Structural Engineering for Complex-Shaped Tall Buildings

Early design of tall buildings culminated with the emergence of the International Style, which produced many Miesian towers all over the world for decades. Today, however, as is true of other building types, multiple design directions are prevalent for tall buildings. This contemporary design trend has produced various building forms, such as twisted, tilted, and free forms, as are the cases with the Chicago Spire in Chicago, Signature Tower in Dubai and Phare Tower in Paris, respectively. This paper presents performance-based structural engineering options for various complex-shaped tall buildings. For each complex form category, tall buildings are designed with various contemporary structural systems, and the structural efficiency of each system, in conjunction with the building form, is studied. Parametric structural models are used for this study to investigate the impacts of the variation of important geometric configurations of complex-shaped tall buildings.