Prefabrication experiments - 217 - oddities - 08 - The Self-lift building technique

R. Buckminster Fuller famously posed the investigative question: How much does your building weigh? Pier Nervi Luigi, another important protagonist posited that construction was all about lifting and moving things and as such weight should be reduced to achieve economies and eliminate the need for complex machinery in the construction process. Both identified weight as a decisive factor for assessing structural systems and both conceived strategies to optimize the relationship between form, geometry, strength and material use. Nervi’s “tavelone” ferrocement formwork for thin-shell construction specifically reduced both weight and the complexities of large-scale onsite construction. Other systems for eliminating transportation and external construction machines include approaches such as tilt-slab construction. Used in many industrial buildings but made famous in architecture by Rudolf Schindler in (1921) on the Kings Road house, the house’s concrete panels were precast onsite and simply tilted into place. 

Another significant technique is sometimes associated with the Boulevard Lefebvre disaster in Paris. A tall apartment building using the ‘self-lift’ process collapsed and initiated a long debate about of identifying responsibilities for stakeholders in the construction sector. The self-lift building method, a competition proposal, was invented by a consortium of architects, engineers and builders known as the CET (Consortium d’entreprises et de travaux) in the early part of the 1950s. Conceived as an alternative to reinforced concrete construction, the self-lift steel frame could be made to be much lighter and therefore much cheaper. Analogous to tilt-slab, portal frame sections made the full height of the building were assembled at ground level, hinged at their base, hoisted and rotated from their horizontal position using the previous frame as a crane. Each frame panel skeleton included floor beams, columns, and any bracing. Tilted into place the bays were joined producing a mega-box-frame.  The column hinge represented in the image below made it possible to rotate the ten-storey frame into place. Floor slabs were also precast on-site and lifted into place, reducing the need for transportation. Prefabricating elements on-site reduced costs and made the system very economical to build. Also known as the Porte des Lilas building technique for its first successful use it received patents in both France and the United States. 

Process diagrams and column hinge