If We Built It Today (2019–…): Season 2, Episode 7 - Eiffel Tower Decoded - full transcript
[narrator] The Eiffel Tower, one of
France's finest architectural achievements,
has captivated the world with its
stature and daring design since 1889.
[man] The Eiffel Tower,
it's a true invention,
a form that had never been seen before.
The genius thing with
it, is that there's no walls.
The wind can go right through.
[narrator] Rising 984 feet into the sky,
this iconic Paris landmark held
the title of the world's tallest structure
for four decades.
So now we're curious,
with today's technology,
could we surpass the champ?
With today's materials
and construction technology,
we can actually achieve
a 3,000 meter tower.
[narrator] Here's the plan,
we're rounding up the best
architects and the heaviest equipment
to build the next Eiffel Tower.
Even more colossal, bigger,
and made for a new generation.
[Scott] We're envisioning
at every 20 or 30 stories,
there would be a hub for
a vertical farming system.
[Randy] I would add
in the observation deck.
It's one of the highest amounts of
revenue you're going to generate.
This would be the first time that
anything like this has been done.
[narrator] Imagine the
world's greatest wonders,
reimagined.
We're wondering, how long would it take,
how much would it cost,
how many workers would we need,
could we even do it?
If we built it today.
Paris...
home to architectural wonders
like the Louvre, Notre-Dame,
and towering over the city
skyline, the Eiffel Tower,
the most recognizable
manmade structure in the world.
It's really become known as
the preeminent icon of Paris.
Could you imagine, you know,
Paris without the Eiffel Tower?
That single image manages to
project a culture around the world.
[narrator] But that image
didn't come out of thin air.
In 1884, French architect and
structural engineer, Gustave Eiffel
had just completed his work on the
Statue of Liberty's iron support structure.
When he was commissioned for a new project
that would debut at the
1889 Paris Exposition.
The 19th century is the age
of iron and the Eiffel Tower
is really a great symbol of this age.
[narrator] Eiffel and his team used iron
to create a revolutionary design,
a structure that would soar above
Paris's historic Champ de Mars.
The Eiffel Tower was actually in the place
where everyone had met for the first time
to have a oath to the Republic,
the new government, so
it was very, very symbolic,
'cause there was this idea of revolution.
[narrator] When you break it down,
the Eiffel Tower is a
giant, iron, jigsaw puzzle
with 18,000 separate pieces.
And two and a half million rivets.
It took Eiffel's top engineers,
a year and a half just to design it.
[William] But if you
look at the calculations,
they're very sophisticated,
they're very, very detailed.
[narrator] Construction
began in January, 1887,
in just 26 months, builders
laid the foundations,
pedestals pillars, floors,
stairs, and elevators.
It was considered the most ambitious
construction project of its time.
So, we have beautiful
photographs that shows
a construction phase of
the Eiffel Tower, day by day.
So it grows really like a
plant from bottom to top.
[narrator] The Eiffel
Tower was mind blowing.
For the first time in history,
people felt like giants over
an ant sized world below.
When the tower was built, it
was the tallest structure on Earth.
Eiffel himself never
called it the Eiffel Tower.
He called it the 300 meter tower.
[narrator] When it
opened in 1889 at 984 feet,
the Eiffel Tower was
nearly double the height
of the world's previous tallest structure,
the 555 foot Washington Monument.
Its size and unique silhouette
floating above the city skyline
quickly made the Eiffel Tower, one
of the most popular attractions in Paris.
[Sarah] Nothing else became
higher for another 40 years,
you think about how many engineers
were trying to get bigger and bigger.
It's a long time.
[narrator] The race for the
sky has been an ongoing battle
for thousands of years.
Some experts believe
the race began in 8000 BC,
when the Tower of Jericho,
set the first recorded record,
rising to 28 feet, barely
taller than a giraffe.
Then, 5000 years later, came
one of the most well known
pyramids in history, the Pyramid of Giza,
which stood at a whopping 455 feet.
The Egyptians weren't the only
ones competing to build the biggest
and the best structure in the world.
During the Middle Ages,
cathedrals became the new structure
to enter the competition,
with some rising as high as 530 feet.
In 1889, Eiffel Tower, literally
skipped a step of evolution
in one breathtaking leap.
It's soared over 450 feet, taller
than any structure ever constructed.
That was until the
skyscraper boom in the 1930s.
First, the Chrysler Building
set a new world record,
standing at 1046 feet,
more than 100 feet taller
than the Eiffel Tower.
Soon after, the Empire State Building
was crowned the winner at 1454 feet.
In 1973, the Sears Tower set
a new record at 1729 feet.
By 2010, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai
blew the competition away at 2,722 feet,
and currently holds the title.
So, what if we wanted to shatter the record
by constructing a super-sized
modern day Eiffel Tower.
Could we even do it?
Today's tall buildings make
incremental gains in height,
but it's unlikely that we'll
ever again see such a leap
that the Eiffel Tower
represented in becoming
the tallest manmade structure.
[narrator] The designer of
the record setting Burj Khalifa
is more optimistic.
William Baker is a structural engineer,
with Chicago's Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill.
He and his team are here to take
on our new Eiffel Tower project.
It's interesting to say, what
if Eiffel was with us today?
What would be the benchmark today?
What would be the taller...
you know, that would still make the mark,
but still be achievable.
And so, it's interesting to take
what what he did on the Eiffel Tower,
let's say, let's do it ten times as tall.
[narrator] A nearly two mile high building.
How's that gonna work?
The first challenge is,
who's going to finance it.
I think the days are gone
where we're gonna see someone
building just a structure
for expression at that height.
[narrator] A century and a half ago,
Eiffel's tower cost one
and a half million dollars.
Today, that number would
be closer to $40 million.
[Antony] These structures are
huge costs, they're very expensive.
[narrator] And design
costs have skyrocketed.
Meaning, today's tall structures
are way more expensive,
but our designer says our
budget can't be sky high
or it would never get built.
Today, it has to be affordable.
This tower needs to cost no more
than the standard super tall building
around the world.
[narrator] With cutting
edge technology on our side,
we're confident our 21st century tower
will blow the super tall
building competition away.
But, we want our structure to offer
more to society than just a statistic.
In 1889, Gustave Eiffel
built the Eiffel Tower,
to honor the 100th anniversary
of the French Revolution,
and set a new benchmark
in high rise engineering.
That'll be a tough act to follow,
even with present day advantages.
So, we'll need our blueprint to rival
the originals and pass the test of time.
[William] It's a way to plant your
flag in the world and say we're here.
This is a very, very important part of
our culture, of all cultures in the world.
[narrator] But, what are
we going to build it out of?
How long will it take?
And will this thing ever turn a profit?
It's a sky high task, lining
up all the pieces, parts,
and people we'd need if we built it today.
[narrator] We're imagining how
we build a 21st century Eiffel Tower
that would leave the famous
one in Paris, in the dust.
