What you are going to see in this post, is one of those rare things in life that leaves you truly speechless, and one more reason to say that technology in these days has no limits. When it comes to tearing down buildings, I’m pretty sure that you think at an implosion ( BTW - here is a cool one ), but today you’ll see a new demolition method that starts on the bottom floor. The process is called daruma-otoshi after a Japanese game that makes players take the bottom parts of a column using a hammer without disturbing the rest of the parts above.
Japanese construction firm Kajima Corporation is using this innovative new skyscraper demolition method to dismantle a pair of old company buildings in Tokyo. Compared to blowing it up, this method saves time and space, pollutes the air less, makes material recycling easier, I think that in big cities this method would be very useful and it’s obviously a lot less dusty than a traditional demo.
How do they do it ?
First they replace the support pillars at ground level with computer-controlled metal columns. Then, a crew carefully demolishes the entire floor by hand, leaving the structure resting on the mechanical pillars, which then go down slowly until the next floor is at ground level. They replace the support pillars again with the mechanical ones, destroy that floor, and repeat the operation until they get rid of all the floors.
This makes it look as if the building is shrinking in front of you, or being swallowed by the street. According to the company, this method greatly reduces the environmental impact of the demolition, as well as the time. Kajima says that it speeds up the task by 20%, while making it easier to separate materials for recycling, as well as reducing the amount of products released into the air. - Via
Published by Michael July 18th, 2008 in Architecture
Tags: Construction firm, Demolish, Japanese, Kajima Corporation, One Floor At A Time, Skyscraper
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17 Responses to “How To Demolish A Skyscraper One Floor At A Time”
- 1 Pingback on Jul 18th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
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Why didn’t they just throw some jet fuel on it?
Also this method allows workers to work faster, because they don’t need to deal with the high elevation in the conventional method.
Wow… so, let me get this straight…
Even blowing stuff up is a job that is being eliminated by
computer-controlled machines?
That’s awesome.
That is VERY cool!
I saw the opposite of this in Perth, Western Australia last year. It was one guy with a Front End Loader, and he started from the top floor just shoving all the crap off of the level until it was clear… then they busted up the ‘roof’ and started again on the next level. Took a while, but there was very little noise etc.
That’s a great idea. You’d think it might take longer and
involve more cleanup work but.. imploding a building also makes
a mess.
Too bad the twin towers in NYC were not taken down that way on 1/9/11.
It would have saved lots of NYers, not to mention firefighters,
their lives and lungs!
That’s just amazing, the marvels of technology.
LOL if the twin towers were demolished this way,
everyone would still believe it was terrorists.
LOL not really, that would be kind of retarded, even to think about something like that is retarded.
LOL not really to even think that the government’s version of events surrounding the 9/11 attacks was truthful in anyway at all would be retarded. Infact to even call someone retarded for thinking otherwise is beyond retarded. If you can’t keep up then you should just return to sleep. There is no helping you. Goodnight rLX.
LOL why would they take down the twin towers if they didnt know they were to be attacked?\
but on a different note its a very clean system