Engineering Feat
...a riverfront facade that would be both massive and appealing. The issue of the water weight proved to be the most challenging part of this program. Loads of up to 900 pounds per square foot were encountered. Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this, in a usual office building loads of 150 pounds per square foot are common. The firm hired to design this project chose to “drive deep piles to bedrock to provide a stable footing for the building system which consists of both cast-in-place and precast concrete”. They used extra-strength concrete with steel reinforcing bars to construct the tanks. Special additives were even used in the concrete to make it as resistant as possible to the saltwater. The large viewing windows in the tanks were held using the force of the water pushing outward. This is called hydrostatic pressure. One of these windows is known as the largest aquarium window in the world totaling 11 inches thick, 16 feet high and 24 feet long. Humidity was also a factor in this great feat. They had to create a way to keep the viewers above the heated tanks in a comfortable environment. With this in...