BUILDING THE SHARD WEALTH CREATION

BUILDING
THE SHARD
London’s newest landmark, The Shard, now dominates the city’s
skyline. Western Europe’s tallest building, designed by Italian
architect Renzo Piano, is now complete with access to the public
due in 2013. Ingenia spoke to John Parker, project director for
structural engineers WSP, who outlined the engineering decisions
made in building the enormous steel and glass structure.

The Shard was conceived in 2000 an 80% stake in the project. surrounding tower to be built London Bridge station and
by Renzo Piano at the behest of Building work started in 2009 before the basement beneath it Guy’s Hospital, a 24-storey
London-based entrepreneur Irvine and The Shard’s 95 storeys will had been fully excavated. 1970s concrete-framed office
Sellar, to be built on the land eventually be home to a 200- Top-down is not an block had to be removed piece-
occupied by Southwark Towers, bed 5-star hotel, three floors of innovation in itself: it was used by-piece before construction
an office-block Sellar owned restaurants, 10 residences, and a to build the new parliamentary work could start.
and wanted to replace. Like all public viewing platform. office building, Portcullis House, Structural engineers
London skyscrapers, The Shard Visually, The Shard’s most in Westminster in the 1990s while calculated that this removal of
quickly gained a nickname, which striking features are its 310m excavating for the Jubilee line 25,000 tonnes of concrete and
has since also become its formal height and the glass which Underground station beneath. glass could cause the ground to
name. The name ‘The Shard’ is forms its sloping walls and But using the technique for the ‘relax’, with the potential to cause
derived from master architect gives the structure its name. core of a very tall building was movement to nearby structures.
Renzo Piano’s description of the Less obvious but equally a world first. By cutting three A finite element analysis
development as a ‘shard of glass’ impressive is the use of the latest months off the construction of the soil and soil-structure
during planning stages. structural engineering tools and programme, carried out by Mace, interaction was performed to
In late 2007, the uncertainty techniques to optimise every it enabled substantial savings to assess the heave and settlement
in global financial markets aspect of the structure, from the be made and kept the cost down effects during demolition and
sparked concerns about getting foundations to the shard tips. to under £450 million. subsequent construction. These
The Shard’s construction One of the most impressive revealed a zone of influence
started. The project was almost innovations was the bold and extending about 70 m outside
cancelled, but in January imaginative use of ‘top-down’ NARROW MARGINS the perimeter, and an extensive
2008, it was announced that a construction which allowed This super-tall building has been monitoring system was put
The last piece of steel being lifted
into place on The Shard’s spire in consortium of Qatari investors the first 23 storeys of the developed within a confined in place. At the demolition
March 2012 © Mace/Sellar had paid £150 million to secure concrete core and much of the site area. Sandwiched between stage, there was less than

