Page 97 - THE FIRE STATION

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“If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss. “
Rudyard Kipling, If, 1910

STRUCTURES The grid pattern of the building’s core thus only applies from Level
3 upwards.
The structural system has undergone numerous changes since
the competition.These have all aimed at increasing modularity The structure is made up of columns, prefabricated curved beams,
and prefabrication to boost construction speed and efficiency reinforced concrete slabs and load-bearing walls (levels 0, 1 and
(the building’s shell was completed within 9 months). 2), pre-cast slabs and walls (levels 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4) and glulam
beam structures for the roof of the top floors.
Call-out traffic flows both inside and outside the building (as
described above) dictate the structural design of Levels 0 - 2. The basement floor slab, necessary for distributing the building’s
weight on a site with low mechanical properties, is 40 cm thick,
The structural and partitioning system combines columns, con- and 60 cm thick in places where vertical loads weigh down on it.
crete walls and floor slab modules pre-cast on site.This greatly
accelerates the construction process, bringing forward the comple- The construction of the semi-underground Level 0 entailed exca-
tion date. vating soil to a depth of 4 metres in order for the weight of the
floor slab (some 6T/m2) to more than adequately compensate for
Given the desire to keep the indoor ring road on Level 1 entirely the weight of the building itself.This avoided the necessity of hav-
free of obstacles in order not to obstruct the manoeuvring of the ing to use deep foundations.
fire engines and ambulances, this space is completely open on two
floors, with the exception of the heated garage for the ambulances For the staff and visitors’ car park, most of which is underground,
and the car-wash. the outside wall is made of prefabricated reinforced concrete ele-
ments, with additional reinforcement where the outside columns
There are thus no columns between the truck parking spaces and (between the garage doors) of Level 1 weigh down on Level 0.
the indoor ring road.

Plan for the prefabricated walls.