A well-thought-out lift plan is the crucial link between high-rise buildings, public accessibility and safety.
Urban rooftops create vibrancy and make our cities greener, especially when considering housing shortages and urban densification. Two challenges are improving the liveliness in the city and removing the anonymity of high-rise buildings. These trends are central here:
- Increasing public accessibility of multi-use high rises for accommodation, hospitality and retail
- Creating urban rooftops which are accessible to residents, office workers and/or the public.
While these developments promote the integration of concrete behemoths into the city, they also carry risks. Consider social safety when unwanted guests can enter the tower from underground parking levels. Cities like Rotterdam now prohibit residential lifts from continuing directly into the parking basements below. Efficiency in traffic handling is also an important consideration : a lift that has to stop at several parking levels before it can go back into the tower creates unnecessarily long waiting times for residents.
The design of public, multifunctional high-rise buildings often hinges on a good lift plan that takes into account the different users and their specific needs. Ensuring the smooth and safe flow of in-house users and external audiences is essential to the success of modern high-rise projects. Examples include projects such as Valley, A’DAM, Escher Gardens and HART010 in the Netherlands
A’DAM: successful integration of mixed use
Take the A’DAM tower in Amsterdam, a popular dance and music destination. Despite a tenfold increase in the intensity of internal movements after its transformation as the Shell office tower, there were constraints to the amount of lifts which could be added.
Instead of creating separate lifts for each, Deerns recommended the more sustainable and financially efficient choice of using the same lifts for mixed use. This is more sustainable and financially efficient. The developer embraced this idea, which meant visitors, from office workers to partygoers, could bump into each other in the lifts. The new lift plan needed to take into account all the new publicly accessible areas, as well as the privacy for residents: the public Lookout, catering establishments at the top, flexible workplaces, offices and a hotel.
Social safety was top priority, as was reducing the annoyance factor of residents disturbed by a constant flow of party goers. A time-sharing concept for Lookout lift allocates freight traffic to the early morning and is then available for the regular morning peak of office and hotel traffic.
Maximising the lift core
The increased multifunctionality of high-rise buildings reinforces the need for a tailor-made lift concept. At Deerns, we pull out all the stops to manage traffic and get the maximum capacity out of Six strategies to accommodate multifunctional high-rise buildings
- Mixing or not mixing traffic by thinking about the different visitor flows;
- Decoupling the public and private parts by lifting the main lift floor;
- Concentrating the entrance levels on a limited number of layers;
- Concentrating the number of destinations over the height of the tower so that the lifts need to stop less often and cycle time is reduced;
- Encourage local stair use (taking into account accessibility for people with disabilities).
An additional challenge with lifts is that they often cannot be retrofitted and are fixed features of the structural core of the tower. This core is the backbone and the lifts are the building’s aorta. This concept has to be right from the sketch design phase to properly determine the feasibility and future-proofing of the tower.
High-rise buildings of the future
Multifunctional towers and public urban balconies is leading to an upward trend of the mix of different types of people flows within high-rise buildings. Unique lift solutions need consider associated challenges such as security, safety and evacuation, ownership and operating costs, supply versus public use (mixed-use) et cetera.
Deerns’ experience with complex projects and associated knowledge ensures an integral approach to these projects. With this expertise, we lift any multifunctional high-rise project, literally, to the next level.
