쌍용건설

There stands the landfill for the Marina Bay on the southern coast of Singapore. Ssangyong Engineering & Construction is busy with a project titled ‘Marina Bay Sands ull-service Resort’ home to a combination of a large hotel, a convention center, a shopping mall and a casino on 570.000 square meters of land. Backed by the Singaporean government to secure the next-generation growth engines, investment for the project has been 3.5 billion dollars (approximately 4.5 trillion won) since 2006.

Ssangyong stakes what it has on a new technology that has been rare in architectural engineering. Concerns of its competitors were rampant, saying, “It is hard to tilt a building by over 15 degrees,” as they looked at a preliminary drawing proposed by a client in the initial bidding process. Most argued that the building could collapse in the worst case, if it is constructed at an angle tilting over 50 degrees.

However, Ssangyong came up with a problem-solving technology by revising the design as many as five times during the six-month bidding process. The secret lay in ‘post-tension’ technique often used in bridge construction. That is to install a special cable made of 15mm-thick eight metal stands inside a tilted building, connect the cable to a retaining wall installed under the building, and pull the cable down from the top to prevent the building from falling over. Moreover, sensors are to be installed to check on the gradient and load real-time on each layer and ground of the building, so that an alarm can go off as soon as the values are out of normality.