Lyon Confluences is a major urban project including residential buildings, offices, a leisure centre, the Regional Hall and the Confluences Museum. POLYBATIC Design Office, in charge of the computing of the Museum’s concrete structure, chose Advance Design to carry out this ambitious and complex project. The software enabled the Design Office to solve cooperation issues with other Offices which were using different software solutions.

The architecture contest that took place in 2001 was won by the Viennese Office Coop_Himmelbau with a complex and ambitious project called “Crystal-cloud”, a building supported by stilts featuring a combination of a steel sphere and a sharp glass roof. For POLYBATIC, this meant designing 14 monumental variable columns, 15 to 20 meters each, and 3 bracing hollow-piles holding the steel structure of the “cloud”. The technical part is located in the base which features two floors with its upper part being the public forecourt. Moreover, each column supports between 2000 and 6000 tons, 670 tons of horizontal loads are distributed on the beams and 1260 tons on the piles. POLYBATIC used Advance to model the concrete elements of the Museum, integrating other elements from the general design model of the project.

The number of Design Offices involved brings more complexity to the project, with, among others, JAILLET-ROUBY in charge of the general model and the steel frame, and the POLYBATIC/PLANTIER group designing the concrete elements.

The use of Advance Design allowed fast computing of the final vertical load distribution from the existing planting, it enabled the 3D modeling of this complex project and the integration of elements designed by other Offices.

M. Gérard DELLA DORA, Managing director of POLYBATIC Design Office and Representative for the Concrete Design Offices group working on the Musée des Confluences: “Each Design Office work with different software solutions and this can be problematic. (…) We were expecting collisions between our “source” model and other Offices’ “clone” models, with regards to the impossibility of making direct exports. Therefore we have proceeded to make some tests for a preliminary validation, and we were pleasantly surprised to see that the differences were minor. Advance Design (…) is a modern program that is perfectly suitable for this type of project. Its main benefit is to be able to model a project as a whole. GRAITEC solutions are high-performance tools that allow us to save precious time, be more competitive and dedicate our energy to the conception and the optimization of the projects.” 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.