Sydney Tower

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sydney Tower
Image of the object
Basic data
Place: Sydney
State: New South Wales
Country: Australia
Altitude : 25  m
Coordinates: 33 ° 52 ′ 13.7 ″  S , 151 ° 12 ′ 32.3 ″  E
Use: Telecommunication tower , observation tower , tower restaurant
Tower data
Construction time : 1975-1981
Total height : 309  m
Viewing platform: 251, 260  m
Total mass : 2239  t
Data on the transmission system
Further data
Status: open
Engineer: Alexander Wargon
Construction: Concrete Constructions Pty Ltd
Owner: Westfield Group
Opening: August 1981
Height antenna: 30 m
Floors: 17th
Position map
Sydney Tower (New South Wales)
Sydney Tower
Sydney Tower
Localization of New South Wales in Australia

The Sydney Tower , formerly AMP Tower and Centrepoint Tower , is a television and observation tower in Sydney, Australia . The tower in the Central Business District, which is open to the public, is 309 meters high and has a viewing platform at a height of 251 meters. After the Sky Tower in Auckland , it is the second tallest telecommunications tower in the southern hemisphere . As a building that dominates the skyline of the Australian metropolis, it is one of its most important landmarks together with the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbor Bridge .

history

Planning and construction

First plans for the Sydney Tower and a publication of those took place in March 1968. The first wind behavior tests and further studies were carried out at Sydney University . A similar model was tested in the wind tunnel Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel of Canada's University of Western Ontario . In the middle of 1969, the insurance company AMP decided to implement the construction project.

Construction work on the tower and the shopping center at the foot of the tower began in the early 1970s. The design for this comes from the architectural firm Donald Crone & Assoc. Pty Ltd. Until the construction of the television tower, the maximum height in the city was 279 meters to ensure the flight safety of the seaplanes . The first shops opened in the shopping center as early as 1972. Construction work on the tower itself began in 1975. Many components were prefabricated and brought to the construction site and assembled there.

The tower cage consists of 14 prefabricated, welded frames that were put together on the roof of the shopping center. Work on the basket lasted from 1977 to 1979, which was lifted with the progressive shaft construction with the help of three hydraulic pumps. It was also secured to the mast with nuts in case one of the hydraulic presses had failed. The floors of the tower cage are cast from concrete. The tower shaft was assembled from 46 individual parts, each weighing 27 tons.

The antenna tip, which was 30 meters high at the time of construction, was assembled from two individual parts and attached using a two-stage lifting process without the aid of a crane. After attaching the upper half, the lower half of the antenna pushed the upper half into position on November 11, 1980.

The opening of the Sydney Tower by Prime Minister Neville Wran took place on September 24, 1981. The total cost amounted to 36 million Australian dollars . Around 1.3 million visitors climbed the tower in the first year.

Since opening

With the installation of an additional lightning rod at the top of the tower in 1998, the structure grew by seven meters to a total height of 309 meters.

On the occasion of the Summer Olympics in 2000 , three sculptures of athletes were installed on the roof of the tower cage in July 1998 with the help of a Sikorsky S-64 . One sculpture represented a gymnast doing a handstand, the second a Paralympic basketball player and the third a sprinter. The approximately twelve meters high and three and a half tons heavy figures adorned the tower until 2003 and then came to the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra and the Olympic Park .

The name of the tower changed several times. The original, but not official, name Centrepoint Tower after the shopping center of the same name gave way in December 2001 to the name AMP Tower after the finance and investment company AMP, which was the owner of the tower. Since the transfer of ownership to the Westfield Group , the tower has been called the Sydney Tower . Up to the 25th anniversary in 2006, more than 16 million visitors could be counted.

On July 2, 2008, eleven people were stuck in the tower's elevator at a height of 200 meters due to a malfunction in the elevator. Another lift was used to free the passengers after an hour and a half without injuries. The third lift carried the visitors on. In the following year, the base building was closed for major modernization measures and reopened in 2010 under the name Westfield Sydney . On June 25th and 26th, 2006, the old AMP logo on the tower cage was replaced by an illuminated , 6 meter high and 20 meter long logo of the Westfield Group with the help of a helicopter .

The British leisure company Merlin Entertainments Group has been operating the public area since 2011 . They invested around $ 3.5 million to redesign the observation deck and restaurant floors. Since the takeover, the observation deck has been called the Sydney Tower Eye .

