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. Modern sources currently define skyscrapers as being at least or in height, though there is no universally accepted definition. Skyscrapers are very tall high-ris ...

Johannesburg Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu and xh, eGoli ), colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, or "The City of Gold", is the largest city in South Africa, classified as a megacity, and is one of the 100 largest urban areas in the world. According to Demo ...

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...

. It is located at the corner of 5 Simmonds Street and 78 Fox Street in the

Central Business District A central business district (CBD) is the commercial and business centre 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 with the "city ...

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 Group Limited is a major South African bank and financial services group. It is Africa's biggest lender by assets. The company's corporate headquarters, Standard Bank Centre, is situated in Simmonds Street, Johannesburg. History ...

, until the company moved to other 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 supported at only 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 canti ...

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 Hubert Petschnigg (31 October 1913 – 15 September 1997) was an Austrian architect. Life Petschnigg was born in Klagenfurt, and went to school in Villach. In 1934 he began to study architecture at the Vienna University of Technology, where he e ...

(1913-1997), who planned the skyscraper in collaboration with the British-Danish-Norwegian engineer

Ove Arup Sir Ove Nyquist Arup, CBE, MICE, MIStructE, FCIOB (16 April 1895 – 5 February 1988) was an English engineer who founded Arup Group Limited, a multinational corporation that offers engineering, design, planning, project management, and ...

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

Johannesburg CBD The 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, many of the b ...

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 fine and coarse aggregate bonded together with a fluid cement (cement paste) that hardens (cures) over time. Concrete is the second-most-used substance in the world after water, and is the most wi ...

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 mining, civil engineering, building and road projects. Concor returned as an independent br ...

of precast

reinforced concrete Reinforced concrete (RC), also called reinforced cement concrete (RCC) and ferroconcrete, is a composite material in which concrete's relatively low tensile strength and ductility are compensated for by the inclusion of reinforcement having hig ...

slabs,

glass Glass is a non-crystalline, often transparent, amorphous solid that has widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optics. Glass is most often formed by rapid cooling (quenching) of ...

, and

steel Steel is an alloy made up of iron with added carbon to improve its strength and fracture resistance compared to other forms of iron. Many other elements may be present or added. Stainless steels that are corrosion- and oxidation-resistant ty ...

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

girder A girder () is a support 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 stabilizing ' ...

s used for the balustrades are 1.5 m high and 24.6 m long. A special

slewing Slewing is the rotation of an object around an axis, usually the z axis. An example is a radar scanning 360 degrees by slewing around the z axis. This is also common terminology in astronomy. The process of rotating a telescope to observe a differ ...

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 box 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 and ...

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 Window cleaning, or window washing, is the exterior cleaning of architectural glass used for structural, lighting, or decorative purposes. It can be done manually, using a variety of tools for cleaning and access. Technology is also employed and ...

, 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