In the fall of 1995, 61-year-old Chen Shimin decided to write a whistle-blowing letter to a leader of the Shenzhen government against a skyscraper that was designed by the very company he founded.
Shenzhen was already crowded in the 1990s, and the most crowded street was Huaqiangbei. In the era without e-commerce and carrier channels, Huaqiangbei was the first street of electronics in China and the pick-up place for electronics retailers nationwide.
At this crowded crossroads, the 72-story super high-rise Sage Plaza arrived on the eve of official construction, but Chen Shimin discovered that the developer had suddenly modified the design plans. According to his original plan, he designed the second floor to be hollowed out by column support, with the entire floor connected by a street crossing bridge instead of a wall for pedestrian traffic, taking into account the crowds in Huaqiang North.
Chen Shih-Min thought this was the most successful stroke of the building, and he gave the space a good name: Gray Space. According to his idea, for pedestrians who feel crowded in the street, seeing this open space is like suddenly seeing a transparent mountain gate in the darkness of the sky.
Initially, the proposal pleased both the Shenzhen planning department and the Sage Group.
“They were going to drag Chen Shimin to drink at night, overjoyed.”
However, when construction was about to begin, the developer, Sage Group, backtracked, determined to seal up the space and turn it into a rentable electronics sales market. When Chen Shih-Min firmly objected, they invited him to dinner, which he did not go to, and later promised to gift him some inches of counter.
“That’s a very valuable counter!”
Still unmoved, Chen Shimin believed that the gray space should be a public square, a shared space for the city, and that the meaning was for people to find freedom from the heaviness of the oppressive space in the building. However, these romantic ideas failed to impress the Sage Group, which believed in wealth and pragmatism in the end.
Chen Shimin was so emotional in his reporting letter to Shenzhen’s leaders that he even put down the harsh words.
“Can not be sealed, or the problem will not be responsible.”
Chen Shimin later lived to the age of 81 and became a generation of Chinese architects. And that year, his letter was relegated to the archives from the beginning and never made waves.
II
As Chen Shimin warned, problems soon arose.
Sage Plaza was built at a rate of 2.7 meters per day, and when completed, the 71-story main building, with a full height of 355.8 meters, was the world’s first building of steel pipe and concrete structure, and ranked second in Shenzhen in height, 28 meters less than the Diwang Building.
But what is seldom mentioned is that, according to the original design, the height of the Sage Tower is 381 meters, which is even higher than that of the Diwang Tower. At the top of the building, there was initially an 89-meter antenna steel pin, which was only welded on September 30, 1999.
A few days later, during the November 1999 long vacation, Sherman Chen was urgently telephoned to Shenzhen. He was pulled to the steel structure has been capped Sage building, the day, the roof of the steel needle together with the building suddenly occurred violent shaking, scared the workers still in the building construction. Saige building is located in Huaqiang North crowded, if there is an accident is unthinkable.
Who do not understand what is going on, who can not think of any good way.
The key time, Chen Shimin gave a contingency plan: the steel needle cut off a section. But to complete the cut is also an extremely dangerous task, and finally, by a group of workers in the absence of building safety facilities, day and night in more than 300 meters of altitude to cut off 26 meters of steel needles, which is to lift the danger.
“After the cutting, it really stopped shaking.”
Later years, the Sage Tower took a lot of architectural awards, decades, it towered over the city of Shenzhen as a signboard. But one question has not been confirmed until today.
Is cutting short steel pins the fundamental solution to the shaking of this skyscraper?
And at first that scene of thrill in the subsequent years never mentioned by the Sage Group, he was only once mentioned in Chen Shimin’s rare memoirs.
Until the late afternoon of May 18, 2021, 22 years later. After about an hour long, when the airtight office building once again swayed dramatically to the naked eye and the indoor kettle shook like an earthquake, thousands of people throughout the building scrambled out of the building, with some going down the 60th floor to the 1st floor in one breath.
On this day, someone retrieved the traces left by the Internet, which revealed that someone had already asked earlier in the microblogging.
“Coordinates 57th floor, did everyone feel the shaking?”
iii
On May 18, a research paper detailing the construction of the skyscraper was also found. The author, a woman who worked for the Sage Group and was involved in the entire construction process of Sage Plaza, summarized the successes and failures of the project in her master’s thesis 21 years ago.
Crucially, her thesis reveals a surprising fact:
Until the construction of the Sage Plaza structure was completed, there was a design-as-you-go construction.
The paper’s description reads.
“At the stage of schematic design and preliminary design, all the preparatory work for the Sage Plaza project was completed long ago, and only the construction drawings were waiting for the construction to start. So the construction of the foundation was started immediately after the construction drawings of the foundation were provided, and the construction drawings of the upper works continued to be designed.
The foundation part of the diaphragm wall and dug pile construction took one year, and within this year, many technical design adjustments were made, and the complete construction drawings were not provided in time. When the general contractor bidding for the whole project was conducted after the foundation was completed, the complete construction drawings could not be provided. But the preliminary foundation part has invested more than 50 million, if the stoppage of work and other drawings will certainly cause an increase in the financial cost of investment funds, the arrow is on the string, had to be sent.
So in a hurry, we used some of the structural drawings of the podium for the general contracting bidding of the project. The tender was invited and the general contracting unit was also determined, but one step slow, one step slow, the phenomenon of stopping and waiting for the drawings and reworking after construction according to the drawings often appeared in the construction, which led to many unnecessary disputes and increased the project cost. This phenomenon of designing and constructing at the same time has continued until the construction of the structural works of Sage Plaza was completed.”
The paper also mentions a frightening scene that occurred in October 1999: the most serious consequence of the design-and-construct construction occurred on the top antenna. And the reason for the swaying of the building was originally concluded as.
“The design of the antenna was incorrectly calculated to cause resonance.”
The design-as-you-build accusation also appeared in another academic publication reviewing the construction of Sage Plaza, which stated.
“When construction reached the mid-62nd floor of the originally designed main tower, the owner decided to add another eight floors to add a suite of high-class hotels equipped with plazas, raising the total height above ground to 72 floors.”
The woman who completed this paper left the Sage Group and in later years had worked on monitoring Shenzhen’s urban public safety: providing support and security for the city’s public safety.
In 1999, in time for the new millennium, the Sage Tower was completed seven months ahead of schedule, a great gift to the city of Shenzhen and to the motherland. For Saige Group, it was the beginning of its shift from an electronics store to real estate, and later to achieve business take-off.
A few hours after the shaking of the skyscraper on May 18, 2021, a team of experts sat in the office and they concluded that night that the main structure of the Saige Building was safe and the internal structure was solid. And the cause of the building’s tremors was a combination of factors.
Wind, subway operation and temperature.
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