Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Demolishing a Skyscraper One Floor at a Time

Kajima Corporation - If you guys have seen The Dark Knight, you would have notice the amount of buildings blown up and gone to waste by The Joker. Now shouldn't there be a more civilised and clean way to demolish a building, you should check out the amount of debris formed after an explosion or collapsing of a building. So Japanese construction firm Kajima Corporation is using this brand new demolition method to take apart old buildings by replacing the support pillars at ground level with computer-controlled metal columns. Then the entire floor is demolished by hand leaving the structure on mechanical pillars which is lowered until the next upper floor becomes the ground floor. The support pillars are replaced with mechanical ones and the process is repeated until they get rid of all the floors. Kajima Corporation informally calls this the daruma-otoshi method, after the old Japanese game consisting of a doll made of stacked pieces that players knock out one by one without toppling the doll (sounds like Uno Stacko to me). This way of demolition makes it look as if the building is shrinking and it reduces the environmental impact of the demolition as well as time. Furthermore, it also saves time and makes it easier for recycling of materials to take place. So this way of taking apart a building is really useful for Singapore in the future (tons of buildings next time). Check out the video below too on how they do it. More info via here.

1 comment:

18htn said...

Yup you can check out Kajima Corporation for more info.

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