Video: Japanese Eco-Friendly Building Demolition Method Harvests Energy As It Destroys

New deconstruction techniques helped take down the tallest Japanese building ever demolished.

By Shaunacy Ferro Posted 01.16.2013 at 12:32 pm 8 Comments

Grand Prince Hotel Akasaka Tokyo's Grand Prince Hotel Akasaka stood about 460 feet tall before demolition. Wikimedia Commons

When it comes time for an aging skyscraper to be put out to pasture, it's best to do so slowly. For buildings higher than 100 meters tall, there's no easy path to demolition. Sure, you could blow it up, but the cleanup would be brutal. You could slam it with a wrecking ball, but that's a little heavy-handed, don't you think?

Taisei Corporation, a Japanese construction company, is doing things a little more subtly, and making skyscraper deconstruction a more eco-friendly endeavor in the process.

Through their Ecological Reproduction System (Tecorep), rather than using cranes to take the building apart from the outside, they start from the inside, taking the structure apart floor by floor from the top down. A crane inside the building lowers materials harvested from each floor to ground level, generating electricity to power other equipment in the process. So with Tecorep, higher buildings are actually an advantage, since the crane can generate more electricity lowering materials over longer distances.

When a floor is completely stripped, the temporary columns and jacks holding it up are lowered, giving the building the outside appearance of shrinking into itself. Between salvaging reusable material and powering the project with clean energy, Tecorep reduces carbon emissions by 85 percent, according to the company. And because the demolition takes place within the building, it reduces noise and dust.

The method successfully brought down the Grand Prince Hotel Akasaka in Tokyo, the tallest building torn down in Japan to date. Hideki Ichihara, who runs Taisei's construction technology development, told the Japan Times that most skyscrapers over 100 meters are torn down after 30 or 40 years, and with 99 Japanese buildings set to fit that bill in the next 10 years, innovative deconstruction technology is an emerging field. Other corporations have been developing their own methods, such as the Kajima Corporation, which dismantles and lowers the building from the bottom up.

You can see Tecorep in action below.

[Wired]

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8 Comments

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Robot

01/16/13 at 1:10 pm

This is very neat to watch! I kept looking for explosions and all I saw was the incrediable shrinking building.

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Phaggamemnon

01/16/13 at 1:17 pm

Japan's Traditional Demolition Technique

GODZILLA!!!

Has unionized and fallen out of favor.

I guess this style will work for now!!!

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jabailo

01/16/13 at 11:33 pm

This is an "aging" skyscraper?

It was opened in 1982!

Imagine what they must think of some of our old 100+ buildings!

Quite frankly, I don't like skyscapers at all...and wish we would tear down most of them.

So...keep destroying, Japan! Maybe we'll turn the world back to sanity some day.

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tgh123

01/17/13 at 6:03 am

That was awesome!

class tgh123 {
public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.println("tgh123 is the best");
}
}

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marcoreid

01/17/13 at 10:36 am

The building is only 30 years old. I'm not sure how much of the building's materials can be reused/recycled, but it seems like an awful waste.

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firehorn

01/17/13 at 8:36 pm

@jabailo: It's kind of silly (counter-intuitive, foolish, short-sighted) to consider eliminating skyscrapers sane or progressive. Skyscrapers allow us to increase the usage of an acre of urban land by up to 100x, reducing urban sprawl. If you think it's preferable to continue the trend of humans paving over nature and increasingly expanding into the territories of wild species (not to mention the inefficiency of it all, requiring more roads, sewer lines, etc.) well, you're just not being reasonable. You can't have your cake and eat it too; you can't have 7 billion human beings on the planet, each with an acre of manicured suburban lawn and 2,000 square foot freestanding house.

Anyway, that 30-40 year figure doesn't seem quite right. I'm too lazy to do the research, but that would suggest that a significant portion of NYC, Tokyo, etc. will need to be rebuilt in the next decade or so, which is obviously not in the cards. He doesn't cite any evidence other than an anonymous 'statistic' so I'm pretty skeptical.

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abier

01/28/13 at 4:28 pm

As usual recently, this article is more about being "green" than rational. While I love the way they are dismantling this building it should be praised for its innovation and elegant execution rather than its green political correctness.

L5Rick

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viennetto

01/30/13 at 4:38 pm

i stayed in this hotel with my parents and brothers for a few nights in 1989. we thought it was the coolest place. this is the first time i've even heard of demolishing such a modern building. i guess it has to happen, but... why so soon? the chrysler building was modern at one time, but is now much older than this hotel. why no commentary on why it was torn down?