Although, now it's a
worldwide symbol of romance.
When Gustave Eiffel first
unveiled plans for his Eiffel Tower,
its radical design inspired anything
but love from Paris' artistic elite.
The Eiffel Tower was a completely new form
in a new construction material,
and its appearance on the skyline
was shocking for this ancient city.
I think often, people don't
like something when it's new.
And then they get used to it, and
then if there's a threat to take it down,
then they want to keep it.
[narrator] And in 1940, the
tower almost did come down.
When Germany occupied
France during World War II,
Hitler ordered that the
Eiffel Tower be torn down.
Thankfully, when the Nazis
retreated from Paris four years later,
the general in charge tactfully
ignored the Reich leader.
If his orders had been followed,
it actually would have been
pretty easy to take it down.
It wasn't supposed to last, it
was supposed to be taken down
with the other buildings.
[narrator] It was designed
to be disassembled
after a lifespan of just 20 years.
But Gustave Eiffel had other plans
for his masterpiece and
encouraged multiple uses,
beyond its original purpose.
He built a radio antenna atop the tower
capable of transmitting
messages 3,700 miles away,
installed an underground military bunker
and a laboratory that was
used by French scientists.
In 1909, he added an
aerodynamic wind tunnel
at the base of the tower that
carried out thousands of tests.
During World War I,
the French military used
the tower's wireless station to
intercept enemy messages from Berlin.
In 1918, the German messages
intercepted at the tower
were considered crucial in
turning the tide on the front lines.
The tower proved it was much
more than a World's Fair attraction,
our tower will have to do the same
if we want its legacy to
last as long as Eiffel's.
So, let's do it.
Taking inspiration from Gustave Eiffel,
we'll create a structure ten
times as tall as the original.
Rising a record setting, two miles high.
A modern fusion of
design, culture, and purpose,
and that mission will guide
every decision we make.
The building has to be 50% occupied,
for it to be considered a building,
so this would be considered
a tower, but what a tower.
[narrator] First, we need to decide where
we build our modern day Eiffel Tower.
And a super tall structure,
can't build it just anywhere.
[narrator] Now that we know
the original can be disassembled,
could we simply replace
Eiffel's original structure in Paris,
with our own?
Sounds like our design team prefers
a location, a little closer to home.
[William] First of all, you need
to have good soils or good rock
that you can set on.
It's nice if the wind
loads aren't too big, okay,
and that really means it's
probably not a coastal city.
And so, I would have to say that,
wind and foundations are
probably the two, two concerns.
If you look around the world,
there's many, many places
that would satisfy this.
My favorite possible
location would be Chicago.
[narrator] When most
people think of Chicago,
they think of its nickname, the Windy City,
but as it turns out, that name
doesn't actually apply to the weather.
It comes from a 19th
century rivalry with New York,
name calling Chicago,
"The city of wind bags."
In fact, Chicago is
about as windy as Paris.
But, will a two mile high structure
be as controversial in Chicago,
as it was for Eiffel in Paris?
Chicagoans love their architecture
and they know it's what defined their city.
I think what's so unique
about the skyline of Chicago
is that because we're under a prairie,
really, the buildings are our mountains.
[narrator] Chicago's architectural boom
began around the same
time the Eiffel Tower was built
after a fire destroyed
the city's business district.
The vast majority of the city burnt
down in the Great Fire in 1871.
And there was this
need to rebuild the city,
and at that time, architects and engineers
were experimenting with new technologies.
[narrator] In 1884,
Chicago became home to what is often called
the world's first modern skyscraper.
And so you've got, you know, people like
William Le Baron Jenney who was
originally a civil war bridge engineer
started experimenting with
building buildings in steel,
and he started with the Home
Insurance Building in 1884.
[narrator] Rising ten stories tall,
it was built with a steel frame,
and reinforced concrete.
Decades later, companies
like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill,
our design team continue
to reach for the sky.
When you look at what has happened
with the John Hancock
building that was built in 1966,
it is a mixed use building, and it
really redefined Michigan Avenue
a great shopping street,
you go forward and in 1974,
you have the Willis Tower,
then the Sears Tower,
that held the title of world's
tallest building for decades.
[narrator] But, Chicago's a large city,
five times the size of Paris,
where would we build?
In Paris, they chose a gathering place
that marked a new chapter
in the nation's history.
The Champ de Mars lining the Seine River.
So, what's our Windy
City equivalent going to be?
SOM designer Scott Duncan has an idea.
The Chicago Fire of 1871
destroyed the entire city
and its urban grid and form was reimagined,
so we are proposing
that it be located on one of
the main axes of symmetry
of that Chicago Plan,
at the center of Grant Park,
where Buckingham Fountain currently rests,
our structure would sit above that.
[narrator] Well, we're sold, Chicago it is.
But we're not ready to
break ground just yet.
We still got to figure out what
material we build our structure with,
and we got to figure out
what our tower will offer
to a modern day population,
we're going to need access to the
most cutting edge construction sites
to see the challenges we'll
face building for tomorrow.
If we built it today.
[narrator] We're imagining how we
build a revolutionary superstructure
that will rival the Eiffel Tower.
We've decided, it'll be ten
times the size of the original,
rising an amazing two miles high.
We know we'd want to build it in Chicago.
And even though, we've established Chicago
isn't actually the windiest city,
wind is still our biggest challenge.
Luckily, we aren't the
first to take on the task.
In fact, Gustave Eiffel figured
out a way to combat the wind,
years before he designed the Eiffel Tower,
his answer, the Eiffel
Tower's unique lattice design.
[Ochsendorf] So, Eiffel's
firm invents a new geometry,
a parabolic form in profile,
which is ideally shaped
to carry the wind load
from the side of the tower.
[Sarah] The genius thing with it,
is that there's no walls.
The wind can go right through,
then there's no resistance.
As you go up, it gets smaller and smaller.
[narrator] Removing walls added
another benefit to the skeletal frame,
kept the tower lightweight enough
that it wouldn't collapse in on itself.
In fact, if you melted the
entire Eiffel Tower down,
the steel and its footprint
would be just six inches deep.
Let's hear what our designers have in store
for our high tech tower.
If one's going to go to 3,000 meters,
you don't take the existing
Eiffel Tower and scale it up.
I came up with several
schemes and I decided to go
for one of the schemes, it
wasn't the least expensive,
but it was pretty interesting and
very much in keeping with Eiffel,
which is a lattice tower.
We did a whole series of studies on what
different shapes could be done on this.
You couldn't just make a
cylinder go all the way up,
because a cylinder would have way
too much wind pressure at the top.
So we came up with an elegant shape
that gets smaller as you go up.
[narrator] The lattice style openings
will allow winds to pass through
and keep it lightweight,
Bill says the base for
the design he's imagined
won't be that much bigger
than the first Eiffel Tower.
Wind and stability, those are the
things that you have to work with.
