Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/30/watch-huge-building-mechanically-walk-to-its-new-location.html
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Baba Yaga has really upped her game.
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Quite an engineering feat IMO. Kudos to them for not just tearing down the old school and building a new one.
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That is neat - and color me surprised that they didn’t just tear it down and build something else. China has been voracious in growth and tearing things down and starting over was pretty typical, I thought. They probably don’t make them like they used too, though.
Not that we wouldn’t also tear it down in the US as well.
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Here’s a tune to go with that ponderous moving:
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I was thinking more…
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18 days to move? They could have built a new one in that time!
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Hydraulics.
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It’s neat, but it raises a lot of questions about the building’s foundations.
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The only way this makes sense to me is a showcase, or test of this technology.
Not really. They cut off the original foundations and put in a grid of reinforced concrete. The grid is designed to take the load of the building and to transfer the load to the points where the hydraulic jacks are. The building looks like it could be a frame/skeleton construction, so the load will be concentrated at a number of points anyway. If it isn’t, the structural design of the grid will take that into account.
My guess is that they’ll keep the grid and just put the whole shebang on top of new foundations at the new location. Which would be another design consideration for the grid.
It’s a pretty straightforward operation, it just takes time.
Sometimes the grid is constructed using steel girders, usually when the grid is removed after the translocation. Bit like a giant cake slice.
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Using hydraulic jacks to move buildings is a tried and tested technology which has been available since the 1960ies or so.
Building bridges, straighten out leaning chimneys, relocating listed buildings, and so on.
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Go home massive building in Shanghai, you’re drunk
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Always surprising to find cases where wheels are not the best tool for straight surface lateral movement.
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This reminded me of the work that was done to re-locate the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. It had to be moved 2,900 feet uphill to get it clear of the eroding shoreline. The challenges of pushing along a historic brick lighthouse made it an impressive move. It took 23 days of gradual movement.
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How the hell did they get the first foot under there?!?
Even further back than that even -
Raising of Chicago - Wikipedia
Apparently back in the day Chicago was like one of those sliding-tile puzzle games or a fleet of those Python bankers brokers : (quote from the above wiki)
Traveller David Macrae wrote, “Never a day passed during my stay in the city that I did not meet one or more houses shifting their quarters. One day I met nine. Going out Great Madison Street in the horse cars we had to stop twice to let houses get across.” The function for which such a building had been constructed would often be maintained during the move. A family could begin dining at one address and end their meal at another, and a shop owner could keep their shop open, even as customers had to climb in through a moving front door.[36][37][38][39][40] Brick buildings also were moved from one location to another, and in 1866, the first of these—a brick building of two and a half stories—made the short move from Madison Street out to Monroe Street.[41] Later, many other much larger brick buildings were rolled much greater distances across Chicago.
This walking mechanism is crazy though - curious why that was chosen over rollers, gentler on the pavement maybe?
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This building in Romania was jacked up and moved on rails, supposedly while the residents were still inside:
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Combination jack things and slidey plates (not the technical terms?)
I was looking forward to seeing the (ca. 2000ish) move of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse straight up some rock at 50 degrees or something. No rock, just back from the ocean. Aw.
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