Scaffold being raised to top of Space Needle, via the Space Needle
The Seattle Space Needle is not a normal building, which makes it a unique project to try to renovate. The iconic building is set to receive a $100 million renovation dubbed the Century Project that promises much better views thanks to new floor to ceiling exterior glazing. To prepare for the project, construction crews recently hoisted a 28.000 pound ring of scaffold to the tower’s Tophouse, around 400 feet in the air.
According to Komo News, it took crews around a week to build the massive scaffold and will take another 2 weeks for them to enclose it to protect them against the upcoming weather. A spokesperson with the Space Needle told Komo that raising a scaffold to the top of the needle had never been done before and a great plan by the contractors, led by General Contractor Hoffman Construction Co., allowed them to stay open for business during the scaffold hoisting procedure.
The project is scheduled to be complete by June of 2018.
You can check out a pretty cool timelapse of the scaffold raising and some other awesome footage in the video below:
While still new in the construction industries, robots are typically designed to perform a specific task in a highly precise and efficient way, like the rebar tying robot, Tybot or the brick-laying robot Hadrian X. More recently, though, robots are being imagined as platforms for 3rd party companies to develop hardware and accessories to attach to the base robot, like the Boston Dynamics robotic dog, Spot. I recently came across a new robot, called Baubot, which hopes to one day perform tasks using every tool on a typical jobsite.