Looks can sometimes be deceiving, and nowhere is that more evident than in the world of polished and toughened glass.
Despite often looking ornately and beautifully delicate, a lot of the glass we use in offices, houses and commercial buildings is extremely tough, resilient and shatterproof, with progressively tougher additives and formulae making previously impossible glass products possible.
This is part of the reason why modern skylines look the way they do; tempered glass curtain walls are strong enough to perform some structural functions along with concrete and steel.
However, one of the most astonishing glass projects ever made, both in its creation and sudden demise, was an aquarium built around a lift which inadvertently provided a lot of lessons for architects relying so heavily on strengthened glass and similar products.
The Aquarium Lift
Known as the AquaDom, which translates roughly to “water dome” or “water cathedral”, the lift in the lobby of a Radisson Collection Hotel in the centre of Berlin was one of the most astonishing pieces of glass construction ever made upon its inception in 2003.
It used a total of acrylic glass panels (26 for the exterior and 15 for the interior surrounding the lift mechanism) that were sealed and secured together to create a seamless cylindrical aquarium, making for a 16m tall aquarium that was the home to over 1500 fish.
It was an extremely audacious project, undertaken in part to advertise a nearby Sea-Life Centre in Berlin and partly to emphasise the luxurious pretensions of what was a flagship hotel complex.
However, for the most part, it worked well, thanks to taking advantage of particularly thick glass and routine care of both the fish and the structure surrounding them.
It proved that, as long as you choose the right glass and budget accordingly with the right glass partner, almost any project is possible.
Mystery
Of course, few people today remember AquaDom for its record-breaking size or its 19 years of smooth operation, but instead are more likely to remember the mysterious circumstances surrounding its collapse.
At 5:50 am on 16th December 2022, the tank burst without warning, sending over a million litres of water, 1500 fish and multiple shards of acrylic into surrounding hotel rooms, the hotel lobby and the nearby street, in a shockwave that registered as an earthquake on local seismographs.
The resulting devastation led to two serious injuries, as well as the deaths of over a thousand fish, with officials crediting the fact that the collapse happened early in the morning as the main reason why lives were saved.
Exactly what caused the aquarium to break is unknown and may never be known, given that an official investigation closed in 2023 without any answers to speak of.
One theory was that renovations in 2020 inadvertently weakened the tank, either by creating a dent or refilling the tank too slowly, which dried the walls out and potentially weakened one of the seams.
However, one of the most likely causes was a major temperature disparity between the water temperature inside the tank and a particularly cold winter morning in Berlin, which could have caused a thermal shock.
AquaDom will never be rebuilt, but the next large-scale aquarium using thick structural glass will likely use measures to ensure that a disparity between internal and external temperatures does not cause a fundamental failure.