And, you know, the strength and
stability comes from the geometry,
and you try very much to minimize the wind
by making the shape aerodynamic.
[narrator] A simple scale model test
in SOM's state of the art wind tunnel,
puts Bill's radical
contour design to the test.
[William] We say designing
the wind and managing gravity.
You put the weight
where it's the most good.
[narrator] The results prove
SOM's design will withstand anything
the windy city can throw its way.
Now that we have our design,
what will our primary material be?
Until 1889, the record breaking tall
structures were all built with stone,
but our experts say that wouldn't work
for our two mile high tower.
Eiffel couldn't even use
it for his 984 foot tower.
Stone would've carried too much weight,
and it what have fallen through the floor.
[narrator] So, Eiffel took a page
from his own design playbook
and used the same product that he
used to support the Statue of Liberty.
Iron.
They couldn't have built it of any
other product, really, at the time,
it just wouldn't have been feasible.
[narrator] But they
couldn't just use any iron,
some irons, like cast iron
have a high carbon content,
making it brittle and
difficult to work with.
But, wrought iron is soft and malleable.
It can be heated and hammered into shape.
A better choice for assembling
18,000 pieces of metal.
Wrought iron is a very special material,
because it's strong in both
tension and compression.
[narrator] In the
evolution of tall buildings,
iron was replaced by steel to
improve strength and efficiency.
But our experts say
there's an even better option.
In the last ten to 20 years, we've
seen a complete inversion of that,
now most of the world's tallest
buildings are built out of concrete.
Concrete is an amazing building material,
I mean, it can take any shape you want.
It's basically liquid stone.
[narrator] Chicago based
contractor Brett Szabo agrees.
Today, he's putting the final touches on
the city's latest high
rise development project,
and they're doing it with concrete.
[Brett] As you start
to build taller buildings,
those buildings want to
move or sway especially
with wind and, and increasing
the stiffness of concrete
slows that movement down
or controls that movement.
For that reason, I think that
concrete is the material of choice
when it comes to high rise construction.
[narrator] So, our lattice
design structure will be built
with durable, wind resistant concrete.
Well, now that we've got our
location, design, and materials in place,
we're nearly ready to get started.
But, we've still got a
few hurdles to figure out,
like, how do we build a
structure that's taller than
the machines designed to assemble them?
If we built it today.
[narrator] We're exploring
the secrets of the 19th century's
tallest building.
The Eiffel Tower.
We want to figure out how we'd
construct a modern equivalent,
that would rise two miles high.
We've already decided,
we build it in Chicago,
and our material of choice is concrete,
but how do you create a structure,
taller than modern machinery
has ever been designed to reach?
Nowadays, you go around the world
and you look at the skyline of cities,
there's all these tower cranes
and ways to hoist the materials up.
[narrator] Today, cranes are the
backbone of the construction industry,
with the ability to move, lift,
and lower heavy materials,
the most powerful cranes are
capable of lifting nearly 17,000 tons,
equivalent to the weight
of three heavy duty trucks,
but the world's tallest crane can only
achieve a maximum height of 818 feet.
We're building nearly ten times higher.
It's a dilemma Gustave Eiffel
and his team faced a century ago.
So they had to improvise.
By adapting early automobile technology.
[Mason] At that time, steam
power was the motor power.
So these steam cranes,
they couldn't lift things very far,
so they had staging, they built
massive wooden scaffolding around,
and would move the
steam crane up with that.
[narrator] Cranes might
help with the heavy lifting,
but the challenging work
is down on the ground.
First, the construction crew
assembles formworks or molds.
So, one of the things about concrete,
that, that lets us do what
we can do is formwork.
It's a liquid material
and so you have to hold it
till it gets hardened, hard
enough that it'll hold itself up.
[narrator] Traditional
formwork is made up of timber,
but it can also be constructed
from plywood, plastic or steel
and is used to create walls,
and other concrete structures,
since freshly poured concrete is wet,
the formwork molds
and supports the concrete
until it's dried and is
able to support itself.
[Brett] Ready-mix trucks pull up
to it, they dump into the hopper
and this machine pushes
the concrete through a pipe,
could be 1000 feet in the air, you
can imagine the amount of power
that that machine has to
produce to push concrete that high.
[narrator] Once the
concrete is poured and cured,
hydraulic lifts move the
formwork structure up.
The process continues
until the building, in this case,
reaches its desired height,
but even the toughest
equipment and materials
have their limits,
especially while working at great heights,
and at a certain point, humans do, too.
When you start getting
to 800, 900, 1000 feet,
the winds up there
are quite a bit different
than the winds on the ground
and sometimes that can be
a challenge that shuts us down for the day.
[narrator] There's another problem, too,
modern formwork is intended
for buildings with simple designs.
Structures with contours, like ours,
take time and are more
complicated to work with.
But Asbjorn Sondergaard and
his team might have a solution.
We have developed a
technology that allow you to do this
just in one swipe.
So that's called robotic wire cutting.
[narrator] Asbjorn says
his company's formwork
makes construction 100 times
faster than conventional methods.
And he's recommending
foam formwork for our tower,
because it's lightweight, cheap, and fast.
The wire cutting tool that you see here,
essentially, is powerful frame
with four suspended flywheels in it,
you have the wires spinning
at 210 kilometers per hour,
and with this, we are able to
cut through marble and granite
and light concrete,
but in particularly also EPS, foam
materials that we use to cut out formworks.
[narrator] A robotically controlled
wire cutter easily slices through
the formwork.
The concrete would be
poured into the negative space
or a hole that was made
by the cutting device.
The number of designs this
technology can create is endless.
And Asbjorn has built a piece to visualize
what a segment of our
tower might look like.
[Asbjorn] So, what we got
here is a scale mock-up,
which is produced by the robots,
actually this is only 20% of the real size.
You can imagine this is
a pretty massive element.
[narrator] The curvy
prototype even lines up
to modern environmental standards,
[Asbjorn] Concrete,
because it's so widely used.
It also comes with a drawback,
and the drawback is that
the production of cement
represents 8% of the global CO2 emissions.
And if we compare that to air
traffic that we hear much more about.
That's only 2%.
So, if you imagine that we
take the wire cutting technology
to create shape optimized design
that is able to take 50% of
the concrete consumption
compared to a standard structure,
we could slice as much as two
times the global air traffic emissions,
just by reducing the amount
of concrete consumption.
[narrator] The added bonus is
that workers won't have to climb
two miles above the ground.
A robot does that tough job.
[Asbjorn] I would imagine
a sequential build up
of a process where the robots are
essentially following up each story,
falling up along the building
until we reach the top.
[narrator] Staged pumping
systems would follow.
Filling the molds one section at a time.
The climbing formwork allows us to
change the thicknesses of columns
in a beautiful way,
increase the amount of concrete
at the intersections where
there's more force being collected.
And it's that kind of
transformation that gives a structure
lightness, and dynamism, and beauty.
