As urbanisation continues at pace, developers are taking a second look at double-deck lifts, says Mark Randle, Stantec’s Vertical Transportation Section Lead.
There are 18 million elevators and escalators around the world, but few people recognise their transformational role in cities. Before Otis installed the first passenger lift in 1857, the height of a building was limited to the willingness of humans to scale its stairs.
Today, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa stretches to 163 storeys and 830 metres high. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat holds a database of more than 40,000 projects.
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Randle has spent 25 years delivering vertical transportation engineering services for iconic projects across the Middle East, Europe, China and Australasia.
Randle has observed an emerging trend towards double-deck lifts as advancing technology offers a smoother, more seamless service, and as design teams look for ways to reduce the core of skyscrapers while boosting their lettable space.
“Double-deck lifts are not new, but the technology has been modernised and several new Australian projects have demonstrated their feasibility to the market,” Randle says.
A double-deck lift, or elevator, stacks one cab on top of another. This allows passengers on two consecutive floors to use the elevator simultaneously, increasing passenger capacity, improving performance efficiency and reducing the amount of floor space required for building services.
Two recent projects, AMP Capital’s Quay Quarter in Sydney and Dexus’ 80 Collins Street in Melbourne both feature double-deck solutions. Randle estimates that upwards of 15 new tall projects are now investigating double-decks designs.
Until 1930 all buildings used single deck cars to transport people. The first double-deck elevators were installed in 1931 in New York’s 66-storey Cities Service Building. Today, many global icons feature double-deck solutions: Sears Tower in Chicago, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Taipei Financial Centre, ICC in Hong Kong and Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, to name a few.
Australian reticence stems from push-button double-deck solutions from the 1970s that were “not a nice experience when passengers decelerated and stopped without the doors opening”. This drove “negative connotations” in the market, Randle explains.
Lift systems can cost as much as $50 million in high-rise commercial towers, so it’s easy to see why developers turn to the tried-and-true. But destination control systems have evolved “immeasurably” in recent years, driving the double-deck’s renaissance.
“Double deckers are a more expensive solution – they cost around 20 per cent more than their single counterparts. But the spatial savings can make them an attractive proposition and clearly developers are making the numbers stack up,” Randle notes.
What does the future of vertical transportation look like?
Randle says the only way is up. “In some tall towers we have simulated, we have seen a double deck solution reduce the number of lifts from 40 to 25. This is a significant space saving that can translate into a bigger return on investment.”
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