the design of he throws Terminal five is
deceptively simple but constructing it
is an extremely complex job
the site 45 is as big as Hyde Park in
London
but for an airport architect it feels
rather small you never have picked this
site for an airport building by choice
it’s trapped between two live runways
some of the busiest in the world it’s
inside the m25 on the west and here for
perimeter road so you’re in a box that
you can’t move out of and it makes the
building very very complex Mike Davis
designs a 40 metre tall terminal and to
make the most of the space inside he
tops it with a single span roof the size
of five football fields
but raising this monster roof becomes
one of the biggest challenges for the
construction team
just one piece of it weighs more than
six jumbo jets lifting it up 40 meters
with tower cranes would create a problem
the cranes would be so tall they would
disturb the heat for a radar system
which kicks in only three meters above
the ceiling of t5 we can’t poke cranes
up into that area otherwise you might
collect under carriages and so on so
basically we had to conceive a design
which could really be built from below
the construction team assembled the roof
sections on the ground with a series of
small cranes then they use a clever
lifting technology to pull the roof off
the ground
it’s called strand Jacky
they suspend the sections in steel wires
these wires run through the Strand jacks
powerful hydraulic rams that can each
lift a hundred and eighty-five tons
sixteen of these jacks will
painstakingly lift the roof section all
the way up to the tenth floor that’s the
plan anyway
on the 6th of April 2004 the
construction team are ready for the
first big lift
one of the problems of lifting a 2200
tonne plate 110 by 56 metres why is that
it could walk as you going up the think
of flex so we had to lift it to within a
centimeter less than a centimeter on
every jacking point so we had to keep
that absolutely perfectly flat as it
went up and when it got to the top it
had to be within very fine tolerances to
be able to put the pins in and lock it
off so it was absolutely perfect
and yes it’s rather strange you’re
sitting in a construction site with big
construction guys but actually the guys
on a computer controller he’s jacking
system off the computer so gone is the
idea of the big levers there’s the crane
driver as it were working on the
computer monitoring the movement of this
thing centimeter by centimeter up
it takes almost a year to jack up all
the roof sections over 18,000 tons of
steel in total
but the effort pays off
the free floating roof maximizes the
space inside t5 has as much floor space
as he throws for other terminals
combined
deceptively simple but constructing it
is an extremely complex job
the site 45 is as big as Hyde Park in
London
but for an airport architect it feels
rather small you never have picked this
site for an airport building by choice
it’s trapped between two live runways
some of the busiest in the world it’s
inside the m25 on the west and here for
perimeter road so you’re in a box that
you can’t move out of and it makes the
building very very complex Mike Davis
designs a 40 metre tall terminal and to
make the most of the space inside he
tops it with a single span roof the size
of five football fields
but raising this monster roof becomes
one of the biggest challenges for the
construction team
just one piece of it weighs more than
six jumbo jets lifting it up 40 meters
with tower cranes would create a problem
the cranes would be so tall they would
disturb the heat for a radar system
which kicks in only three meters above
the ceiling of t5 we can’t poke cranes
up into that area otherwise you might
collect under carriages and so on so
basically we had to conceive a design
which could really be built from below
the construction team assembled the roof
sections on the ground with a series of
small cranes then they use a clever
lifting technology to pull the roof off
the ground
it’s called strand Jacky
they suspend the sections in steel wires
these wires run through the Strand jacks
powerful hydraulic rams that can each
lift a hundred and eighty-five tons
sixteen of these jacks will
painstakingly lift the roof section all
the way up to the tenth floor that’s the
plan anyway
on the 6th of April 2004 the
construction team are ready for the
first big lift
one of the problems of lifting a 2200
tonne plate 110 by 56 metres why is that
it could walk as you going up the think
of flex so we had to lift it to within a
centimeter less than a centimeter on
every jacking point so we had to keep
that absolutely perfectly flat as it
went up and when it got to the top it
had to be within very fine tolerances to
be able to put the pins in and lock it
off so it was absolutely perfect
and yes it’s rather strange you’re
sitting in a construction site with big
construction guys but actually the guys
on a computer controller he’s jacking
system off the computer so gone is the
idea of the big levers there’s the crane
driver as it were working on the
computer monitoring the movement of this
thing centimeter by centimeter up
it takes almost a year to jack up all
the roof sections over 18,000 tons of
steel in total
but the effort pays off
the free floating roof maximizes the
space inside t5 has as much floor space
as he throws for other terminals
combined
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