[narrator] In total, we estimate
we'd need 130,000 tanker trucks
worth of concrete.
Lined up, they'd stretch
from Chicago to New York.
So, we've got the design.
We've got the materials, and now we've
got robots to work at incredible heights.
Before we reach for the sky,
we want to make sure
we equal Eiffel's success
by making sure our two mile high tower
would be of benefit to the modern world.
If we built it today.
[narrator] We're imagining what it would
take to build an Eiffel Tower of the future.
In Chicago, we've already
decided it would be built
from modern super strength concrete,
and would stand two miles high,
eclipsing the current world record holder.
The Burj Khalifa at 2,722 feet,
which leads us to our next question.
How many people would it take,
because it's not going to be easy.
[Mason] If you're looking to
build the Eiffel Tower today,
finding 300 guys willing
to withstand, I don't know,
500, 600 feet up in the air
and swing a sledgehammer.
I don't think that you
would find those people.
[narrator] Back in the 19th century,
welding the tower's 18,000
pieces of iron in place,
was one of the toughest
challenges in high rise history.
One of the problems that
actually goes right back,
a long ways is how do
you connect metal to metal?
[narrator] Eiffel came up with a
riveting solution for his workforce.
They put two bolts in to hold it in place,
then they hot riveted the unit.
Uh, that's why anybody who
goes up the Eiffel Tower today,
you're amazed by all the
little X's and cross beams
and the millions of rivets.
[narrator] Two and a
half million to be exact.
[hammering]
Inside his shop, Blacksmith John Mason
continues to bring that technique to life.
[Mason] Riveting became a science.
When men figured out
how to heat it and hammer it
in situ and create two hemispheres,
that were of equal diameter,
once they did that, the stresses
on the outside of the material
and the inside of the material
were equalized on the shank itself.
This coal when it's coax,
if I put a lot of air to it,
it can go 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
So if you get the length of the rivet right
and you hammer the head properly,
then basically you can put
stuff up that's really heavy,
and it's not going to
move 'cause it shrinks
[narrator] Riveters
are a thing of the past,
practitioners of a lost art.
So we'll leave the workforce
decision making to the experts.
[Brett] At any given time, we
could have 500 to 1,000 employees
working for us.
This year is actually a
record year for us in volume,
we're just constantly trying
to push the limits and do more.
[narrator] So, we'll hire 1,000 workers.
But, how long would all this take?
The original Eiffel Tower took
just over two years to complete.
At ten times the height, does that mean
our tower will take more than 20 years?
On the Burj Khalifa, we
went from competition
to a grand opening in a
little less than seven years.
Now, we're doing something
that's a little over twice as tall,
so I would suspect we could do this,
including foundations around ten years.
[narrator] That timeframe doesn't
sound bad for a two mile high building,
but to stand the test of time, our
tower is going to need a purpose.
A century ago, Eiffel
Tower had a science lab,
a weather station,
and an underground military bunker.
But our designers have
their own unique vision.
We're envisioning at
every 20 or 30 stories,
there would be a hub for
a vertical farming system.
And if one thinks about
those farming levels
that would occur throughout
the height of the tower,
the cloud line is often at
about one kilometer high.
So, while there may be a gray
day in the terrestrial Chicago,
above the clouds, it's bright and sunny.
[narrator] Duncan even thinks
our tower could help feed the city.
Our calculations show that we'd
be able to meet the annual needs
of the school lunch program,
the entire Chicago Public Schools
with integrated urban farms
within the tower structure.
[narrator] And if that's not enough,
by adding solar panels
to the tower's exterior,
we could harness enough energy
to power all the city buses in Chicago.
That's an incredible concept,
but it's starting to make
us wonder how much
this whole thing would cost?
We'd need to attract the
entire world to Chicago
to visit our record breaking structure.
But would people be willing
to pay big bucks to do it?
What would the view be from
the heights we're imagining...
if we built it today.
[narrator] We've been
imagining what it would take
to build a modern day Eiffel Tower.
It would be the tallest
structure ever built.
Ten times taller than the original,
and we'd build it in Chicago,
we'd use a slick, wind resistant design,
we'd use 130,000 tanker
trucks worth of concrete,
and we'd want to do it
all in less than a decade.
Now, it's time to imagine, breaking ground.
The stages of construction
would be very similar
to which Eiffel did.
You start with the foundations.
We would drill some 10 foot diameter shafts
down to the rock.
Above there, we would have these caps,
these foundations that would then
go up to receive the tower above.
[narrator] With the foundations in place,
we task our human workforce
with building to the sky.
[William] Gotta get all
the equipment set up,
the construction technology,
then off you would go
and you would continually,
you build it as you go up.
[Scott] The process of constructing
is almost a design unto itself,
thinking about where materials are staged,
where people are located,
would it make sense to
have a crew of workers
who would live within the structure,
as it's being built to
avoid the daily commute
from ground level and up.
[narrator] Then, about halfway up,
we'd switch to a robotic
workforce to finish the job.
One could imagine multiple robots,
all working at once, around
the perimeter of the structure
and moving up and up just as those
conventional climbing formwork systems do.
This would be the first time that
anything like this has been done.
[narrator] With the last
robotic formwork added,
and the last drop of concrete poured,
our Eiffel Tower 2.0 would
measure nearly 10,000 feet.
The tallest structure ever created.
With the help of our top notch design team,
we've reimagined one of the
most iconic skylines in the world.
But what about the price tag?
Today, it has to be affordable.
[narrator] According to Bill,
he's confident our design should be
able to match the budget of the Burj.
So, let's say we could
do it for the same price,
$1.5 billion.
But, how would we ever pay for all this?
For most people, that's a ton of money,
but maybe there's a
way for us to turn a profit.
[William] You know, the Burj Khalifa makes
a huge amount of money
off of the observation deck.
They started out with one level
and then another level,
and now they have...
it can keep converting levels,
because the demand is so high.
[narrator] Would people pay mega
bucks to experience our mega tower?
Randy Stancik manages
the Willis Tower Skydeck
which welcomes 1.7
million guests every year.
[Randy] If I were going to build it, I
would add in the observation deck.
It's one of the highest amounts of
revenue you're going to generate
per square foot in your tower typically.
[narrator] The 360 degree view
atop the Willis Tower Sky Deck,
gives us a good idea
of the sights we'll see,
and can expect from the top of our tower,
you could see an area covering five states,
and more than 115,000 square miles,
and you could reach for the
top in your very own Skypod.
Our concept here would be to
not have a fixed observation deck,
but actually have 100 or
1,000 observation decks,
a platform that you would
board at ground level,
an enclosed climate controlled space.
[narrator] We think we could
have this thing paid off in 25 years.
[Scott] Your ability to see out to the
horizon would really be unparalleled.
[narrator] Our 21st century
Eiffel Tower represents
a modern day Renaissance,
that's leading to unimaginable
superstructures beyond.
From the Burj Khalifa, to
our own modern Eiffel Tower,
carrying the hopes and dreams
of humanity higher and higher.