24 INGENIA INGENIA ISSUE 52 SEPTEMBER 2012 25

BUILDING THE SHARD WEALTH CREATION

5 mm movement measured of The old building’s large concrete sinking interlinked secant piles a concrete basement, structural Unlike the building it replaced, The Shard
the adjacent Jubilee line tunnel under-reamed piles, for example, – closely-spaced bored piles steel from ground to level 40, CONTROLLING THE SWAY
and there was no more than were not deep enough to use used to form a retaining wall. concrete from levels 41 to 69, occupies virtually every square metre of the All tall buildings move in the wind, and gusts of 100 mph have been
12 mm during the whole course on the new building, and were The ground floor slab was then and steel again from there to recorded near the top of The Shard. What the occupiers will notice
of the project. too difficult to remove or to drill cast, with a hole left for the core the top at level 95. The whole site, with no surrounding space for storage. is not the movement itself – in The Shard’s case, up to around 300-
Unlike the building it through – both in terms of time to pass through, in order to act structure is given stability by 400 mm at the top – but the horizontal acceleration as the building
replaced, The Shard occupies and cost of jackhammering out as a prop for the wall ahead of a massive concrete core that sways back and forth, and this was particularly important in the
virtually every square metre of all the concrete. The answer was excavation beneath. is placed in the middle of the hotel and residential section. A limit of just 0.15 m/s2 at level 65 was
the site, with no surrounding to arrange the new piles in a building. placed on the design, and achieving this required a combination
space for storage. Pre-planning pattern which avoided the old. SHARD CONCEPT This design solution was of damping the oscillations (provided, conveniently, by the heavy
was an essential requisite With the demolition over, The Shard is an unusual mixture driven by the intended use of concrete section between levels 41 to 69) and increasing stiffness.
throughout the four-year build a perimeter wall was created of concrete and steel, a tiered The Shard, but its side effects The stiffness was increased by WSP with a ‘hat truss’ at level 66.
in this built-up commuter area. round the edge of the site by wedding cake of a building with have been to improve the This uses outrigger struts rising diagonally from the perimeter
columns to the central core, with the sole purpose of reducing
the lateral acceleration. But tightening the bolts on the truss had
dynamics of the building, save to be left until near the end of The Shard’s construction.
money and add lettable space
EXCAVATING This was because buildings shorten during construction –
– see Controlling the sway. The WHILE BUILDING through foundation settlement, elastic compression of materials
lower floors of the structure With the perimeter wall built and (with concrete) shrinkage and creep. For a building up to
will be offices, with spans of and the ground floor slab cast, around 15 storeys, the effects are negligible but with The Shard
up to 15 m from perimeter to concrete piles were sunk to they are substantial, and they vary across the building: the
core. Structural steel columns support the building, the largest perimeter columns have shortened much more than the core.
and beams were the optimal piles being underneath the This meant many additional deflection calculations for various
solution for these floors, with core and extended down as far stages of construction using ETABS structural analysis software,
plenty of space between the as 53 m. Massive steel plunge and considerable extra complications in construction: floors,
deep beams for the extensive columns were then embedded for example, had to be built slightly off the horizontal so that
services required. in the top of the piles, rising up to they would settle into the correct position. And only once the
In the upper part of the above B2 level. The building (and building was complete and most of the shortening had taken
building, the use changes particularly, the core) could then place could the hat trusses be finally fixed.
to hotel and residential start to rise upwards, supported
accommodation, where fewer on the plunge columns, while
ceiling-mounted services excavation of the basement
are required and where proceeded underneath.
acoustic separation of the With excavation complete,
floors becomes much more the B3 basement slab, the
important. The tapering of the bottom of the building, was
building here means that the ready to be cast. Here, the
maximum span at this height engineers worked hard to design
is down to 9 m. Concrete the slab to be as thin as possible,
columns and post-tensioned both to save unnecessary
concrete flat slabs were the best excavation and to avoid the
solution on these floors. And complications of deepening
then by reducing the storey the secant pile walls. The result
height in this section from was a remarkably thin slab by
3.75 m to 3.1 m it was possible comparison with similar sized
to include two extra floors – an buildings elsewhere in the world.
important consideration since Nevertheless, at 3 m thick The mini-crane’s boom is lifted up The Shard by the main tower crane.
The boom was then lifted up to level 87 and reattached to the mini-crane,
Aerial view of the site during piling, showing the proximity to London Bridge The Shard is a hybrid structure: concrete in the basement, steel to level 40, the overall height was limited under the core with four layers of ready for work to commence © GGR Group
station © WSP concrete again to level 69 and finally a steel ‘spire’ at the top © WSP by the Civil Aviation Authority. reinforcement in each direction,

