The new museum was designed by the famous French architect Jean Nouvel. The Austrian company Waagner-Biro from Vienna was responsible for the structural calculation and the construction of the dome.
Structure
The dome rests on only four support points arranged at a distance of 360.8 ft. This gives the impression that the roof is hovering above the museum pavilion below. The intention of the roof covering, consisting of several layers of aluminum sections, is to create similar lighting conditions to those that occur in an Eastern bazaar, where woven mats cover the narrow streets. In this way, the dome's supporting structure is visually pushed into the background.
The structural system is based on a space frame consisting of approximately 11,000 member elements with an average length of 13-16 ft each. The spatial grid made of triangles and quadrangles was developed by Buro Happold.
The structure is supported by four resettable spherical bearings. It was important to consider their frictional resistance and the restoring force of the supports for the modeling.
The loading that acts on the structural analysis model was analyzed intensively by Waagner-Biro and consulted with the technical planners. For example, they designed service meshes to handle the local load transfer. When service technicians walk on these meshes, the adjacent members must absorb the additional transverse loading.
The target is to get an ideal dome shape without visible sag when it is finished. Therefore, it was necessary to camber the structure for mounting. With this, another effect had to be taken into account in addition to the deformation components from the self-weight. Over time, the tolerances in the bolt connections of the members will lead to sliding of the connections. This, in turn, causes further sagging of the dome.
Waagner-Biro: "A new icon of architectural steel construction has been created with the dome of Louvre Abu Dhabi."
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