How multi-ton buildings are moved

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Among the engineering challenges that humanity had to solve, there are those that cause something like a sacred awe in the soul. Moving buildings from place to place is clearly one of those. In the very idea of tearing the house away from Mother Earth, there is already something unnatural and irrevocable. But if necessary, then it is necessary, and even in the 15th century the legendary Aristotle Fioravanti (before becoming a Russian architect and military engineer) moved the bell tower in his Italian homeland.

We, residents of Russia, and especially Muscovites, are very close to the topic of relocation of buildings, because there were times in our recent history when the center of the capital of Russia with its "old-regime" buildings was actively adapted to the bright communist future.

Then, in the 1930s, according to the General Plan for the reconstruction of Moscow through the center, it was decided to build several wide streets. Where the new avenues were cramped, whole neighborhoods turned into rubble. Still, some houses deserved a special fate - they were not demolished. They were simply moved.

The most famous buildings that have moved to a new address are the then building of the Moscow City Council (originally the house of the Governor-General, built by M. F. Kazakov), the courtyard of the Savvinsky Monastery, the building of the Eye Hospital - all on Tverskaya Street.

Much has already been written about the history of the Moscow "permutations", about the outstanding engineer Emmanuel Handel, who directed the movements. However, it is no less interesting to look at the very technology of transferring a building from place to place.

Indeed, even the uninitiated understands that the main problems that engineers have to solve are the enormous weight of the object being moved and its fragility. The house must be very delicately torn from the foundation, lifted, moved and managed not to destroy it.

Iron into the ground

The first step is to somehow separate the house from the base. To do this, a trench is torn off around the building, and then it is cut off from the foundation. In the practice of Moscow movements, metal cables were used as a cutting tool. Of course, at this stage, the building will not go anywhere: it is enough to slightly move it from its place - and it will begin to collapse. Before the journey begins, brick, stone, or wood will have to be held together.

The first step is to reinforce the building with so-called belt beams. Another option is to gird the house with a concrete monolith. The next step is the construction of a powerful metal frame on which the building will hit the road.

External and internal walls, which will be perpendicular to the direction of movement, are the most vulnerable, so they need to be specially strengthened. Longitudinal grooves (strips) are made in the walls, into which powerful iron beams in the form of an I-beam are embedded.

These reinforcing structures are called round beams. Openings for the rail tracks are punched in the walls below the rand beams (they will run perpendicular to the rand beams). Rollers are installed on the laid track, and on them - the so-called running beams. Above the running beams, transverse beams are placed, which are rigidly fastened to the randbeams, but do not touch the running ones yet.

This is how the base frame takes on its final form. Finally, metal wedges are driven into the remaining gap between the running and transverse beams. At this point, the weight of the building is transferred from the foundation to rollers placed on the rails. It remains to disassemble the sections of the masonry between the gaps for the rail tracks, and the house can be rolled.

Actually, the described technology is just one of the options. In different cases, depending on the weight of the house and other conditions, the design of the support frame and the methods for placing it on the rollers could be different. But the general principle remained unchanged. When moving the building, it was common to use push jacks and winches to pull the building forward.

The Mossovet House is one of the most famous examples of the relocation of buildings in Moscow. In 1939, the building (which had not yet been completed) was moved 13.6 m deep into the quarter. Despite the objections of the architects (there is no need to rush to move the buildings), the former house of the governor-general left for a new place at a “Stakhanov’s pace” - in 41 minutes.

All this proves once again that there was a lot of politics, ideology and a desire to demonstrate to the West the technical achievements of the country of victorious socialism in fashion for the relocation of buildings. In today's, already bourgeois Moscow, only railway bridges were moved. Houses are treated differently.

What about us?

It is surprising and sad that the Soviet feats in the field of moving buildings are practically unknown abroad. One of the well-visited American popular science sites in the five of the heaviest buildings that have ever been moved, there is not a single Moscow building, but there are four American ones, although a certain Chinese house is recognized as the record holder. It weighed 13,500 tons and was moved 36 m, which is why it got into the Guinness Book of Records. It is only worth recalling that the Savvinskoye courtyard transferred by Handel weighs 23,000 tons.

It seems unfair, but there is a grain of truth here. Our epic with urban reshuffles remained in the distant past, when the USSR measured its achievements with the United States. America was branded as a hotbed of bourgeois mores, but secretly envied of its technological power. But it was in the United States that the movement of buildings was for the first time in history placed on a commercial and industrial basis. They continue to move houses there today.

Despite the fact that wheeled carts on pneumatic tires are now most often used for the transfer of structures, there are exceptions. In 2000, in the state of North Carolina, a whole brick lighthouse 59 m high and weighing about 4,000 tons was transferred. This colossus had to overcome the distance of 870 meters on a special rail platform.

Jacks and Wheels

For example, back in 2001, the building of the old terminal at Newark Airport in New Jersey was relocated. Its weight, by the way, is about 7000 tons. True, the technologies that are used today to move such bulky goods are somewhat different from those described above. Now, instead of rollers, wheels are almost universally used.

Everything starts in the usual way. The house is dug in a trench to expose the foundation, separated from it, and powerful I-beams (such as randbeams) are brought into the building through the basement. They will form the backbone of a sturdy frame. Next comes the most important part of the whole action - the building must be raised in order to bring wheeled carts under it. This is done using hydraulic jacks.

The jacks are placed on wooden blocks. The lifting process itself requires filigree precision. The force should be distributed evenly and the building should not heel. In the course of work, while some jacks hold the building, additional bars are placed under others. Then these jacks are already activated.

Modern equipment makes it possible to control all working jacks at the same time, ensuring that the raised building occupies a perfectly horizontal position. When the required height is reached, wheeled carts are brought under the metal frame beams.

With the help of a rack-jack, the carts rest against the iron beams, taking the weight of the building onto themselves. Then the towing begins. Sometimes, if the building is not very large, instead of carts, a special truck with a huge platform is brought under it, on which transportation is carried out.