26 INGENIA INGENIA ISSUE 52 SEPTEMBER 2012 27

BUILDING THE SHARD WEALTH CREATION

The Shard is an spire. Where the changes occur,

TOP-DOWN CONSTRUCTION ON THE SHARD transfer structures are needed REACHING NEW HEIGHTS
irregular pyramid 1. Initial section of core constructed,
which restrains the head of the
2. Basement excavation progresses
around plunge columns. Slip forming
3. Once excavation is complete,
the raft and walls are cast
and these have been ‘hidden’ in Getting workers and materials up to the top of The Shard during construction, without delaying the
the façade. To avoid deep beams high-speed programme and in all kinds of weather, was particularly challenging for the design and
with highly complex basement plunge columns of core commences
Ground floor slab round the perimeter, loads were construction team, and prompted some unique solutions.
transferred using three-storey Gaining access to the lower floors was relatively straightforward with four tower cranes round the
geometry. deep vierendeel trusses (frames edges of the site doing most of the heavy lifting. When the building reached 162 m, the cranes had
with fixed joints that are capable come to the limit of their reach and new cranes were called for.
B1 of transferring and resisting First, a tower crane was attached to the rig that rose steadily up the building with the slip form –
B2 bending pressures). the moving formwork. This is believed to be the first time the technique of attaching a crane to the
Mace, the construction slip form has ever been tried outside North Korea, where it failed due to the difficulties of keeping the
B3 company building The crane stable. Here, stability was successfully achieved by extending the lower section of the tower
Shard, aimed for continuous crane down into one of the already-cast lift shafts where guide rails kept it vertical.
improvement in safety through For the top section of the building, the central crane would have been in the way. So a new tower
the project. Risks were crane was erected outside the building envelope, cantilevering off the concrete core – the first time
highlighted on design drawings such a technique had been used outside the US, and at 317 m, the UK’s highest ever crane. This made
and details were amended so a dramatic sight on the London skyline, as the tapering building moved further away from the crane
3D modelling showing how on that these areas were safer to as it progressed upwards (see diagram)
certain levels of The Shard the Basement 1800 mm
perimeter columns kink and the plunge diameter construct. The edge beam in With the external construction complete, there came the inevitable conundrum: no crane can lower
floor plates have to resist lateral columns pile © Anthea Carter/New Civil Engineer the steel levels, for example, was itself to the ground. A ‘recovery crane’ was erected by the cantilevered tower crane, which was then
forces © WSP
fabricated with floor decking, dismantled and lowered by the recovery crane. Then a smaller, spider crane was taken up the jump-lift
edge trim, façade brackets and in pieces, assembled, and taken down the same way after lowering the recovery crane in pieces.
this was a massive slab, requiring 18 facets – a combination of the edge of the floor plate. The edge protection already in place
the UK’s largest ever continuous
BUILDING UPWARDS large planes of glass and narrow top section, the spire, reverts to so that less work was needed Main structure is constructed Cantilevered crane then used Cantilevered crane then Cantilevered crane “jumped”
concrete pour: three concrete Slip-forming the core – re-entrant ‘fractures’ in between steel with composite steel floors at height in this hazardous area. using tower crane to help dismantle central begins constructing 66m tall ever higher as spire grows
pouring the concrete almost An ‘empty pockets’ policy was slipforming up the central core crane steel spire
pumps placed 700 truckloads – together with a 19-storey – see Preassembling the spire. core. Central core crane is
over 36 hours, a total of 5,500 m3. continuously while sliding the extension, or ‘backpack’, attached The tapering of the building introduced to reduce the risk used to build second crane
The concrete used ground- formwork continuously up the to the eastern side. And creates a series of challenges of falling objects. Throughout that cantilevers off building
from level 55
granulated blast furnace slag building – has now become a because The Shard tapers as it for the design of the perimeter the build there were no major
– a byproduct of steelmaking conventional technique; in The rises, every floor plate is different. columns, both to ensure incidents, but the minor
– as a substitute for 70% of the Shard’s case this was done at This presented plenty of design effective transfer of loads and to incidents were investigated
Portland cement. The slag has the rate of 3 m a day. For the challenges requiring rigorous avoid unsightly detailing. By and thoroughly in order to learn
a much lower carbon footprint, tricky task of steering the slip- analysis and extensive use of large, these perimeter columns lessons and prevent recurrence.
eliminating 700 tonnes of CO2 form to achieve an accuracy of 3D modelling. slope with the face of the The ‘shards’ are triple-glazed,
emissions in the base slab alone ±25 mm in the position of the Up to level 40, the structure building, but in places they ‘kink’ with a naturally ventilated cavity
while at the same time giving core, the contractors tried both has steel columns and steel towards the vertical, creating between the external glazing
off less heat as it cures. Even GPS and more conventional beams supporting composite horizontal forces that have to be and the double-glazed units
so, the temperature of the base laser guidance. To most people’s steel floors consisting of steel transferred back to the central on the inside. Solar gain is
slab reached more than 60°C surprise, the GPS produced more plate with a 130 mm layer of core through the floors. reduced by blinds within the
during curing. consistent results. concrete on top. From level The perimeter columns are cavity, which are driven down
With the base slab in place, Buildings usually have some 41, concrete columns support designed so that their weight, automatically when necessary
the missing section of the core form of symmetry or regularity post-tensioned concrete floors size and spacing reduce with the by the building maintenance
walls between the bottom of the which can aid design and just 200 mm thick. With fewer height of the building, adding system. The outside windows
core and the B3 slab could be construction. By contrast, The ceiling-mounted services to the effect of an increasingly are cleaned via building
cast. By the time that the core Shard is an irregular pyramid needed in the hotel and delicate structure tapering into maintenance units at levels 29, Beyond the reach of ground-mounted tower cranes, a tower crane was attached to the slip-forming rig, and rose
was at last resting on its final with highly complex geometry, residential sections, the storey the sky: spacing varies from 75 and 87 – nine in all. These steadily up the building with the slip form. For the spire, where the central crane would have been in the way, a new
governed largely by the irregular units have multi-jointed arms 111 m-high tower crane was erected outside the building envelope on a platform cantilevering off the concrete core
foundations, the building above height could be lowered with 6 m at the base to 3 m in the © New Civil Engineer
had risen 23 storeys. shape of the site. The tower has most of the services confined to hotel section to 1.5 m in the that can reach around the