Location and description

location

The Sydney Tower is located in downtown Sydney in the Central Business District (CBD). It stands west of Hyde Park in the shopping district bordering Market Street, Pitt Street and Castlereagh Street. Access to the tower is via Pitt Street Mall, the pedestrian mall on Pitt Street.

description

Tower base on the roof of the department store

The 309 meter high Sydney Tower stands on top of the 16-storey Westfield Sydney department store with well over 100 shops in which 50,000 tons of 25,000 cubic meters of concrete are built. So that the high-rise can absorb the mass of the tower structure on the roof, it was reinforced by shear walls. A slim core tube with a diameter of only 6.70 meters protrudes from the roof, attached to a solid concrete base plate, on which the tower cage is placed with the tip. Nevertheless, it houses the elevator shafts and two spiral emergency stairs. The base plate is 1.3 meters thick and 10 meters in diameter. A hyperboloid structure in the form of 56 steel cables each 182 meters long, each with a mass of 7 tons, serves as the supporting structure of the tower structure . Each steel cable is made from 235 wires, each 7 millimeters thick, which are galvanized to protect against rusting . The steel cables are stretched against the core tube between the base plate and the tower cage. Part of the cable was stretched from the far right edge to the far left; the other part in opposite directions in order to achieve greater rigidity . The cable thickness is so small that it is hardly noticeable from a distance and the tower appears to be floating freely on the thin tubular mast.

The four-storey tower cage with a diameter of around 30 meters is an inverted, light truncated cone , which is clad with a gold-bronze aluminum facade. Above it, a five-storey, windowless upper part for the antenna installations rises in an inverted conical shape, on the roof of which the tapered antenna carrier crowns the building. The top third of the tower cage has a recessed passage in which directional antennas are housed. Transmitters for telecommunications and air traffic are located in the mast support at the top. Without the antenna, the tower is 275 meters high.

The Sydney Tower weighs 2,239 tons. The 7th floor in the tower cage contains a 162,000 liter water tank, which is used for the supply and also holds fire water ready in the event of a disaster . A sophisticated system of hydraulic throttle valves in the water tank ensures that the pendulum-like movement of the water mass is compensated for in the event of wind movements so that it does not rock out of control and endanger the building. The Sydney Tower was designed in such a way that it can withstand hurricanes with a maximum force of 260 kilometers per hour, which statistically only occur once in a thousand years.

Public facilities

Tower cage and antenna support

The tower, which is open every day except Christmas Day, is available to visitors as a viewing tower for a fee. Three double-decker elevators for 16 people per cabin drive up to 800,000 visitors to the four-story public area every year. The speed of the elevators depends on the wind strength; at top speed, the ascent takes around 40 seconds. Next to the viewing platform at a height of 250 meters there are two revolving restaurants and a café in the tower basket . This means that the Sydney Tower has the highest publicly accessible viewing platform on a building in Australia. Even the taller Q1 Tower does not outperform the tower in this respect. A maximum of 960 people can stay in the tower cage. With 1504 fireproof steps, two separate escape routes lead down.

From the viewing platform there is access to the Skywalk at a height of 260 meters on the roof of the Sydney Tower. This platform walkway with a glass bottom has existed since October 18, 2005 and is made up of 2,000 individual steel parts that are held together with 4,376 rivets and bolts . The design phase for this public area lasted four years, the platform was built in two months and cost just under four million Australian dollars. On the skywalk, the visitor, secured with a leash, has an open view of the city from the roof of the tower cage.

A motion picture theater has been set up in the Sydney Tower where visitors can watch 4D films about the city of Sydney and Australia. There is a souvenir shop in the entrance area.

The view extends up to 80 km over the natural harbor of Sydney to the north, the Pacific to the east, Botany Bay to the south and the Blue Mountains to the west. To make orientation easier for visitors, there are telescopes and multimedia and multilingual touchscreen monitors with information about the landmarks of Sydney. For a clear view, the 420 windows are regularly cleaned semi-automatically with a cleaning machine. The process takes around two days; 50 liters of water are required for this.

and display information about the image
All-round panorama from the observation deck of the Sydney Tower

Events and usage

Sydney Tower Stair Challenge

A summer flight of stairs has been held at the Sydney Tower since 1989 . Thereby 1504 steps have to be overcome like in a 60 to 70-story high-rise. The stairwell runs in a counter-clockwise direction with no mezzanines and has a narrow handrail. The current record (2013) was set by the three-time winner Paul Crake , who needed 6:52 minutes for the run-up in 2002. In 2009, Venessa Harvard set the women's record with 8:45 minutes. The average time to climb the altitude is 18 to 20 minutes. The German athlete Thomas Dold won the run in 2009 and 2010. After the break in 2011 and 2012, another running competition took place on August 18, 2013.

