump

for the future generations.

So in 2007,

they hold a competition to find a new design.

And a young, relatively unknown architect wins.

I had been an architect

for six years.

And my practise was only two years old.

Never done a ski jump and probably never will do

another ski jump.

The first thing that crosses your mind

is, like, you know, be careful what you wish for,

because this is not gonna be easy.

What Julien de Smedt plans

is an extraordinary 300-foot-long

curving swoosh design.

First, though, they must demolish the old ski jump

while preserving the historical ski museum underneath.

Next, the 1,100 ton steel structure

will start to grow.

And somehow, the jump will only be fixed

to its support at one point.

They must also allow for the steel

expanding and contracting

with the massive changes in temperature.

And perilously, they will have to build the jump

up into thin air,

while barely being able to support it.

Finally, they must find a way to protect skiers

from the dangerous crosswinds as they fly down the jump

at 60 miles per hour.

It's a tall order for the engineers,

literally.

The first time I saw it, er, I thought

that it was a pretty crazy construction for a ski jump.

Finally, after months of budgetary delays,

the team gets the green light.

The World Ski Championship is fast approaching.

We had only one and a half years

to build the new one.

So that was really bad.

The first job is demolishing the old ski jump

without damaging the historic

National Ski Museum underneath.

We were afraid of destroying it,

so it was done in pieces

with a concrete cruncher with a very long arm.

And it was taking it down piece by piece,

very carefully.

With that done, they turn to building the jump.

The design, though, is incredibly complicated

and requires 40,000 different pieces of steel.

When we started the project,

the 3D model we got was asymmetric.

It made it very hard for us to do the production,

so we needed to redraw the models.

The actual timing was about three to four months, er, delay.

With the designs finally reworked,

in Poland, work begins producing the steel parts

for the 300-foot-long frame.

It's a huge job.

So, er, it's about 1,400 tonnes of steel.

In many ways, steel was the perfect choice.

It's strong yet lightweight,

and it can handle heavy and dynamic loads.

Not only that, but it can be fabricated in sections

and then assembled on site.

In spring 2009,

they begin their 1,000 mile journey to site

where the team is ready to put them together.

So we had, er, two cranes, er, one big on the top

and one down here, and lifted in the first section.

The tolerance is only 50 millimetres.

It's not much on this structure.

So it's a very tough, demanding thing.

Despite only having two inches wiggle room

to fit each huge piece,

the frame slowly takes shape.

And then...

the weather turns.

It's one of the absolute toughest places to be.

Lots of the time, we had fog,

sometimes, we didn't see the crane top.

Sometimes, we had wind, so we had to shut down the work

for half a day or a day and so on.

You get nervous, always waiting for better conditions.

So, things had to go really fast.

Sometimes we had, you know, 500 workers on site

going crazy, it was like an ant farm.

As the weather closes in, building the frame becomes

more and more treacherous.

Water is welding's enemy.

In high heat, the water breaks down,

releasing hydrogen that then gets trapped

inside of the metal as it cools,

which can cause brittle and weak joints.

Not only that, the water acts as an electrical conductor

which can cause very dangerous

and even fatal electric shocks.

So we had to build tents around every spot

that was welded.

It's 26,000 bolts.

And we have about 15 tons of welding material.

Er, it means that, er, that we have

almost 1,500 kilometres of welding wire.

It takes 54,000 man hours to complete

the Herculean 930 miles of welding.

Then, in October 2009, the team reaches

the most critical part of the build,

the one point in the middle where the jump

is fixed to the support wall.

The whole construction weighs

around, er, 2,000 tons.

97% of the weight,

er, ends up in the mid support.

It has to be rock solid

and able to cope with temperatures

ranging from -15

to +70 degrees Fahrenheit.

When it gets warmer, the steel expands.

And when it gets colder, it shrinks.

If there was no absorption of movement at all,

it could rupture the structure.

So, the team designs a special joint

to connect the jump to the supporting wall.

So, the mid support wall

is not welded to the jump,

it's, er, hinged with a very large kind of hinge.

The hinge carries all the weight.