If we built it today.
France's finest architectural achievements,
has captivated the world with its
stature and daring design since 1889.
[man] The Eiffel Tower,
it's a true invention,
a form that had never been seen before.
The genius thing with
it, is that there's no walls.
The wind can go right through.
[narrator] Rising 984 feet into the sky,
this iconic Paris landmark held
the title of the world's tallest structure
for four decades.
So now we're curious,
with today's technology,
could we surpass the champ?
With today's materials
and construction technology,
we can actually achieve
a 3,000 meter tower.
[narrator] Here's the plan,
we're rounding up the best
architects and the heaviest equipment
to build the next Eiffel Tower.
Even more colossal, bigger,
and made for a new generation.
[Scott] We're envisioning
at every 20 or 30 stories,
there would be a hub for
a vertical farming system.
[Randy] I would add
in the observation deck.
It's one of the highest amounts of
revenue you're going to generate.
This would be the first time that
anything like this has been done.
[narrator] Imagine the
world's greatest wonders,
reimagined.
We're wondering, how long would it take,
how much would it cost,
how many workers would we need,
could we even do it?
If we built it today.
Paris...
home to architectural wonders
like the Louvre, Notre-Dame,
and towering over the city
skyline, the Eiffel Tower,
the most recognizable
manmade structure in the world.
It's really become known as
the preeminent icon of Paris.
Could you imagine, you know,
Paris without the Eiffel Tower?
That single image manages to
project a culture around the world.
[narrator] But that image
didn't come out of thin air.
In 1884, French architect and
structural engineer, Gustave Eiffel
had just completed his work on the
Statue of Liberty's iron support structure.
When he was commissioned for a new project
that would debut at the
1889 Paris Exposition.
The 19th century is the age
of iron and the Eiffel Tower
is really a great symbol of this age.
[narrator] Eiffel and his team used iron
to create a revolutionary design,
a structure that would soar above
Paris's historic Champ de Mars.
The Eiffel Tower was actually in the place
where everyone had met for the first time
to have a oath to the Republic,
the new government, so
it was very, very symbolic,
'cause there was this idea of revolution.
[narrator] When you break it down,
the Eiffel Tower is a
giant, iron, jigsaw puzzle
with 18,000 separate pieces.
And two and a half million rivets.
It took Eiffel's top engineers,
a year and a half just to design it.
[William] But if you
look at the calculations,
they're very sophisticated,
they're very, very detailed.
[narrator] Construction
began in January, 1887,
in just 26 months, builders
laid the foundations,
pedestals pillars, floors,
stairs, and elevators.
It was considered the most ambitious
construction project of its time.
So, we have beautiful
photographs that shows
a construction phase of
the Eiffel Tower, day by day.
So it grows really like a
plant from bottom to top.
[narrator] The Eiffel
Tower was mind blowing.
For the first time in history,
people felt like giants over
an ant sized world below.
When the tower was built, it
was the tallest structure on Earth.
Eiffel himself never
called it the Eiffel Tower.
He called it the 300 meter tower.
[narrator] When it
opened in 1889 at 984 feet,
the Eiffel Tower was
nearly double the height
of the world's previous tallest structure,
the 555 foot Washington Monument.
Its size and unique silhouette
floating above the city skyline
quickly made the Eiffel Tower, one
of the most popular attractions in Paris.
[Sarah] Nothing else became
higher for another 40 years,
you think about how many engineers
were trying to get bigger and bigger.
It's a long time.
[narrator] The race for the
sky has been an ongoing battle
for thousands of years.
Some experts believe
the race began in 8000 BC,
when the Tower of Jericho,
set the first recorded record,
rising to 28 feet, barely
taller than a giraffe.
Then, 5000 years later, came
one of the most well known
pyramids in history, the Pyramid of Giza,
which stood at a whopping 455 feet.
The Egyptians weren't the only
ones competing to build the biggest
and the best structure in the world.
During the Middle Ages,
cathedrals became the new structure
to enter the competition,
with some rising as high as 530 feet.
In 1889, Eiffel Tower, literally
skipped a step of evolution
in one breathtaking leap.
It's soared over 450 feet, taller
than any structure ever constructed.
That was until the
skyscraper boom in the 1930s.
First, the Chrysler Building
set a new world record,
standing at 1046 feet,
more than 100 feet taller
than the Eiffel Tower.
Soon after, the Empire State Building
was crowned the winner at 1454 feet.
In 1973, the Sears Tower set
a new record at 1729 feet.
By 2010, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai
blew the competition away at 2,722 feet,
and currently holds the title.
So, what if we wanted to shatter the record
by constructing a super-sized
modern day Eiffel Tower.
Could we even do it?
Today's tall buildings make
incremental gains in height,
but it's unlikely that we'll
ever again see such a leap
that the Eiffel Tower
represented in becoming
the tallest manmade structure.
[narrator] The designer of
the record setting Burj Khalifa
is more optimistic.
William Baker is a structural engineer,
with Chicago's Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill.
He and his team are here to take
on our new Eiffel Tower project.
It's interesting to say, what
if Eiffel was with us today?
What would be the benchmark today?
What would be the taller...
you know, that would still make the mark,
but still be achievable.
And so, it's interesting to take
what what he did on the Eiffel Tower,
let's say, let's do it ten times as tall.
[narrator] A nearly two mile high building.
How's that gonna work?
The first challenge is,
who's going to finance it.
I think the days are gone
where we're gonna see someone
building just a structure
for expression at that height.
[narrator] A century and a half ago,
Eiffel's tower cost one
and a half million dollars.
Today, that number would
be closer to $40 million.
[Antony] These structures are
huge costs, they're very expensive.
[narrator] And design
costs have skyrocketed.
Meaning, today's tall structures
are way more expensive,
but our designer says our
budget can't be sky high
or it would never get built.
Today, it has to be affordable.
This tower needs to cost no more
than the standard super tall building
around the world.
[narrator] With cutting
edge technology on our side,
we're confident our 21st century tower
will blow the super tall
building competition away.
But, we want our structure to offer
more to society than just a statistic.
In 1889, Gustave Eiffel
built the Eiffel Tower,
to honor the 100th anniversary
of the French Revolution,
and set a new benchmark
in high rise engineering.
That'll be a tough act to follow,
even with present day advantages.
So, we'll need our blueprint to rival
the originals and pass the test of time.
[William] It's a way to plant your
flag in the world and say we're here.
This is a very, very important part of
our culture, of all cultures in the world.
[narrator] But, what are
we going to build it out of?
How long will it take?
And will this thing ever turn a profit?
It's a sky high task, lining
up all the pieces, parts,
and people we'd need if we built it today.
[narrator] We're imagining how
we build a 21st century Eiffel Tower
that would leave the famous
one in Paris, in the dust.
Although, now it's a
worldwide symbol of romance.
