TP S.A. Tower
Encyclopedia
The TP S.A. Tower is a highrise office tower
Tower
A tower is a tall structure, usually taller than it is wide, often by a significant margin. Towers are distinguished from masts by their lack of guy-wires....

 in Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...

, the capital of Poland. It is located at 14/16 Twarda Street in the Warszawa-Śródmieście
Warszawa-Sródmiescie
Śródmieście is the central borough of the city of Warsaw. The best known neighborhoods in the borough are the Old Town and New Town ....

 central business district
Central business district
A central business district is the commercial and often geographic heart of a city. In North America this part of a city is commonly referred to as "downtown" or "city center"...

 of the city and houses the headquarters
Headquarters
Headquarters denotes the location where most, if not all, of the important functions of an organization are coordinated. In the United States, the corporate headquarters represents the entity at the center or the top of a corporation taking full responsibility managing all business activities...

 of its investor, the telecom operator Telekomunikacja Polska S.A.
Telekomunikacja Polska
Telekomunikacja Polska S.A. is a Polish national telecommunications provider established in December 1991. It is a Public company traded on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, with a controlling stake owned by France Télécom , with the latter controlling over 50% of this stake by 2002...

 (TP S.A.), with some space being leased to other companies.

The building of the tower was initially contracted to PIA Piasecki S.A. on 1 August 1997, originally due to be completed 30 June 2002. In 2002, however, the contractor was found unable to complete the structure due to strained financial standing, and the investor turned to PORR Polska S.A. (who has completed a number of other office buildings and towers in Warsaw) to finish the construction. After the signing of the new contract at the beginning of 2003, the Tower was finally completed in December 2003. The Tower was built using the "top-down" technology, with both the over- and underground parts of the structure being constructed simultaneously. During the excavation for the foundation
Foundation (architecture)
A foundation is the lowest and supporting layer of a structure. Foundations are generally divided into two categories: shallow foundations and deep foundations.-Shallow foundations:...

 of the Tower, a 580 kg artillery shell from World War II was discovered 8 metres below ground level.

The Tower was designed by architects from Apar-Projekt and Arca A&C bureaus, and consists of a composition of cylinders
Cylinder (geometry)
A cylinder is one of the most basic curvilinear geometric shapes, the surface formed by the points at a fixed distance from a given line segment, the axis of the cylinder. The solid enclosed by this surface and by two planes perpendicular to the axis is also called a cylinder...

 and cuboid
Cuboid
In geometry, a cuboid is a solid figure bounded by six faces, forming a convex polyhedron. There are two competing definitions of a cuboid in mathematical literature...

s. The structural design was the responsibility of TMJ Tomasz Ziętała. The Tower has 30 overground and 5 underground floors, extending 16.5 metres below ground level and rising to 128 metres above ground. The building comprises almost 50,000 m2 of space, over 41,000 of which is usable.

A unique feature of the building is the external elevator shaft, sloped 14°, which connects the street level with one of the higher office floors with an elevator cabin travelling at 2.5 m/s. Apart from it, there are seven other straight-up elevator shafts in the building core. The Tower is a modern intelligent building, fitted with building automation
Building automation
Building automation describes the functionality provided by the control system of a building. A building automation system is an example of a distributed control system...

 systems. Atop the building sits a helicopter landing pad
Helipad
Helipad is a common abbreviation for helicopter landing pad, a landing area for helicopters. While helicopters are able to operate on a variety of relatively flat surfaces, a fabricated helipad provides a clearly marked hard surface away from obstacles where a helicopter can safely...

, which precludes the mounting of height-enhancing spire
Spire
A spire is a tapering conical or pyramidal structure on the top of a building, particularly a church tower. Etymologically, the word is derived from the Old English word spir, meaning a sprout, shoot, or stalk of grass....

.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK