Structural Design and Construction of Complex-Shaped Tall Buildings

Abstract

Today's diverse architectural design trends have produced tall buildings of various forms, such as twisted, tilted, and free forms, as can be seen in the Infinity Tower in Dubai, Veer Towers in Las Vegas and Phare Tower project in Paris. This paper studies various structural system design options for these complex-shaped tall buildings and their performances. For each complex form category, tall buildings are designed with different contemporary structural systems, such as diagrids, braced tubes and outrigger systems. The structural efficiency of each system, in conjunction with building forms, heights and height-to-width aspect ratios, is studied. Parametric structural models are generated to investigate the impacts of variation of important geometric configurations of complex-shaped tall buildings. The models are then exported to structural engineering software for analyses and design. Based on the study results, comparative structural efficiency of different structural systems for tall buildings of each complex form category is estimated.