Each bolt that holds it in place

weighs nearly 200 pounds

and is heat-treated for nine months.

This is to make it strong enough

to support the 2,000 tons of ski jump.

They're probably some of the toughest bolts

in the world.

Now, they have to connect the 2,000 ton ski jump

to that tiny hinge.

If it wouldn't fit, it would be a total game-stopper

for the project.

And the steel didn't fit.

The team building Norway's National Ski Jump

is racing to finish in time for the World Championships.

But as it tries to join the jump to the one place

it touches the ground...

The steel didn't fit.

It could mean they've got

their calculations wrong,

or the sun had made it expand too much.

So they wait until nightfall,

hoping the steel will contract enough

to slot onto the hinge when the temperature drops.

On October 13, 2009,

the team prepares themselves.

Yeah, we were pretty nervous.

If this doesn't work, there's a real danger

the project will be delayed.

In the night, the steel in the front shrink.

It kinda moved slowly.

And then it came into the right position,

so that we could drill the hole...

for the hinge.

Now, the team has to work fast.

Until the jump is connected to the slope,

the whole thing is hanging in mid-air.

The crane had to hold this section

for four days

during welding the main beams.

So, er, we had to have people

all the hour around the clock

to just see that everything was in the exact position.

At the end of 2009,

with just months until the games,

they take on their next challenge.

Holmenkollen has always been a place

with too much wind.

We're on the top of a hill.

Er, wind can come from different directions...

...so it's very unpredictable.

For ski jumpers, that's a nightmare.

Wind creates turbulence

which leads to sudden drag

and loss of lift mid-jump.

It's the last thing you want

when you're flying through the air

at 60 miles per hour.

Somehow, they need to build wind protection

into the jump.

We have some guys that know

aerodynamics and airflow,

and they came up with a solution

of using a mesh.

I was not sure if this would work,

to be honest.

Never done before,

never been in any venue in the world.

It's new to skiing, but tried and tested

in aeronautical engineering.

Rather than resisting the wind,

it controls its flow, reducing drag

and turbulent wake.

With the mesh fitted,

the jump is nearly complete.

And then winter hits early.

It was the coldest winter in many years, in 2010.

As temperatures dropped to -15 degrees Fahrenheit,

the team struggles with trying to get the jump finished.

We have worked really hard day and night.

Er, the guys was really worn out.

We came closer and closer to the date

that we had to take the decision

to cancel the whole competition.

Then... they get a lucky break.

We got the weather, we could lift the sections,

and, er, we said that, okay,

now we are in, er-- in the time schedule,

so we go for it.

When the final piece, er, went up

and we connected it and, er, everything fitted

and we started welding and so on, it was a relief.

Finally, in March 2010,

the incredible 300-foot-long ski jump is finished.

Just in time for the championship trials.

It's a symbol for, er, Norwegian sports

and for the whole country, I think.

It's a big honour for us.

The first ski jump ever

to have built-in wind protection,

it's not only prettier than its predecessor,

it's also safer.

With the wind nets that are built-in on the side,

it really feels very different from the old one.

It feels safer, it feels more calm.

It's also become a destination,

attracting up to a million visitors

each year.

Holmenkollen is a Norwegian icon.

It's a part of the silhouette of Oslo.

It's so sleek, it's really cool.

I grew up nearby, so I could see the old tower

and now I can, sort of, see the new one.

So I was very proud to be a part of the team.

I think it's probably one of my best,

if not my best piece, so I love it.

Okay. So, you're a once great city

facing tough times.

What do you do to inspire the place

to hit the heights again?

Simple, give it an art gallery

that literally looks like it could fly.

If only those big flapping wings

didn't weigh 90 tons.

Those darn laws of aerodynamics always ruin the fun.

The 1940s to the 1960s

was a time when Milwaukee ran

on labour and grit.

At its peak, factories hummed and assembly lines

ran day and night.

It was a big brewing town,

so it's known as Brew Town here.

Then as global competition and automation grew,

the industries that built the city

started to shrink, and unemployment soared.