When Gustave Eiffel first
unveiled plans for his Eiffel Tower,
its radical design inspired anything
but love from Paris' artistic elite.
The Eiffel Tower was a completely new form
in a new construction material,
and its appearance on the skyline
was shocking for this ancient city.
I think often, people don't
like something when it's new.
And then they get used to it, and
then if there's a threat to take it down,
then they want to keep it.
[narrator] And in 1940, the
tower almost did come down.
When Germany occupied
France during World War II,
Hitler ordered that the
Eiffel Tower be torn down.
Thankfully, when the Nazis
retreated from Paris four years later,
the general in charge tactfully
ignored the Reich leader.
If his orders had been followed,
it actually would have been
pretty easy to take it down.
It wasn't supposed to last, it
was supposed to be taken down
with the other buildings.
[narrator] It was designed
to be disassembled
after a lifespan of just 20 years.
But Gustave Eiffel had other plans
for his masterpiece and
encouraged multiple uses,
beyond its original purpose.
He built a radio antenna atop the tower
capable of transmitting
messages 3,700 miles away,
installed an underground military bunker
and a laboratory that was
used by French scientists.
In 1909, he added an
aerodynamic wind tunnel
at the base of the tower that
carried out thousands of tests.
During World War I,
the French military used
the tower's wireless station to
intercept enemy messages from Berlin.
In 1918, the German messages
intercepted at the tower
were considered crucial in
turning the tide on the front lines.
The tower proved it was much
more than a World's Fair attraction,
our tower will have to do the same
if we want its legacy to
last as long as Eiffel's.
So, let's do it.
Taking inspiration from Gustave Eiffel,
we'll create a structure ten
times as tall as the original.
Rising a record setting, two miles high.
A modern fusion of
design, culture, and purpose,
and that mission will guide
every decision we make.
The building has to be 50% occupied,
for it to be considered a building,
so this would be considered
a tower, but what a tower.
[narrator] First, we need to decide where
we build our modern day Eiffel Tower.
And a super tall structure,
can't build it just anywhere.
[narrator] Now that we know
the original can be disassembled,
could we simply replace
Eiffel's original structure in Paris,
with our own?
Sounds like our design team prefers
a location, a little closer to home.
[William] First of all, you need
to have good soils or good rock
that you can set on.
It's nice if the wind
loads aren't too big, okay,
and that really means it's
probably not a coastal city.
And so, I would have to say that,
wind and foundations are
probably the two, two concerns.
If you look around the world,
there's many, many places
that would satisfy this.
My favorite possible
location would be Chicago.
[narrator] When most
people think of Chicago,
they think of its nickname, the Windy City,
but as it turns out, that name
doesn't actually apply to the weather.
It comes from a 19th
century rivalry with New York,
name calling Chicago,
"The city of wind bags."
In fact, Chicago is
about as windy as Paris.
But, will a two mile high structure
be as controversial in Chicago,
as it was for Eiffel in Paris?
Chicagoans love their architecture
and they know it's what defined their city.
I think what's so unique
about the skyline of Chicago
is that because we're under a prairie,
really, the buildings are our mountains.
[narrator] Chicago's architectural boom
began around the same
time the Eiffel Tower was built
after a fire destroyed
the city's business district.
The vast majority of the city burnt
down in the Great Fire in 1871.
And there was this
need to rebuild the city,
and at that time, architects and engineers
were experimenting with new technologies.
[narrator] In 1884,
Chicago became home to what is often called
the world's first modern skyscraper.
And so you've got, you know, people like
William Le Baron Jenney who was
originally a civil war bridge engineer
started experimenting with
building buildings in steel,
and he started with the Home
Insurance Building in 1884.
[narrator] Rising ten stories tall,
it was built with a steel frame,
and reinforced concrete.
Decades later, companies
like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill,
our design team continue
to reach for the sky.
When you look at what has happened
with the John Hancock
building that was built in 1966,
it is a mixed use building, and it
really redefined Michigan Avenue
a great shopping street,
you go forward and in 1974,
you have the Willis Tower,
then the Sears Tower,
that held the title of world's
tallest building for decades.
[narrator] But, Chicago's a large city,
five times the size of Paris,
where would we build?
In Paris, they chose a gathering place
that marked a new chapter
in the nation's history.
The Champ de Mars lining the Seine River.
So, what's our Windy
City equivalent going to be?
SOM designer Scott Duncan has an idea.
The Chicago Fire of 1871
destroyed the entire city
and its urban grid and form was reimagined,
so we are proposing
that it be located on one of
the main axes of symmetry
of that Chicago Plan,
at the center of Grant Park,
where Buckingham Fountain currently rests,
our structure would sit above that.
[narrator] Well, we're sold, Chicago it is.
But we're not ready to
break ground just yet.
We still got to figure out what
material we build our structure with,
and we got to figure out
what our tower will offer
to a modern day population,
we're going to need access to the
most cutting edge construction sites
to see the challenges we'll
face building for tomorrow.
If we built it today.
[narrator] We're imagining how we
build a revolutionary superstructure
that will rival the Eiffel Tower.
We've decided, it'll be ten
times the size of the original,
rising an amazing two miles high.
We know we'd want to build it in Chicago.
And even though, we've established Chicago
isn't actually the windiest city,
wind is still our biggest challenge.
Luckily, we aren't the
first to take on the task.
In fact, Gustave Eiffel figured
out a way to combat the wind,
years before he designed the Eiffel Tower,
his answer, the Eiffel
Tower's unique lattice design.
[Ochsendorf] So, Eiffel's
firm invents a new geometry,
a parabolic form in profile,
which is ideally shaped
to carry the wind load
from the side of the tower.
[Sarah] The genius thing with it,
is that there's no walls.
The wind can go right through,
then there's no resistance.
As you go up, it gets smaller and smaller.
[narrator] Removing walls added
another benefit to the skeletal frame,
kept the tower lightweight enough
that it wouldn't collapse in on itself.
In fact, if you melted the
entire Eiffel Tower down,
the steel and its footprint
would be just six inches deep.
Let's hear what our designers have in store
for our high tech tower.
If one's going to go to 3,000 meters,
you don't take the existing
Eiffel Tower and scale it up.
I came up with several
schemes and I decided to go
for one of the schemes, it
wasn't the least expensive,
but it was pretty interesting and
very much in keeping with Eiffel,
which is a lattice tower.
We did a whole series of studies on what
different shapes could be done on this.
You couldn't just make a
cylinder go all the way up,
because a cylinder would have way
too much wind pressure at the top.
So we came up with an elegant shape
that gets smaller as you go up.
[narrator] The lattice style openings
will allow winds to pass through
and keep it lightweight,
Bill says the base for
the design he's imagined
won't be that much bigger
than the first Eiffel Tower.
Wind and stability, those are the
things that you have to work with.
And, you know, the strength and
stability comes from the geometry,
and you try very much to minimize the wind
by making the shape aerodynamic.
