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Making concrete dance is no small feat.
When Miami-based developer Terra approached Danish design architects Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) with a tight, three-acre site south of Miami’s downtown, the firm responded with an inventive solution — a pair of “dancing” towers with rotating concrete floor plates. The Grove at Grand Bay includes two 20-story residential buildings that harness the versatility of reinforced concrete to create distinctive high-rise forms and capture views of Biscayne Bay. The result is a combination of a rational, Scandinavian logic and a Caribbean interpretation of modernism.
Upon completion, the project became the first new residential high-rise development to be completed in Coconut Grove in more than 10 years. As Terra President David Martin said, Coconut Grove is one of Miami’s most storied neighborhoods and Grove at Grand Bay represents another chapter in that story. A sanctuary for artists, writers and unconventional thinkers, the Grove has a long history of challenging the status quo – much the same way Grove at Grand Bay is changing the way Miami thinks about design.
Typical floor plan; drawing courtesy BIG
It was made with many amenities, including a spa, pet spa, fitness center, concierge, and private dining room. The towers’ concrete slabs are designed to cantilever past the perimeter of the apartment floors to accommodate deep balconies and shade the fully-glazed window walls on each apartment level.
West elevation of the north tower; drawing courtesy BIG
CEMEX was able to meet that need by delivering special aggregates from multiple locations outside of the Miami area to create a ready-mix concrete that met the client’s requirements. This important project required more than 7,200 truckloads of custom ready-mix concrete delivered over a two-year period.
The answer was a composite core of concrete and steel internal plate shear walls. The team also used a hat truss for each roof, where girders are cantilevered from the tower cores and connected to the columns.
The columns were cast in steel forms to make them as smooth as possible, and while all the columns stay in the same position as the floor plates rotate, thus the columns can be tracked through the structure as seamless connectors.
The interactive movement of the two towers creates a new dancing silhouette on the Grove’s skyline. In turn, concrete is showcased in a new light to bring a dynamic, flowing architecture to life.
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