The snow might be piling up against the building's base, but inside is 53 million cubic metres of air kept at a temperature of 26degC around the clock, 365 days a year, not to mention eight football fields of landscaping made barefoot-friendly by an under-floor heating system. Instead, in 2004 it became a German water park with an English name, Tropical Islands, the moniker apparently lending an extra touch of the exotic for the hordes of Berliners who patronise it. Sure, CargoLifter went belly-up in 2002, its business plan disintegrating faster than the several Hindenburgs you could fit inside its stately pleasure dome, but still: You'd expect that a scheme equally grandiose, or at the very least sinister, would have found a home there. There before us stood hubris of a rare order: 14,000 tonnes of steel supporting a 21,000sq m structure 32 storeys high, an aviation Xanadu. "Yeah, um, wow," I replied, my voice a mixture of awe and profound confusion. "Wow!" That's all my son could say as the bus rounded a bend and an enormous elliptical dome appeared in the distance. The Kublai Khan-worthy plan: to construct a heavy-lift aircraft - "heavy-lift" as in having a loading bay capable of carrying "a diesel locomotive engine (120 tonnes) and a humpback whale (40 tonnes)", according to the book International Logistics by Douglas Long, which unfortunately does not go on to explain why you might want to transport both of those at once. It was flat and treeless and abandoned in 1998 when a German firm called CargoLifter purchased it with the stated intention of building a massive hangar. This was land the Nazi Luftwaffe once used as a training ground for pilots, that the Soviet Union later turned into an East German military base. No-one was clamouring for an artificial biosphere so enormous that the Statue of Liberty could stand upright in it or the Eiffel Tower lie on its side.Īnd even if they had been clamouring for it, no-one would have built it here, in the German countryside somewhere between Berlin and Dresden. Photo by Tropical Islands.It was never supposed to be the largest indoor water park in the world, much less a parable for our times, a cautionary tale on the perils of dreaming big. All the chords of the truss-arch are brace-connected to each other by diagonals (355 mm) and posts (273 mm), with the exception of the two bottom-chords these are connected by only straight members (355 mm) at 4.135 m, forming a Vierendeel-system.The Tropical Islands water park in Germany is built inside a massive aircraft hangar. The top chords (diameter 559 mm) are at 3.441 m centres and the bottom chords (559 mm) at 2.0 m centre. The arches of the cylindrical part have a structural height of 8 m and span over 225 m. The structure has been designed using steel grade S355. In addition, this solution is suitable to avoid excessive wind turbulence. The shape of the building is oriented closely on the clearance diagram for two airships. Both doors form a semi-circle in plan and a quarter-segment of a circle in elevation. The central part is of a cylindrical shape consisting of five steel arches at 35 m centres – each of the four bays being covered with a textile fabric – and at both ends of the building are the doors which consist of two fixed and six moving elements. The structural concept distinguishes two main parts of the building. Currently, the detailed design is taking place and most of the building structure should be ready in 1999. With a span of 210 m, a height of 107 m and a length of 363 m it will be the largest hall in Germany. The site is an airfield in Brand, about 50 km south of Berlin. In the middle of 1997 the CargoLifter AG commissioned the design for an airship hangar in Germany to house two new airships. This airship allows transporting a pay-load of 160t over a distance of up to 10’000 km with a speed of 80-120 km/h. Currently, a new generation of airships (helium filled, carbon fibre structure, length 260 m), the CargoLifter CL-160 is prepared. But the global market and ecological needs require the search for new forms of transportation. Six decades ago the golden age for the airships – succeeded by airplanes – seemed to have died forever.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |