Journal: Museum expansion in Lausanne
Roughly 20 years after its opening the Olympic Museum in Lausanne – designed by the Mexican architect Pedro Ramirez Vazquez – was restructured and expanded. The most striking addition is a roof measuring 71× 21 meters. Beneath it, a filigree glass facade separates a newly created reception hall from the panorama terrace facing the south towards Lake Geneva. It is groundbreaking in its use of ultra high performance concrete (UHPC) in Swiss construction. Towards the north and averted from the Lake the roof is supported by a U-shaped configuration of concrete walls that enclose the hall. Along the facade, the roof is supported by solid steel tubes with 120 mm diameter on the inside and circular hollow sections with 270 mm diameter on the outside. The roof consists of longitudinal steel beams and sleek UHPC ribs arranged in two planes. Above the terrace facing the south the longitudinal ribs consist of 53.5 cm tall and 8 –10 cm wide UHPC profiles placed at 75 cm off centre. The lateral ribs suspended from the steel beams have the same width and are arranged along the same column lines, yet are 100 cm tall. They serve as single span beams spanning up to 16.50 m. In the south, they cantilever outwards by up to nine meters. The two rib planes are connected by bolted stainless steel angles. All concrete ribs were prefabricated in the factory in sections of up to 12 m in length. They received a slightly trapezoidal cross section that permits easy removal of formwork. The ribs are thermally separated at the facade and connected via stainless steel profiles along their bottom and tension cables along their top. The concrete of the ribs is reinforced with 200 kilograms of steel fibre per cubic centimetre in addition to conventional reinforcement and tension cables. The very high durability of UHPC enabled reducing the concrete cover above the reinforcement to 15 mm.