It was very much a blue-collar factory town

in the middle of the Rust Belt.

When that economy started drying up,

it hit Milwaukee hard.

But here's the thing about the fifth largest city

in the Midwest,

it is resilient.

And in 1994,

it's ready for reinvention.

They needed something extraordinary

to actually draw attention to what the city had.

Incredible pieces of architecture

like the Pompidou Centre in Paris

had been built to change the fate of cities.

Milwaukee thought that creating a new art museum

could do the same for them.

Now, what they need is an architect

with a bold enough vision.

They hired someone to do sort of a survey

of great buildings around the world.

They came up with 70 different architects.

They asked them all to bid.

None makes the grade.

Then, museum director Russell Bowman

makes a chance discovery.

Russell was looking through a magazine,

saw these amazing pictures

of Santiago Calatrava's work over in Europe.

Calatrava will go on to create

extraordinary buildings like New York City's The Oculus.

But at the time, he's relatively unknown

in the US.

He seizes the opportunity

to build something remarkable

on the edges of Lake Michigan.

It's one of the projects that I enjoy more

in my career and in my life,

trying to capture the beauty of the landscape

or the significance of this lake who,

in the reality looking in from the shore,

it seems to be an ocean.

Calatrava's vision for the Milwaukee Art Museum

is as ambitious as it is astounding.

A 90-foot-high glass encased cathedral-like hall

topped off with a pair of giant wings.

Measuring over 200 feet,

they will be an extraordinary sight

as they open and close like a bird in flight.

But there are many challenges ahead,

which begin by needing to find a way

to secure a building weighing thousands of tons

on an unstable bed of clay.

Then somehow, they'll need to build

the 200-foot-long hall

without traditional columns

or many straight lines.

Next, at the prow-like lakeside end,

the team needs to construct a 90-foot wall of glass,

and make sure it won't shatter.

When all that's done, they'll have to work out

what to make the huge wings from

and engineer them to flap on cue

every single day.

Finally, the team must work out how to construct

a gravity-defying bridge

linking the museum to the city.

The fact that he thought

that buildings could physically move

is pretty radical.

From my standpoint, it was very exciting

to have the opportunity to work on something so ambitious.

But then it's, "Be careful what you wish for,"

because it was like, we've never done this before.

It's December 10th, 1997

and the site on Lake Michigan's shoreline

throws up its first challenge.

It was a contaminated site.

There wasn't really any precedent for building

on this, what they called, unlicensed abandoned landfill

in the Lake Michigan bed.

The question is, how do you build foundations

on unstable ground to support a building

with huge moving wings?

The building is really complex

and has areas that are incredibly heavy

and others that are comparatively light.

If you just sit this on the piles,

there's a real danger that the movement of the wings

could put such different forces on different piles

that the whole thing could twist and collapse.

The decision was made to use a very thick mat slab,

so essentially the entire art museum

is floating on a mass of concrete

sitting over all the soils that we encountered.

The mat takes all the forces coming down from the building

and transfers them equally into the ground.

Now they just have to build it,

but being on the edge of a lake isn't ideal.

We're actually ten feet below Lake Michigan,

so we had, er, groundwater to contend with.

Hundreds of interlocking steel sheet piles

are sunk deep into the soil, to keep the water out

as they excavate the site.

Over the next three months, the team pours

the 50,000-square-foot concrete mat foundation.

That, though, is the easy bit because Calatrava's approach

is to create something of beauty

but always to push at the boundaries

of what's possible.

Architecture is an art,

and as an art, it can be approached

from many points of view.

To build the 200-foot-long hall

without any supporting columns,

Calatrava turns to a piece of engineering magic.

The ring beam is a huge beam

of concrete and steel that creates a ring

around the top of the support elements.

It's critical to holding up the entire roof structure,

the entire glazing system,

and a significant part of the spire

that supports all the wings as well.

So, the ring beam needs to be huge, strong,

and built 50 feet in the air.

Inside the ring beam

is some of the most massive steel rods

that I've ever seen in my entire career.

