Toronto Pinnacle One Yonge | 345.5m | 105s | Pinnacle | Hariri Pontarini

 
A little off topic, but I don't think Sugar Wharf had 4.5 meter transfer slabs as the article states, it looked like mostly beams and a 600+ slab poured afterwards.

As for the first pour, it was over 900 cubic meters of concrete.
 
Sugar Wharf ~9th and 12th floor transfer slabs were 4.6m.
The base was crazy thick too. Same depth, same shale, same tower height, assuming different engineer at sugar wharf vs pinnacle 1st tower. Just curious.
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Who would have thought a concrete slab would be so interesting?

Perfect staging to be able to see both towers from this angle.
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Flashback two years ago - March 20, 27 & 30, 2019
SE tower slab pour with up to 10 feeds over 12 hours in poor weather conditions.


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Sugar Wharf ~9th and 12th floor transfer slabs were 4.6m.
The base was crazy thick too. Same depth, same shale, same tower height, assuming different engineer at sugar wharf vs pinnacle 1st tower. Just curious.

Who thought a concrete slab would be so interesting?
You can see the yellow vertical forms that separate the individual beams, I would not consider it true 4.6m transfer slab.
 
For everyone's reference, a concrete truck carries about 8-10 cubic meters of concrete.

Fascinating to see Canadian construction industry measure concrete in cubic meters. It's almost like we live in a metric country. How did we ever move away from measuring concrete in foot-yard freedom units?
 
Fascinating to see Canadian construction industry measure concrete in cubic meters. It's almost like we live in a metric country. How did we ever move away from measuring concrete in foot-yard freedom units?
I was chatting to an architect on this very subject yesterday. He informed me that commercial construction is very much metric, but smaller residential is still stuck with imperial.

Oh, and you're only truly metric if you spell it "metres", not "meters". The latter is still horribly American (said in my strongest British accent!)
 
2nd level windows NE corner

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Terrible timing.
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SE upper corner poured.
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1 or 2 more pours to go? How did they physically separate/contain the pours?
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That will be fun dismantling in 100-200+ years? What is the expected life span of a new super tall building like this?
 
There is concrete surviving since Roman times, the key for any structure's longevity, is a solid foundation, to keep the structure dry, no exposure to extreme heat cycling and designing to ensure a lengthy fatigue life from wind loading. In most cases the fatigue life of the structure determines the ultimate life of the building. I believe the CN tower was considered during construction an overbuild design with a structure fatigue life of 300 years, (that's my memory from 50 years ago so I could be wrong here). I'm thinking for a residential concrete supertall, 150 years would be about right with heavy periodic maintenance, although I have to admit I've never worked on one so maybe some one else has some more info with the specifics here.
 
It's really hard to say how long our new skyscrapers will last, as modern reinforced concrete construction techniques haven't been around long enough. 100 year old concrete buildings today were designed and constructed much differently than buildings going up today.

There's a number of things that would warrant demolition. Freeze/thaw exposure, the salt for deicing, and just general time are all things that cause rebar corrosion. There's also the possibility of a design level wind or earthquake event, in which case the building would likely need to be demolished.

In the absence of those factors, let's say the structure is contained inside the envelope, GFRP bars are used, and no earthquakes - theoretically it would last "forever" (i.e. longer than humanity). The chances of nothing bad ever happening are pretty small, so people usually say somewhere between 100-200 years.

Ultimately, I'd expect these buildings to be torn down for social or financial reasons over structural. that is unless an earthquake hits Toronto. In which case I could rant for a while about design codes, structural performance, and the unpreparedness of our infrastructure for such events.
 

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