Turning Torso Building, Malmo
Santiago Calatrava designed the project for a certain area in the western harbor of Malmö and to be exhibited at the European Housing Expo in 2001. The project is foreseen as an important part of the exchange program of the western port of Malmö.
Today, we can say that this program has been successful. Around the Turning Torso, settlements with elegant and orderly architecture, have been built and a coastal arrangement is constructed for people to use the seaside
The city of Malmö consists mostly of low-rise buildings. Calatrava designed the project as a sculptural element rising on its own. The form of the tower is based on a sculpture by Calatrava, “The Turning Torso “. In this sculpture, he abstracted the return movement of the human body into cubes.
Turning Torso consists of nine cubes in a row. Each cube consists of five floors. There are offices in the first two cubes of the building. Apart from the meeting rooms on the last two floors of the ninth cube which is the top cube, the other floors consist of apartments. There are one to five flats on the floors. The total height of the building is 190 m and the building consists of 54 floors.
The main load-bearing structure of this building is the central reinforced concrete core. Stairs and elevator cavities are located in this core. The center of this circular core corresponds to the center of rotation of the floor slabs. The diameter of the core is 10.6 meters. The thickness of the reinforced concrete wall at the base is 2.5 m and 0.4 m at the top.
There is a skeleton of painted steel elements that reinforce and strengthen this core, resembling the outer spine, standing apart from the building. This spine is connected to each unit with large horizontal and vertical steel struts. These steel elements connect the spine to a structural wall at the top of each unit and transfer the shearing forces to the core.
Each floor of the unit is connected to the spine with smaller struts to stabilize the spine. Floor slabs are made of cast-in-place reinforced concrete and are 27 cm. The bottom floor of each unit is a conical cantilever slab and the maximum thick part is 90 cm. These cantilever slabs transmit the load of the floor columns to the core
The facade of the building consists of approximately 2,800 curved aluminum panels and 2,250 flat glazed windows.
In the pool at the entrance of the building, in the entrance way and indoors , black granite was used.
The entire building is designed for the use of the disabled and has a highly environmentally friendly design.
Although the building seems to be very difficult to construct, it is completed in less time than expected thanks to the unusually efficient engineering method. After the foundation was laid, the cores and slabs in the middle were build by cast-in-place reinforced concrete by sliding frame system and then the outer steel prefabricated backbone elements were added. Finally, with the help of cranes, prefabricated curved aluminum façade elements were moved to the floors and mounted. So the manufacturing is complete.
In August 2015, the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats (CTBUH) awarded the “10 Year Award” , The Turning Torso Building.
** Technical information is learnt from Santiago Calatrava’s own Web page.