Enormous formwork moulds

are balanced on top of scaffolding

ready to be filled with 1,000 tons of concrete.

We really wanted it to be one continuous pour.

We didn't wanna have a cold joint or a break

in between the ring beam itself.

The night before the pour, I don't think anybody sleeps.

In Milwaukee, the team building

architect Santiago Calatrava's cathedral-like art museum,

complete with gigantic wings

that will move like a bird in flight,

is about to pour the 3,000-ton ring beam

that holds the entire structure together.

I remember a lot of people saying,

"John, are you sure this is gonna work?"

September 21st, 1999,

the pour begins.

The challenge was once we started,

you literally could not stop.

It had to be one monolithic pour.

Over 13 hours,

eighty trucks deliver around

1,500 cubic yards of concrete.

You had to be very slow, very careful.

There's still no guarantees in the outcome.

The team will only know if it's worked

when the last drop has been poured

and the concrete has set.

You pull apart that first form

and you see the smooth concrete face.

It's like, "Oh thank heavens, we made it."

Over the next eight months,

the vast space is built and then glazed

before a gravity-defying bridge is added,

connecting the museum to downtown.

Finally, in 2000,

work begins on the most complicated bit

of a very complicated build,

the 217-foot-long wings that sit on top.

The fact of the movement

you can associate it to many things:

to the horizon, er,

to the lake in front of you,

but also to the birds who are flying.

Calatrava's idea is to build them

from carbon fibre.

Used in rockets and supercars,

it's light and strong.

What it's not is cheap.

The price kept getting more expensive

and people were saying, "Okay,

have we bitten off more than we can chew?"

With the completion date looming,

Calatrava goes back to the drawing board.

We are in front of an insurmountable problem.

So, I look deeply into the engineering of the wings

and with my team, we make some calculations.

It was Calatrava coming to the table saying,

I think that we can accomplish

what we need to out of traditional steel.

To do that,

the steel needs to be very thin.

Thin construction steel means,

you know, steel who goes under eight millimetres.

Only a few workshops in the world are capable.

Calatrava picks one more than 4,000 miles away

in Spain.

Finally, in August 2001, the wings are ready.

They were shipped on the world's largest aeroplane,

a Russian Antonov.

The wings were intended to be shipped

on September 11, 2001.

Then the terrorist attacks happened,

so all the air traffic in the country was shut down.

We had the grand opening gala planned.

We didn't know if it was going to be able to happen.

On September 18th, the wings arrive,

and there are just 20 days to fit them.

The next step was pray that everything's gonna fit.

We didn't have a whole lot of time

to construct those wings.

But everything pieced together as it should.

The big question is,

will the extraordinary wings

with their 217-foot span actually flap?

I remember we did that at a midnight,

under cover of darkness so nobody would see it.

You know, when we pushed the button,

were they really gonna open?

Were they gonna partially open and get stuck?

When we did it, I remember, it was just exactly the way

that I had envisioned it.

The night that we first

were able to see them work

was an amazing feeling.

October 13, 2001,

Milwaukee Art Museum is finally complete.

We always knew we were building something special,

but we didn't know how special.

This is really beyond anybody's expectation.

I love working in a museum

that flaps its wings a couple of times a day.

When kids first walk into the building

they're like, "Oh, my gosh,"

and they are just unfiltered.

This building taught me

there isn't anything that's impossible.

And it's made the statement that we have

world-class craftsmen here in the city of Milwaukee.

We make things that are as complex

as anything you'll find in the world.

It's not only a professional experience,

it's also a human experience.

It's a huge symbol of hope for the city.

Culver City used to be home to movie giant MGM.

And I'm guessing, if I pitched those guys the idea

of constructing a 17-story tower in an earthquake zone,

to be lifted off the ground and lowered into place,

all held together with huge steel bandages

because there were no columns inside...

yeah, I'd never work in this town again.

The 1930s is the Golden Age of Hollywood.

The glamour that was in full flower

when people like Clarke Gable were sure to be there.

Los Angeles is setting the standard

for movie entertainment around the globe.

And nearby Culver City is helping.

