Top o 'Texas Tower

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Top o 'Texas Tower

The Top o 'Texas Tower is a 152.4 meter high gyro tower made by Intamin in Dallas, Texas . It stands near the Cotton Bowl Stadium at the Fair of Texas Exhibition Center and opened on September 27, 2013. The architects of the building are Good Fulton & Farrell Architects Inc. and Jonathan Rollins.

history

As early as 1962, Robert Lee Thornton, then mayor of Dallas, was inspired by the Space Needle in Seattle to build a similar tower in Dallas. Since his 3.5 million project did not find a majority, it was initially discarded. In 1969, as the city skyline was growing, a new proposal came up for a 275-meter-high skyscraper with an observation deck , which also failed to make it past the planning stage. At the end of the 1970s, with the construction of the Reunion Tower, the idea of ​​an observation tower in a central location in Dallas was realized.

The establishment of the Top o 'Texas Tower began in the summer of 2011. The individual shaft elements, each 24 meters long and weighing 64 tons, were joined together with the help of a lattice boom crane in December 2012. The construction costs were around 12 million US dollars . With a height-to-width ratio of 47.61: 1, it has held the Guinness World Record as the “slimmest tower in the world” since it opened on September 27, 2013 . In the years 2016 to 2018, reports circulated that the structurally similar British Airways i360 in Brighton in the south of England had this record, which later turned out to be wrong . The observation tower in Brighton also has a smaller height-to-width ratio due to a wider shaft . However, the British Airways i360 is around 20 meters higher and can carry up to twice as many people in its viewing platform.

Technical specifications

The observation tower can accommodate 100 passengers during one trip. The ride in the gondola takes around 4.5 minutes and is done at a moderate speed. During the journey, the gondola turns slowly around the vertical axis of the tower, so that you get a 360-degree view of the surroundings. In this way, the tower can offer the journey 13 times an hour. The vertical speed is 2 meters per second. The shaft diameter is 3.20 meters, the diameter of the gondola is 16.7 meters. The gondola has a circular plan and is attached to the shaft by ten steel struts via a carriage.

The gyrotower weighs a total of 480 tons. For its foundation , 1,223.3 cubic meters of concrete were used. A total of 1.4 million LED light units illuminate the tower.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Top o 'Texas Tower , accessed July 16, 2019
  2. ↑ NBC: Top o 'Texas Tower Growing in Height , December 19, 2012 article, accessed July 16, 2019
  3. ↑ Top o 'Texas Tower Ride Facts , accessed July 16, 2019
  4. ↑ Guinness World Records: Most slender tower , accessed on July 16, 2019
  5. ↑ Poster with the technical data of the Top o 'Texas Tower , accessed on July 16, 2019

Coordinates: 32 ° 46 ′ 40.1 ″  N , 96 ° 45 ′ 26.9 ″  W.