Musée des Confluences, a major urban project in Lyon, designed with Advance Design

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.

For a long time -dedicated to industry and transport, this area, which is located south of the Peninsula of Lyon, is now undergoing an unprecedented urban renewal project. This progressive development enhances an exceptional area and unique landscape. The expected doubling of the hyper-center's surface, a rare project in Europe, is a great opportunity for this major city and its inhabitants. Regarding the project's scope, many users of GRAITEC software solutions are working on it, such as the Design Offices POLYBATIC and PLANTIER, who worked on the conception of the Leisure Center and the Regional Hall, and who are now dealing with the Confluences Museum. After a two-year pause, VINCI group has now been put in charge of the construction of the Museum.

A few figures relating to the Museum:
Length: 180 m
Width: 90 m
Height: 37 m
Surface of the gardens: 24 400 m2
20 000 m2 net area
27 000 m2 living space
46 500 m2 total surface
3-year project

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."

Founded in 1986, GRAITEC is a major software developer for civil engineering offering a Building Information Modeling (BIM) system that automates the entire structural process.

GRAITEC offers a complete software solution:
Advance Steel® is designed for steel detailers who require a professional structural steel modeling platform. Perfectly integrated into AutoCAD®, it includes automatic joints and macros for stairs and railings, automatic drawing creation, material lists and output to all major industry formats (DWG, IFC, CIS/2, SDNF, PSS, etc.). Advance Steel® is part of the BIM structural GRAITEC Advance® suite.

Advance Concrete® is designed for draftsmen who require a professional solution for producing all their reinforced concrete drawings. Perfectly integrated into AutoCAD®, Advance Concrete® accelerates the design phase by offering libraries of structural elements and bars. It generates all construction drawings using view production tools, dimensions, symbols and layout functions.

Advance Design® is aimed at structural engineers who require a high-end solution for simulating and optimizing all their projects. It includes a user-friendly structural modeler, automatic load generators, a powerful FEM engine, top-level wizards for concrete and steel design, efficient post-processing and report generators.

GRAITEC Group
12 Burospace
91572 Bièvres Cedex, France
Valérie Dugard
valerie.dugard@graitec.com
www.graitec.com

This release was published on openPR.