That was home to major studios like MGM

where classics like Gone with the Wind,

The Wizard of Oz, and Ben Hur,

they were all filmed there.

Tucked among the studios

are factories and warehouses.

Even billionaire Howard Hughes

relocates his aircraft company there.

By the 1980s, though,

the Golden Age of Hollywood is in decline,

and Culver City is losing its sheen.

It left the area

largely uninhabited, desolate.

There was a lot of vacant warehouse spaces

and factory buildings

because the area was sort of left to die, in a way.

In step two unlikely developers

who spy an opportunity.

We felt that things could turn around

but nobody else was thinking that way.

Former Hollywood actress Laurie Samitaur Smith,

and husband Fredrick,

one-time assistant to artist Pablo Picasso,

have an extraordinary vision for Culver City.

We were determined to build these unusual buildings.

What they need is someone to bring this to life.

Architect Eric Owen Moss

is a tenant in one of their developments.

I think their aspiration was inspirational.

I would say a relationship developed

that over a period of time

got to be as much a friendship as it was a partnership.

Over the next decade, Frederick, Laurie, and Moss

stamp their identity across Culver City

with radical buildings like The Samitaur Tower,

Stealth,

and The Pterodactyl.

They pushed us to take the architecture to the limits.

All stunning,

but all low-rise.

We wanted to build a high-rise

so that it would be seen from the affluent area

such as Beverly Hills, which was directly north.

An idea for the structure for the new high-rise

comes to Fredrick over breakfast.

I had made some boiled eggs.

And he just grabbed one

and he threw it down on the--on the floor,

but it didn't crack open.

And then he said,

"This egg has given me the concept

for how to build the high-rise."

Everything's held together inside that egg.

Why do we need columns?

Architect Moss is also inspired

with a vision for a building where all the support

sits on the outside.

So it's no longer the grid system,

columns and beams and so on.

It's something a little bit different.

Called rapper, Moss' ambitious idea

will create a tower like nothing else around.

Sitting on a fairly standard foundation,

from here on up, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

But that involved overcoming some serious challenges.

First, they need to create a tower

where each floor can adapt to the needs

of completely different tenants.

That means no internal columns or central core,

which are what normally stop buildings falling down.

To make matters more complicated,

it's being built in an earthquake zone.

They will still need somewhere

to house the elevators and stairs

and a way to hold the building up,

which with every floor different,

will mean engineering a radical steel frame

that won't support itself

until the whole thing is complete.

Only then will they know for sure

whether the revolutionary design

has worked.

Nobody wanted to invest money in something this crazy.

And finally, Deutsche Bank, New York,

they decided to place their bet on us.

In 2018, 20 years after the original idea,

work finally starts with the team fixed

on making sure the building can stand up to Mother Nature.

You can see

extensive, extensive damage here.

And what you're trying to see is, you know,

in an earthquake situation,

how does it keep the building safe.

Los Angeles intersects a maze of active faults.

Long Beach is the worst-hit city.

The team must find a way to protect the building

if the project is to go ahead.

You are in a highly seismic region.

We're less than a tenth of a mile away

from the Newport-Inglewood Fault,

which is the cause of the 1933 earthquake.

In LA, the team building rapper

needs to find a way to make it strong enough

to resist a magnitude 7 earthquake.

Except, it has none

of the usual structural elements

that hold a high-rise up.

Modern towers are engineered to absorb these forces,

but here, there were going to be no internal columns or core,

so they had to look at other ways

of making sure it would stay standing.

Inspiration for this cutting-edge building

comes from the ancient world.

The 6th-century tomb of Cyrus the Great

in Pasargadae, Iran

is considered one of the oldest examples

of earthquake-resistant engineering.

The tomb's foundation consists of layers of limestone,

while the base is secured, the upper layers are not,

allowing movement during earthquakes.

Engineers call this base isolation.

In modern construction,

special base isolators are fitted

between a building and the ground

to mimic this action.

The rapper is sitting on 20 base isolators.

The building's allowed to move

essentially within 30, 32 inches all around.