[narrator] A simple scale model test
in SOM's state of the art wind tunnel,
puts Bill's radical
contour design to the test.
[William] We say designing
the wind and managing gravity.
You put the weight
where it's the most good.
[narrator] The results prove
SOM's design will withstand anything
the windy city can throw its way.
Now that we have our design,
what will our primary material be?
Until 1889, the record breaking tall
structures were all built with stone,
but our experts say that wouldn't work
for our two mile high tower.
Eiffel couldn't even use
it for his 984 foot tower.
Stone would've carried too much weight,
and it what have fallen through the floor.
[narrator] So, Eiffel took a page
from his own design playbook
and used the same product that he
used to support the Statue of Liberty.
Iron.
They couldn't have built it of any
other product, really, at the time,
it just wouldn't have been feasible.
[narrator] But they
couldn't just use any iron,
some irons, like cast iron
have a high carbon content,
making it brittle and
difficult to work with.
But, wrought iron is soft and malleable.
It can be heated and hammered into shape.
A better choice for assembling
18,000 pieces of metal.
Wrought iron is a very special material,
because it's strong in both
tension and compression.
[narrator] In the
evolution of tall buildings,
iron was replaced by steel to
improve strength and efficiency.
But our experts say
there's an even better option.
In the last ten to 20 years, we've
seen a complete inversion of that,
now most of the world's tallest
buildings are built out of concrete.
Concrete is an amazing building material,
I mean, it can take any shape you want.
It's basically liquid stone.
[narrator] Chicago based
contractor Brett Szabo agrees.
Today, he's putting the final touches on
the city's latest high
rise development project,
and they're doing it with concrete.
[Brett] As you start
to build taller buildings,
those buildings want to
move or sway especially
with wind and, and increasing
the stiffness of concrete
slows that movement down
or controls that movement.
For that reason, I think that
concrete is the material of choice
when it comes to high rise construction.
[narrator] So, our lattice
design structure will be built
with durable, wind resistant concrete.
Well, now that we've got our
location, design, and materials in place,
we're nearly ready to get started.
But, we've still got a
few hurdles to figure out,
like, how do we build a
structure that's taller than
the machines designed to assemble them?
If we built it today.
[narrator] We're exploring
the secrets of the 19th century's
tallest building.
The Eiffel Tower.
We want to figure out how we'd
construct a modern equivalent,
that would rise two miles high.
We've already decided,
we build it in Chicago,
and our material of choice is concrete,
but how do you create a structure,
taller than modern machinery
has ever been designed to reach?
Nowadays, you go around the world
and you look at the skyline of cities,
there's all these tower cranes
and ways to hoist the materials up.
[narrator] Today, cranes are the
backbone of the construction industry,
with the ability to move, lift,
and lower heavy materials,
the most powerful cranes are
capable of lifting nearly 17,000 tons,
equivalent to the weight
of three heavy duty trucks,
but the world's tallest crane can only
achieve a maximum height of 818 feet.
We're building nearly ten times higher.
It's a dilemma Gustave Eiffel
and his team faced a century ago.
So they had to improvise.
By adapting early automobile technology.
[Mason] At that time, steam
power was the motor power.
So these steam cranes,
they couldn't lift things very far,
so they had staging, they built
massive wooden scaffolding around,
and would move the
steam crane up with that.
[narrator] Cranes might
help with the heavy lifting,
but the challenging work
is down on the ground.
First, the construction crew
assembles formworks or molds.
So, one of the things about concrete,
that, that lets us do what
we can do is formwork.
It's a liquid material
and so you have to hold it
till it gets hardened, hard
enough that it'll hold itself up.
[narrator] Traditional
formwork is made up of timber,
but it can also be constructed
from plywood, plastic or steel
and is used to create walls,
and other concrete structures,
since freshly poured concrete is wet,
the formwork molds
and supports the concrete
until it's dried and is
able to support itself.
[Brett] Ready-mix trucks pull up
to it, they dump into the hopper
and this machine pushes
the concrete through a pipe,
could be 1000 feet in the air, you
can imagine the amount of power
that that machine has to
produce to push concrete that high.
[narrator] Once the
concrete is poured and cured,
hydraulic lifts move the
formwork structure up.
The process continues
until the building, in this case,
reaches its desired height,
but even the toughest
equipment and materials
have their limits,
especially while working at great heights,
and at a certain point, humans do, too.
When you start getting
to 800, 900, 1000 feet,
the winds up there
are quite a bit different
than the winds on the ground
and sometimes that can be
a challenge that shuts us down for the day.
[narrator] There's another problem, too,
modern formwork is intended
for buildings with simple designs.
Structures with contours, like ours,
take time and are more
complicated to work with.
But Asbjorn Sondergaard and
his team might have a solution.
We have developed a
technology that allow you to do this
just in one swipe.
So that's called robotic wire cutting.
[narrator] Asbjorn says
his company's formwork
makes construction 100 times
faster than conventional methods.
And he's recommending
foam formwork for our tower,
because it's lightweight, cheap, and fast.
The wire cutting tool that you see here,
essentially, is powerful frame
with four suspended flywheels in it,
you have the wires spinning
at 210 kilometers per hour,
and with this, we are able to
cut through marble and granite
and light concrete,
but in particularly also EPS, foam
materials that we use to cut out formworks.
[narrator] A robotically controlled
wire cutter easily slices through
the formwork.
The concrete would be
poured into the negative space
or a hole that was made
by the cutting device.
The number of designs this
technology can create is endless.
And Asbjorn has built a piece to visualize
what a segment of our
tower might look like.
[Asbjorn] So, what we got
here is a scale mock-up,
which is produced by the robots,
actually this is only 20% of the real size.
You can imagine this is
a pretty massive element.
[narrator] The curvy
prototype even lines up
to modern environmental standards,
[Asbjorn] Concrete,
because it's so widely used.
It also comes with a drawback,
and the drawback is that
the production of cement
represents 8% of the global CO2 emissions.
And if we compare that to air
traffic that we hear much more about.
That's only 2%.
So, if you imagine that we
take the wire cutting technology
to create shape optimized design
that is able to take 50% of
the concrete consumption
compared to a standard structure,
we could slice as much as two
times the global air traffic emissions,
just by reducing the amount
of concrete consumption.
[narrator] The added bonus is
that workers won't have to climb
two miles above the ground.
A robot does that tough job.
[Asbjorn] I would imagine
a sequential build up
of a process where the robots are
essentially following up each story,
falling up along the building
until we reach the top.
[narrator] Staged pumping
systems would follow.
Filling the molds one section at a time.
The climbing formwork allows us to
change the thicknesses of columns
in a beautiful way,
increase the amount of concrete
at the intersections where
there's more force being collected.
And it's that kind of
transformation that gives a structure
lightness, and dynamism, and beauty.
[narrator] In total, we estimate
we'd need 130,000 tanker trucks
worth of concrete.
