Skyline Tower
Building tall buildings with seismic lateral systems for safety and optimal ocean views.
Project Facts
| Location | Costa Del Este, Panama City, Panama |
| Owner | Desarrollo Bahia |
| Size | 662,100 SF |
| Status | Completed |
Overview
Skyline Tower is a luxurious condominium tower located on Avenue Paseo Del Mar in Costa Del Este, Panama City. The tower needed five levels of basements for parking, which presented a huge challenge since it’s located less than a few hundred feet from the Pacific Ocean. Walter P Moore worked closely with the geotechnical engineer to develop a site-specific seismic study to help plan the next phase of development for the building.
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About the Project
The 58-story Skyline Tower provides spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean for 105 residences. To accommodate the residents, the tower needed five levels of basements for parking. Due to poor soil conditions in the top 20 meters of the soil layers from the tower’s proximity to the ocean as well as various site restrictions, temporary tiebacks were not permitted for the retention system.
Therefore, a top-down construction method was proposed for excavation. Rings of slabs at the five levels of the basements were designed to help resist the lateral load from the soil and water.
Walter P Moore worked closely with the geotechnical engineer to develop a site-specific seismic study and determine the benefit of excavation for the five levels of basements. This allowed the reclassification of the site from D to the much less stringent class B. This small change caused significant savings in the seismic lateral systems of the towers.
After the reclassification, the building design focused on two-way post-tensioned slabs without beams. The shallow post-tensioned slab design allowed for more residential floor-to-floor height. Plus, the use of efficient concrete shear walls at the building core provided resistance to the lateral loads.
