Agrimeco builds Vietnam’s tallest tower

Vietnamese engineering and construction conglomerate Agrimeco has put seven units of Liebherr tower cranes to work on the VietinBank Towers project in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Agrimeco is a joint venture with Hoa Binh Construction, the main contractor for the construction works. The project has been designed by London-based Foster + Partners in the UK. The structural engineer for the project is Halvorson and Partners, and project management is by Turner Construction Co.

The VietinBank Towers is a 300,000 square metre development. It will have two towers, one 68 storeys and the other 48 storeys. The towers will be connected by a seven-storey podium. The taller tower will rise to a height of 363 m and will be a V-shaped building. The smaller tower will be triangular and will rise to 280 m.

Cranes on site include three 36 tonne capacity 542 HC-L 18/36 Litronic luffing jib units and four 16 tonne capacity 280 EC-H 16 Litronic units. The three luffing jib units are helping construct the office tower and the four 280 EC-H 16 Litronic models will be used to erect the hotel and residential tower and the podium block.

Work for the cranes will include lifting construction material. The office tower will have six steel trusses, each weighing approximately 1,000 tonnes and measuring 55 m wide by 10 m high.

Mike Tay, senior regional sales manager for tower cranes at Liebherr-Singapore, said, “Vietnam has always been a very competitive market for our tower cranes, as Chinese-built cranes and second-hand units have had the price advantage, and the volume of high-rise building has until recently been limited.”

Le Van An, Agrimeco president and CEO, said, “VietinBank Towers will be the tallest structure in Vietnam. It also presents the most rigorous engineering demands of any high-rise structure in our country. We invested in the Liebherr cranes because they represent the finest in European engineering expertise, and they will deliver the precision, reliability and speed of erection that we require to deliver this most innovative of projects.

“Liebherr showed us how we could deploy these cranes to the optimum effect,” An said. “Had we been using another type of crane we would not have had this productivity, and we would almost certainly have had to use more than seven units.”