Concreted force of expression
The V&A Dundee – Scotland’s first design museum and at the same time the first offshoot of the Victoria and Albert Museum outside London – combines opposites into an exciting synthesis. Jutting out into the Firth of Tay, the horizontally structured façade is reminiscent of the layered rock of the cliffs in north-east Scotland. From another perspective, it looks like a ship’s hull and thus corresponds with the nearby RRS Discovery, the ship of the polar explorer Robert F. Scott. The openwork structure itself consists of two inverted pyramids that rise as separate, sinuous volumes from a water surface and merge with each other on the upper floors.
Inspired by the sedimentary cliffs of Scotland’s east coast, the V&A Museum of Design Dundee juts out into the Firth of Tay estuary.
Concerted feat of strength
Due to the high proportion of custom-made freeform formwork, all disciplines and production capacities of PERI Germany and UK worked hand in hand. The cramped construction site also required sophisticated logistics. And because the cantilevered walls did not support the load before the roof was completed, the complete formwork including the supporting structure had to remain in place until the end. But all this was preceded by two essential work steps: elaborate type tests to ensure that the twisted shapes of the building could be formed in the first place. And extensive 3D simulations to ensure that striking the formwork would be possible.
Anticlastic – curved in opposite directions – this wall surface serves as a type model and feasibility study.
You can´t get more curved than that
“For about 5 years, Kengo Kuma’s plans lay dormant. No one dared to carry it out because for a long time the complex, anticlastic structure was considered an “unrealisable building form in concrete”. Or put more simply: You can't get more curved than that. But together with our colleagues from PERI UK, we managed it and made the seemingly impossible possible. When the V&A opened, even German television reported on it on the evening news and pointed out the feat of construction engineering. That alone makes us proud!"
Markus Beez, Head of Technical Office
"Black, surface-finished architectural concrete without air pockets, offsets or cracks, the combination of the most complicated curves with straight walls, an overall construction that only became load-bearing after the roof was completed, the construction size squeezed in between the water and existing buildings – the V&A was a technical and logistical challenge that involved a great many people and could only be achieved through extremely good communication and teamwork. 3D planning and prefabrication of the formwork units in Weissenhorn, Germany, final assembly of the freeform formwork in Rugby, delivery and assembly in Dundee, right on time for the next concreting step: everything was painstakingly choreographed. We are talking about hundreds of tonnes of formwork and scaffolding material, countless custom-made formwork elements and several designers scattered around the world working simultaneously on CNC data and assembly drawings. On the construction site itself, we were always represented by two project managers at the same time, so that it was absolutely certain that Careys, the contractor carrying out the work, had a contact person available at all times. They adopted us straight away and declared us honorary Scots."
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