Other Events

The Sydney Tower is choreographed into the traditional New Year's fireworks . In the years before and during the Olympic Games in 2000, in particular, the tower was staged pyrotechnically in the form of an Olympic torch with colored lights.

use

In addition to tourist use, the Sydney Tower is also a telecommunications and telecommunications tower. Two of the five floors of the upper tower cage are used for telecommunications; The operating rooms are located on three floors.

Reception in the media

The landmark character of the tower means that it is featured frequently or is the setting in films set in Sydney. In the action film Mission: Impossible II (2000) you can see the tower faded in several times as soon as the inner city of Sydney appears. In the science fiction film Supernova - When the Sun Explodes (2005), the tower is destroyed by a meteor split off from a supernova . In a scene in Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) in which the monster Zilla is teleported into the city , the Sydney Tower is also destroyed. The monster is later fought by Godzilla, and the Sydney Opera House is devastated. The Sydney Tower also appears in the youth film Power Rangers - The Film (1995).

literature

  • Saiful H. Esa: Sydney Tower at Centrepoint, Sydney , University of New South Wales, 1991.
  • A. Wargon, E. Smith, A. Davids: Sydney Tower Design for Comfort and Strength , in: National Structural Engineering Conference , 1990, ISBN 0-85825-506-5 .
  • Alexander Wargon: Sydney Tower at Centrepoint (Australia) , in: IBASE STRUCTURES C-34/85 (Telecommunication Towers), May 1985, pp. 24-27, ISSN  0377-7286 . ( here online )
  • BJ Vickery, Alan Garnett Davenport : An Investigation of the Behavior in Wind of the Proposed Centrepoint Tower in Sydney, Australia , University of Western Ontario. Faculty of Engineering Science 1970.
  • John Steven Gero, Wargon, Chapman and Associates: Preliminary Report on the Model Investigation of the Centrepoint Tower for the AMP , Department of Architectural Science, University of Sydney, 1969, ISBN 978-0-85589-016-2 .

Web links

Commons : Sydney Tower  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Facts about Sydney Tower , accessed June 15, 2013
  2. ↑ a b Wargon: Sydney Tower at Centrepoint (Australia) , p. 25
  3. ↑ a b c The Sydney Morning Herald : The symphony of building a great work , September 25, 1981 (English), accessed June 25, 2013.
  4. ↑ a b c d Information and pictures about the Sydney Tower , accessed on June 15, 2013
  5. ↑ Blog entry Sydney Tower gets “re-badged” , accessed on June 17, 2013
  6. ↑ The Mole will not be entering Sydney Tower’s , accessed on June 22, 2013
  7. ↑ The Sydney Morning Herald: Nightmare at 200m: trapped in lift , July 3, 2008 article, accessed June 24, 2013
  8. ↑ Life begins for 'Sydney Tower Eye' as Sydney Tower September 2011 ( Memento of April 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on June 20, 2013
  9. ^ The Sydney Morning Herald: EyePhoney: Sydney Tower goes over the top , accessed June 15, 2013
  10. ↑ Erwin Heinle , Fritz Leonhardt : Towers of all times, of all cultures. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-421-02931-8 , page 254.
  11. ↑ a b Wargon: Sydney Tower at Centrepoint (Australia) , p. 24
  12. ^ University of Melbourne: The Centrepoint Tower, Sydney , accessed June 16, 2013
  13. ^ The Sydney Tower Eye: Opening Hours , accessed June 26, 2013
  14. ↑ Centrepoint Tower ( Memento of the original from November 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed June 15, 2013  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / library.thinkquest.org
  15. ↑ AMP Centrepoint Tower and Skywalk ( Memento of October 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on June 16, 2013
  16. ↑ Sydney Tower Eye with 4D Cinema ( Memento September 26, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), accessed June 21, 2013
  17. ↑ 2010 Triple M Sydney Tower Run-Up , accessed June 22, 2013
  18. ^ Sydney Tower Stair Challenge , accessed June 22, 2013
  19. ↑ Sydney Tower Stair Challenge: Event Details ( April 9, 2013 memento in the Internet Archive ), accessed June 26, 2013
  20. ↑ We can't believe it! No Sydney Race! , accessed June 22, 2013
  21. ↑ Sydney Tower Run-up 2012 is canceled , accessed June 22, 2013
  22. ↑ Communication Rental Companies , accessed June 24, 2013
  23. ↑ Sydney Tower ( Memento of the original dated August 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed June 24, 2013 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sydneytoday.com.au
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on March 8, 2014 .