01–04
WORTH WRITING DOWN.
Two hundred and sixty projects have been handed over since 1994. These four are the ones an engineer here still brings up in a meeting.
MERIDIAN TRANSIT HUB.
Two hundred and fourteen million euro of interchange, built in fifty-two hour possessions over a line carrying 190 000 passengers a day.
Phase II is the platform hall: a forty-eight metre clear span carried on a twelve metre grid, with a roof that cantilevers twenty-four and a half metres over the concourse below. None of it can be built with the railway shut, so the primary steel arrives as six prefabricated bays lifted in sequence, each one rehearsed at the yard in Rotterdam before it is allowed near the track. Phase I, the bus and tram deck, opened in 2024 and is carrying traffic while we build above it.
THE FIVE DIMENSIONS ON THE FRONT PAGE
| Millimetres | What it is |
|---|---|
| 12000 | Column grid, platform hall |
| 24500 | Roof cantilever over the concourse |
| 7200 | Clear height, concourse soffit |
| 31500 | Tower crane hook height, phase II |
| 48000 | Clear span, platform hall |
KOLKZICHT CIVIC HALLS.
Three public buildings the town had been running separately, put under one roof and one heating system, on the footprint of a demolished swimming pool.
The interesting problem was acoustic rather than structural. A sports hall and a reading room sharing a structure will transmit every whistle unless the two are separated all the way to the ground, so the halls sit on independent foundations with a movement joint that runs the full height of the building. The council chamber above it is on resilient bearings. It cost about four per cent of the contract and it is the reason the library is usable on a Saturday.
NOORDERLICHT TERMINAL.
A transfer and storage terminal on reclaimed quayside, where the first eight months of the programme went into the ground rather than into the building.
The plot had been dredged spoil for sixty years and would not carry the tank loads. We drove 1 240 piles, surcharged the terminal apron for a winter and monitored settlement weekly until it stopped moving, then built. The client wanted that time back and we would not give it to them, which was the single most useful conversation on the job: the tanks are within four millimetres of level three years on.
WESTER LOCK RENEWAL.
A nineteenth-century lock rebuilt one chamber at a time, with commercial traffic passing through the other chamber every day of the works.
Rebuilding half a lock while the other half operates means the temporary works are the real engineering. The cofferdam had to hold against a chamber being filled and emptied forty times a day two metres away, and the monitoring on it was continuous rather than periodic. We finished the second chamber eleven weeks ahead of the first, because by then we had built one.
WHO BUILT THESE.
Four hundred and twelve people across Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Eindhoven, most of whom are on a site rather than in an office this morning.
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