UBS towers over London's tallest riverside residential building

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UBS construction hoists

The design was originally developed by UBS to speed construction of the Canary Wharf Tower, the Swiss Re building and other high-rise developments in London’s docklands. A low profile tower together with high speed hoists is enabling Ontario Towers contractors, Ballymore Properties, to improve efficiency and speed of elevating materials and personnel to height with the minimum of disruption to the construction programme.

The core of the system is an aluminium common tower into which multiple hoists are concentrated allowing material and passenger hoists to be available simultaneously without taking up additional site space. The 2 high speed rack and pinion hoists installed by UBS can lift up to 2800kg to the top of the 88 metre tower in under one minute compared to more than 3 minutes using standard hoist travelling at 28 m/min., dramatically reducing travel time.

The low profile of the tower not only improves working efficiency on site by minimising the elevator loading area, but as the tower is tied directly into the building using only one set of ties every three floors, exterior cladding can be applied to the whole building apart from the 4.5 metre opening. This not only speeds up erection and removal of the tower but also saves time by reducing the number of cladding panels that have to be replaced at the end of the contract.

Tony Faulkner, managing director of UBS added, “The savings in time that our hoist systems can achieve have long been recognised in the USA where we are regularly commissioned to install them on many of the high profile high rise construction projects. The UBS towers are also far quicker to install and remove, so there are major savings at the start and end of the project as well. With high rise developments becoming more common in city centres throughout Europe, major construction companies like Ballymore have recognised the advantages in time saving and added value that the UBS systems can bring to these projects.”