28 INGENIA INGENIA ISSUE 52 SEPTEMBER 2012 29

BUILDING THE SHARD

building and lower cradles serve just part of the tower. The
to all parts of the façade. three-storey-high viewing gallery

Careers with energy

Construction of The Shard on levels 69 to 71 will open next
hit its first target of ‘visual February, followed soon after by
completion’ in time for the the five-star, 200-plus bedroom
London Olympics, and now Shangri-La hotel. Then all that is
fit-out is continuing, including
completion of the tower’s 44
lifts, some double-decked and
needed are tenants to occupy the
offices, and owners to be found
for the spectacular apartments
Unleash yours.
some stacked over each other to at the top of The Shard.

BIOGRAPHY
John Parker is a Technical Director for WSP’s London structures Got ideas?
team. He has worked on Hungerford Bridge, the Jubilee Line
Extension and London Bridge station projects as well as The
Shard. He is particularly interested in enhancing architecture 3L[[OLTÅV^OLYL
through expressed structural engineering.
and the impact
The Shard is a significant addition to London’s South Bank skyline. The
exterior of The Shard was completed in June 2012 and the rooms inside are
now being prepared for completion by early 2013 © A Devlin/PA Photos
Hugh Ferguson spoke to John Parker on behalf of Ingenia

you create will have

PREASSEMBLING THE SPIRE
At the top of The Shard sits the steel and glass spire. Containing
just 530 tonnes of The Shard’s total weight of 12,500 tonnes of the potential to be
structural steel, it is light compared with the remainder of the
building, but at 60 m and 23 storeys high, it is a significant building
in its own right. In addition, It had to be assembled 300 m up felt globally.
in the air, over the top of the highest point of the concrete core,
where winds can reach speeds of 100mph.
This was never going to be easy, and there were concerns
about how to construct it safely and without delays. The architect
recognised that the spire would be the focal point of the whole
building and so he wanted it as perfect as possible.
The solution was to minimise work at height by pre-assembling
Now that’s a career.
the spire in modules, in a two-stage process. First the steelwork,
with flooring added, was built in segments up to 3 m wide, just
With energy.
small enough to fit on 3 m-wide trailers for transport to site. Once
on site, segments were bolted together to get as close as possible
to the 7.5 tonne limit of the tower crane, thus reducing the number
of crane lifts from 800 to only around 100.
And to be sure that it could all be done ‘right first time’, it was
decided first to do a dry-run of the process, assembling the whole
spire in three-storey sections in steelwork contractor Severfield
Rowan’s Yorkshire works. This enabled any risks or difficulties to be
identified before final assembly, and also allowed the architect to
make adjustments to the appearance, for example by improving

An independent
the quality of the welding where the finish would be visible. The
The Shard’s spire was pre-assembled on a North Yorkshire airfield by
modularisation and test erection paid off, as crane lifts for the the steel design and erection team Severfield Rowen. The firm used the

E&P company
highest levels were severely restricted by high winds during the exercise to create 3D models of the spire at every part of its construction,
and create a ‘building guide’ with detailed day-by-day instructions for the
build phase. team to build it on top of The Shard © Mace

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