Lined up, they'd stretch
from Chicago to New York.
So, we've got the design.
We've got the materials, and now we've
got robots to work at incredible heights.
Before we reach for the sky,
we want to make sure
we equal Eiffel's success
by making sure our two mile high tower
would be of benefit to the modern world.
If we built it today.
[narrator] We're imagining what it would
take to build an Eiffel Tower of the future.
In Chicago, we've already
decided it would be built
from modern super strength concrete,
and would stand two miles high,
eclipsing the current world record holder.
The Burj Khalifa at 2,722 feet,
which leads us to our next question.
How many people would it take,
because it's not going to be easy.
[Mason] If you're looking to
build the Eiffel Tower today,
finding 300 guys willing
to withstand, I don't know,
500, 600 feet up in the air
and swing a sledgehammer.
I don't think that you
would find those people.
[narrator] Back in the 19th century,
welding the tower's 18,000
pieces of iron in place,
was one of the toughest
challenges in high rise history.
One of the problems that
actually goes right back,
a long ways is how do
you connect metal to metal?
[narrator] Eiffel came up with a
riveting solution for his workforce.
They put two bolts in to hold it in place,
then they hot riveted the unit.
Uh, that's why anybody who
goes up the Eiffel Tower today,
you're amazed by all the
little X's and cross beams
and the millions of rivets.
[narrator] Two and a
half million to be exact.
[hammering]
Inside his shop, Blacksmith John Mason
continues to bring that technique to life.
[Mason] Riveting became a science.
When men figured out
how to heat it and hammer it
in situ and create two hemispheres,
that were of equal diameter,
once they did that, the stresses
on the outside of the material
and the inside of the material
were equalized on the shank itself.
This coal when it's coax,
if I put a lot of air to it,
it can go 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
So if you get the length of the rivet right
and you hammer the head properly,
then basically you can put
stuff up that's really heavy,
and it's not going to
move 'cause it shrinks
[narrator] Riveters
are a thing of the past,
practitioners of a lost art.
So we'll leave the workforce
decision making to the experts.
[Brett] At any given time, we
could have 500 to 1,000 employees
working for us.
This year is actually a
record year for us in volume,
we're just constantly trying
to push the limits and do more.
[narrator] So, we'll hire 1,000 workers.
But, how long would all this take?
The original Eiffel Tower took
just over two years to complete.
At ten times the height, does that mean
our tower will take more than 20 years?
On the Burj Khalifa, we
went from competition
to a grand opening in a
little less than seven years.
Now, we're doing something
that's a little over twice as tall,
so I would suspect we could do this,
including foundations around ten years.
[narrator] That timeframe doesn't
sound bad for a two mile high building,
but to stand the test of time, our
tower is going to need a purpose.
A century ago, Eiffel
Tower had a science lab,
a weather station,
and an underground military bunker.
But our designers have
their own unique vision.
We're envisioning at
every 20 or 30 stories,
there would be a hub for
a vertical farming system.
And if one thinks about
those farming levels
that would occur throughout
the height of the tower,
the cloud line is often at
about one kilometer high.
So, while there may be a gray
day in the terrestrial Chicago,
above the clouds, it's bright and sunny.
[narrator] Duncan even thinks
our tower could help feed the city.
Our calculations show that we'd
be able to meet the annual needs
of the school lunch program,
the entire Chicago Public Schools
with integrated urban farms
within the tower structure.
[narrator] And if that's not enough,
by adding solar panels
to the tower's exterior,
we could harness enough energy
to power all the city buses in Chicago.
That's an incredible concept,
but it's starting to make
us wonder how much
this whole thing would cost?
We'd need to attract the
entire world to Chicago
to visit our record breaking structure.
But would people be willing
to pay big bucks to do it?
What would the view be from
the heights we're imagining...
if we built it today.
[narrator] We've been
imagining what it would take
to build a modern day Eiffel Tower.
It would be the tallest
structure ever built.
Ten times taller than the original,
and we'd build it in Chicago,
we'd use a slick, wind resistant design,
we'd use 130,000 tanker
trucks worth of concrete,
and we'd want to do it
all in less than a decade.
Now, it's time to imagine, breaking ground.
The stages of construction
would be very similar
to which Eiffel did.
You start with the foundations.
We would drill some 10 foot diameter shafts
down to the rock.
Above there, we would have these caps,
these foundations that would then
go up to receive the tower above.
[narrator] With the foundations in place,
we task our human workforce
with building to the sky.
[William] Gotta get all
the equipment set up,
the construction technology,
then off you would go
and you would continually,
you build it as you go up.
[Scott] The process of constructing
is almost a design unto itself,
thinking about where materials are staged,
where people are located,
would it make sense to
have a crew of workers
who would live within the structure,
as it's being built to
avoid the daily commute
from ground level and up.
[narrator] Then, about halfway up,
we'd switch to a robotic
workforce to finish the job.
One could imagine multiple robots,
all working at once, around
the perimeter of the structure
and moving up and up just as those
conventional climbing formwork systems do.
This would be the first time that
anything like this has been done.
[narrator] With the last
robotic formwork added,
and the last drop of concrete poured,
our Eiffel Tower 2.0 would
measure nearly 10,000 feet.
The tallest structure ever created.
With the help of our top notch design team,
we've reimagined one of the
most iconic skylines in the world.
But what about the price tag?
Today, it has to be affordable.
[narrator] According to Bill,
he's confident our design should be
able to match the budget of the Burj.
So, let's say we could
do it for the same price,
$1.5 billion.
But, how would we ever pay for all this?
For most people, that's a ton of money,
but maybe there's a
way for us to turn a profit.
[William] You know, the Burj Khalifa makes
a huge amount of money
off of the observation deck.
They started out with one level
and then another level,
and now they have...
it can keep converting levels,
because the demand is so high.
[narrator] Would people pay mega
bucks to experience our mega tower?
Randy Stancik manages
the Willis Tower Skydeck
which welcomes 1.7
million guests every year.
[Randy] If I were going to build it, I
would add in the observation deck.
It's one of the highest amounts of
revenue you're going to generate
per square foot in your tower typically.
[narrator] The 360 degree view
atop the Willis Tower Sky Deck,
gives us a good idea
of the sights we'll see,
and can expect from the top of our tower,
you could see an area covering five states,
and more than 115,000 square miles,
and you could reach for the
top in your very own Skypod.
Our concept here would be to
not have a fixed observation deck,
but actually have 100 or
1,000 observation decks,
a platform that you would
board at ground level,
an enclosed climate controlled space.
[narrator] We think we could
have this thing paid off in 25 years.
[Scott] Your ability to see out to the
horizon would really be unparalleled.
[narrator] Our 21st century
Eiffel Tower represents
a modern day Renaissance,
that's leading to unimaginable
superstructures beyond.
From the Burj Khalifa, to
our own modern Eiffel Tower,
carrying the hopes and dreams
of humanity higher and higher.
If we built it today.