Ayia Napa marina: twisting tower engineering challenges

Overview

Join us this May to learn about the unique engineering challenges faced during the construction of the Ayia Napa marina towers in Cyprus.

The towers are high-rise buildings with 28 levels, standing at approximately 120 metres tall. The buildings are situated on the beachfront of the east coast of Cyprus and combine the high seismicity of the eastern Mediterranean region with an innovative architectural twisting design of a relative rotation of 1.6vdegrees per floor with inclined columns. The fact that the columns are inclined creates torsional stresses on the buildings due to the imposed gravity loads, which in turn generates a creep effect on the concrete mass and rotational displacement on the buildings' floors.

Through the use of laboratory tests to identify appropriate locally sourced aggregates for construction and detailed analysis of the long-term saftey of the project, engineers were able to design truly innovative towers. Furthermore, a monitoring plan was carried out during construction, with the results evaluated to compare the actual with the estimated displacements and rotation of the building, thus offering accurate results in line with the predictions of the concrete creep models formulated in the initial fase of planning.