Structural Design and Construction of Complex-Shaped Tall Buildings

While the early design of tall buildings culminated with the dominance of the International Style, today's pluralism in architectural design has produced tall buildings of many different forms, including more complex forms, such as twisted, tilted, tapered and free forms.This paper presents performance-based structural system design options for complex-shaped tall buildings.For each complex form category, tall buildings are designed with various structural systems, such as braced tube, diagrid and outrigger systems, and the structural performance of each system, in conjunction with the building forms and heights, is studied.Parametric structural models are generated to investigate the impacts of varying various important geometric configurations of complex-shaped tall buildings, such as the rate of twist, angle of tilt, angle of taper and degree of fluctuation of free form.The parametric models are exported to structural engineering software for analyses, design and comparative studies.While an emphasis is placed on the structural performance of complex-shaped tall buildings, architectural and construction issues are also discussed holistically.