The Standard Bank Centre (also known as the Hanging Building or the 78 Fox Street) is a

skyscraper A skyscraper is a tall continuously habitable building having multiple floors. Most modern sources define skyscrapers as being at least or in height, though there is no universally accepted definition, other than being very tall high-rise bui ...

Johannesburg Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu language, Zulu and Xhosa language, Xhosa: eGoli ) (colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, Jo'burg or "The City of Gold") is the most populous city in South Africa. With 5,538,596 people in the City of Johannesburg alon ...

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...

. It is located at the corner of 27 Simmonds Street and 78 Fox Street in the

Central Business District A central business district (CBD) is the Commerce, commercial and business center of a city. It contains commercial space and offices, and in larger cities will often be described as a financial district. Geographically, it often coincides wit ...

of the city. Construction of the building started in 1966 and was completed in 1968. It is tall. It was also home to

Standard Bank Standard Bank (officially Standard Bank Group Limited) is the largest bank in Africa, as well as the continent's biggest lender by assets. The company's corporate headquarters, Standard Bank Centre, is located in Johannesburg, Gauteng. The ...

, until the company moved to a new site in 1990. The building was built from the top-down, meaning that after the central core was built, the floors were suspended from

cantilever A cantilever is a rigid structural element that extends horizontally and is unsupported at one end. Typically it extends from a flat vertical surface such as a wall, to which it must be firmly attached. Like other structural elements, a cantilev ...

ed arms with the top floors added first, followed by each lower floor.

Design

The challenge for the designers - the German architect

Helmut Hentrich Helmut Hentrich (17 June 1905 – 7 February 2001) was a German architect who became particularly known for his striking high-rise buildings in the 1960s and 1970s. The architectural firm he founded, ''Hentrich, Petschnigg und Partner (HPP)'', st ...

(1905–2001) and the Austrian architect Hubert Petschnigg (1913–1997), who planned the skyscraper in collaboration with the British-Danish-Norwegian engineer

Ove Arup Sir Ove Nyquist Arup (16 April 1895 – 5 February 1988) was an English engineer who founded Arup Group Limited, a multinational corporation offering engineering, design, planning, project management, and consultant, consulting services for bu ...

(1895–1988) - was to find a spacious square in the crowded

Johannesburg CBD The Johannesburg Central Business District, commonly called Johannesburg CBD, is one of the main business centres of Johannesburg, South Africa. It is the densest collection of skyscrapers in Africa, however, due to white flight and urban blight, ...

to anchor an office building. To keep space used to a minimum, they adopted the "hanging" design. Apart from the

concrete Concrete is a composite material composed of aggregate bound together with a fluid cement that cures to a solid over time. It is the second-most-used substance (after water), the most–widely used building material, and the most-manufactur ...

core tower, the Standard Bank Centre was built by

Concor Concor Holdings (Proprietary) Limited. is a South African construction and mining services company. It is active throughout Southern Africa, involved in civil engineering, buildings, roads and mining projects. Concor returned as an independent ...

of precast

reinforced concrete Reinforced concrete, also called ferroconcrete or ferro-concrete, is a composite material in which concrete's relatively low tensile strength and ductility are compensated for by the inclusion of reinforcement having higher tensile strength or ...

slabs,

glass Glass is an amorphous (non-crystalline solid, non-crystalline) solid. Because it is often transparency and translucency, transparent and chemically inert, glass has found widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in window pane ...

, and

steel Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon that demonstrates improved mechanical properties compared to the pure form of iron. Due to steel's high Young's modulus, elastic modulus, Yield (engineering), yield strength, Fracture, fracture strength a ...

. The plastic molds in which the concrete slabs were cast gave them a distinctive shape. The steel

girder A girder () is a Beam (structure), beam used in construction. It is the main horizontal support of a structure which supports smaller beams. Girders often have an I-beam cross section composed of two load-bearing ''flanges'' separated by a sta ...

s used for the balustrades are 1.5 m high and 24.6 m long. A special slewing crane was designed for the project to lift and mount a quarter of each floor level. Concrete was delivered by night to the construction site to minimize traffic obstruction. The office building stretches to 39 stories, of which five are underground. The lower two stories house the computer center, including the evaluation center with a staff of 300. The bank room offers access to the

safe A safe (also called a strongbox or coffer) is a secure lockable enclosure used for securing valuable objects against theft or fire. A safe is usually a hollow cuboid or cylinder, with one face being removable or hinged to form a door. The body ...

tower stretching through all the lower floors, with delivery access through the lower parking lot. The windows use tinted glass with laminated double glazing for sunlight protection. No special arrangements need to be made for window cleaning, since the 60-cm balustrades make cleaning the outer pane easy. Air vents are located in the corners of the facade. The office is 9.7 m wide. The hanging design eliminates the need for pillars.

Design

References

Citations

Books

Further reading