And it allows 75% of the lateral load

from an earthquake not to get into the building.

With the 20 base isolators fitted,

the building's concrete floor plate

is poured on top.

The team then turns its attention

to the floors above.

Somehow these need to be held up

without any columns inside.

So a typical high-rise, the core would be in the centre

which does all of the primary work

in supporting the building

and all of the usable space would be wrapped around it.

Owen Moss' idea is radically different.

So here, the core is pulled to the side of the building.

It's not the first time it's been done,

but it's done rarely.

One reason why the system is barely ever used

is it's much more complicated to keep the building standing.

So imagine my body is the core in the middle.

And I have to support the weight equally around me.

This feels balanced.

It's heavy, but it feels balanced.

Now with the rapper,

the core has to hold all the weight out in front.

That's not so easy.

Moss' radical solution

to keeping the building standing

feels less architect

and more transformer.

My reaction was,

"I've never seen anything like this before.

What is it?"

An exoskeleton that acts

as the building's structural system,

made from huge, curving steel bands.

Those bands wrap around the building.

They go up the side, over the top,

down the other side, some of them land on the ground.

The bands collect all the load

and bring it down to a finite number of points.

While the smaller components are made

in the US,

the huge, hollow curved steel sections

that will form the main exoskeleton

are created in lightweight steel in China.

In February 2020, the first shipment arrives.

I was scared.

How are the contractors

going to get those pieces

in the exact right location so it fits?

It's like a jigsaw puzzle.

We had one guy on it, I think for two or three months

of just analyzing those bands coming off of the truck bed

in order to get them exactly where it's supposed to be.

And weighing up to 100,000 pounds apiece,

fitting the bands together isn't going to be easy.

If you don't have the orientation correct,

the iron workers are really at risk of getting injured

and having, you know, problems

with getting this member in the correct orientation.

Each band has to be positioned

with mathematical precision

so the whole system fits together correctly.

What's unusual about the structural system

of the bands themselves

is that they're not stable until they're all in.

So, it's like a house of cards or something.

To keep the whole thing from collapsing,

a temporary structure of vertical steel columns

is fitted to hold the bands while they're welded together.

We had to have temporary shoring

around the perimeter of the office building.

It was very precise,

um, very detailed, um, engineered plan

to support the structure as we went up.

It's basically

an entirely separate temporary framework

that will hold the exoskeleton up

until it's finished.

Then you take the shoring away,

and hopefully the exoskeleton stays standing.

After more than nine months

of painstaking work, the final piece

of the massive steel exoskeleton

is welded into place.

The building was ready

to basically take its own weight.

Now, they have to remove 223 tons

of steel support.

There was a lot of concern

about how we would de-shore this building.

So we had 12 locations where we had a pair of jacks

underneath each temporary column.

It was almost like fine-tuning a piano,

disconnecting the building from the temporary shoring.

The question is, will it stand on its own

when all the shoring is removed?

It was creaking and, you know, we weren't sure

what was--you know, maybe what was happening.

A total of 3.5 million pounds

was taken out of the temporary structure

and basically transferred into the rapper structure.

After two days of carefully controlled lowering,

rapper is left to stand on its own.

It was a great experience, really,

just to, er, see everything coming together.

It felt great 'cause it was something that had never

really been done before.

Finally, in January 2023,

fully glazed and fireproofed,

rapper is complete

after 20 years of planning, design,

and construction challenges.

Over the years,

the people that I've run into

start to love it in a--in a really bizarre way.

It becomes like part of their family

or something in the city.

Inside, each floor is completely open

and different from the ones above and below...

Every vantage point is a different vantage.

You see it differently.

You understand the space differently.

And that's part of the purpose.

...while the base isolators

not only protect the building,

but are visible and part of the experience.

All of which goes to making rapper

a building for today and for tomorrow.

It's going to be around a lot longer

than most of the buildings around here.

It's time to make some new geometric discoveries.

And that's what the rapper has done.

In a world where imagination, innovation,

and creativity define the spaces that surround us...

How Did They Build That? shows again and again

that humankind will overcome the seemingly impossible.