Port Mall Shopping Centre

The Port Mall shopping centre is a multifunctional building incorporating retail, department stores, parking garage and leisure time facilities. It is located on the outskirts of Bratislava, Slovakia.
The whole construction has a building area of approximately 55.000 m².
After having attended the competition successfully, the brief was to develop a design for the load-bearing structure of the shopping centre as well as the light-weight steel-glass free-form roof. Furthermore Knippers Helbig carried out structural and detailed design up to completion for the before mentioned structure.
Part of detailed design was design and optimization of the steel-glass free-form gridshell tornado. Rectangular hollow sections with dimensions of 120x70mm (lower areas) up to 180x76mm (top areas) with different wall thicknesses depending on structural requirements are used. Where possible the connections between members and nodes are bolted. All nodes milled from solid blocks consist of a unique geometry following the architectural intention visualizing the rounded profile edges of the hollow sections but letting the connection between member and node almost disappear.