How to move a 200-ton hotel? Just 700 bars of soap

What tools are needed to move a building?

Recently, a construction company in Canada used an unexpected tool to move a 200-ton building - soap.

The Elmwood Building, built in 1826, was originally scheduled for demolition in 2018, but real estate company Galaxy Properties saved its fate by purchasing the building that same year. Galaxy Properties hopes to relocate the structure closer to the street, place it on a new foundation and connect it to a nine-story residential apartment project.

Sheldon Rushton, the owner of the construction company, realized that moving the nearly 200-year-old building was a challenge, so he decided to use soap to complete the move. "After several weeks of preparation, the moving process of about 9 meters was as smooth as soap," the company said in a post on the social media platform on the 8th.

The moved building

A special way of moving

Question! How many steps does it take to put an elephant into a refrigerator?

The answer is that it only takes three steps: open the refrigerator door, put the elephant in, and close the refrigerator door.

So, how many steps can be taken to relocate a building?

The answer is four steps.

The first step is to cut the building apart from its original foundation. The second step is to lift the building up in situ using a lifting device. The third step is to install movable equipment at the bottom of the building. The fourth step is to get the building moving and move it to its new location.

In this process, architects need to study the structure of the building several months in advance to determine whether it is suitable for relocation and develop a detailed relocation plan. Before relocation, workers need to be arranged to clear and remove obstacles on the relocation route, such as wires and trees, and reinforce old buildings that are already fragile in structure to prevent them from being damaged during the relocation process.

Relocation Process

In fact, this method of building translation has been implemented a long time ago.

In 1901, the University of Iowa used 80 screw jacks to lift up the building due to campus expansion. 675 log rollers with a diameter of 150 mm were used as rolling devices, and 30 screw jacks provided horizontal traction to move the three-story science building as a whole.

The successful completion of this project also shocked the civil engineering community at the time. Engineers from all over the world began to challenge the high difficulty and study how to safely and stably move heavier buildings to farther locations.

The Science Museum on the Move

Our country has also completed many remarkable building relocation projects.

In 2021, the original location of Xiamen Houxi Long-distance Bus Station blocked the southward route of the Fuzhou-Xiamen High-speed Railway. Engineers boldly chose to move the Xiamen Houxi Long-distance Bus Station, which weighed more than 30,000 tons.

In September 2023, the largest group-type translation project was launched in Zhangyuan East District, Shanghai. Under the "escort" of the country's most advanced crawler translation technology, 9 cultural relics protection buildings were divided into four groups and translated to the central location in turn.

It is obvious that the application of architectural "translation" method in urban planning is becoming more and more common.

Zhangyuan East District Group Translocation Project

The secret of mobile architecture - soap

In fact, translational construction is already very common, but some of the novel auxiliary methods are not well known.

For example, soap was used in the relocation of the Elmwood Building.

The soap was placed on a dozen steel beams under the building. The weight of the building crushed the soap, making the beams smooth and easier to move. Could soap allow such a heavy building to be moved easily?

This brings us to the texture of the soap.

Sheldon Rushton sticks to only one brand of soap: Ivory. Most soap brands dry out and break down quickly, he says, but Ivory soap sticks to the steel beams so they slide more smoothly. And fresh soap is better, because old soap breaks more easily.

Rushton, the construction manager, said he had used soap to move buildings dozens of times. Small buildings generally required 20 to 40 bars of soap, but the Elmwood Building was the heaviest building he had moved in his five years of construction work, so he used more than 700 bars of soap.

Of course, this isn't the first time "strange stuff" has been used to move buildings.

In April 2023, the Utah Department of Transportation used a method called accelerated bridge construction. In order to seamlessly insert the new bridge, construction workers applied 16 gallons of Dawn brand detergent on the low-friction pads under the steel beams, and smoothly moved a 2,400-ton bridge 33.5 meters.

It has to be said that these novel building relocation stories are a perfect interpretation of wisdom and creativity, and are also a feat of the world's construction industry. Perhaps more unexpected relocation methods will be presented to the world in the future.