Project Name: Empire Tower

Consultant Firm: ACT Consultants Co., Ltd. (ACT)

Associated Firm: Design Phase

Wong Hobach Lau (USA) was the designer for structural steel work. ACT was responsible for about 70% of the total workincluding the design of the foundation, architecture, concrete structure, building services. ACT was also the Engineer of Records.

Construction Phase

ACT performed the construction supervision work which was about 70% of the total consultancy work under Project Management by Bechtel International, Inc.

Project Location: Sathorn Tai Road, Bangkok, Thailand

Project Owner: Silom Tower Co., Ltd.

Type of Project: Office Building: The tower consisted of structural steel high blocks of 58 stories, a 10-story concrete low block, and 6 levels of basement. The total floor area was 344,300 sq.m. The construction cost was approximately 4,500 million Baht and the constructionwas completed in April 1999.

Technical Qualification: The Empire Tower is, to date, the largest in floor area and talleststeel structure single office building in Bangkok. A large part of the construction work was done off-site i.e. steel fabrications, facade frames and glazing. The erections of steel structures and building enclosures installation with concrete flooring were erected and installed on-site.

The majority part of building services and interior construction were done inside the building enclosures, resulting in considerably less environmental impact when compared with construction of conventional concrete high-rise buildings. Doing substantial part of the works off-site also helped accelerated construction schedule as required by the owner.

Highlight: The top-down-bottom-up construction technique was first introduced in Thailand at this building, resulted in substantial reduction of construction time. At the time the 6th basement floor and mat foundation were completed, erestructure had reached the 20th floor.