Tours Duo facade maintenance challenge

Tours Duo 1 Skycrapers

Ivanhoe Cambridge, a real estate company in Paris, is behind the "DUO Towers" project in Paris. The maintenance of the facades of the skyscrapers will be carried out by six building maintenance units custom-made by Tractel.

Tours Duo in will be cladded with 1500m2 of energy- generating 'Gold Look' façade

Ateliers Jean Nouvel designed Tours Duo, two 180-meter and 125-meter high-rise buildings. The towers will be cladded with Solar Visuals' energy-generating façade panels to leverage energy use and minimize the carbon emissions footprint of the buildings. 1500 square meters facade will be cladded with 825 Solar Visuals panels in a custom-designed 'gold look.

Duo is covered with 850 solar panels

The 825-panel project and the 1500 square meters of energy-generating cladding material will be split between DUO-1 and DUO-2. These integrated panel solution façades are a source of large-scale renewable energy generation. Artlite Active Doré glass panels used on the facades and roofs are 4mm matte structured tempered glass and matt anodized gold frame.

Monumental glass facades need maintenance

As you can see in the pictures, the building shell is complex, the walls and roofs incline in several directions, and the building is tall and practically covered with glass.

All those properties challenge the maintenance work of the facades. They need to be accessible for inspections, maintenance, glass replacements, and naturally for window cleaning.

The facade maintenance solution at Tours Duo

Building Maintenance units (BMU) are delivered by Tractel

Tractel has delivered six building maintenance units (BMU: s) at Tours Duo. A big Scorpio” mast” machine & a Jupiter “compact” building maintenance units at taller building #1 At building #2, two other “compact” machines and 2 parapet trollies with an original design has been installed.

Tours Duo #1 building maintenance units

#1 building at Tours Duo is 200 meters tall and has a strongly inclined roof. The placement of the main BMU was defined to be in the middle of the inclined roof. The BMU had to reach even the faraway corners and walls from the center of the building. Tractel chose medium size BMU from the product line and customized the unit to customer needs.

Tractel equipped the counterweighted Scorpio BMU with an extra-long hydraulic jib which extends to 36 meters, and a PLC system. Because of the roof inclination and the position on the roof, the jib can be raised hydraulically up 5 meters.

On the top floor (39th) of Tours Duo #1, Tractel installed tracks for the Scorpio BMU. It can travel about 15 meters on the rails. The rails and the extra-long and raisable jib (telescopic mast) allow access to most DUO #1 facades using just one BMU.

The other building maintenance unit is a Jupiter “compact” machine. It is placed on floor 30 in the #1 building on the restaurant terrace. The BMU has a mobile traversing trolley with one jib and a working cradle suspended from the trolley using galvanized steel wire ropes and a rail track. The rails reside on the restaurant's balcony, and the rails are hidden below the removable floor tiling.

Tours Duo #2 building maintenance units

On Tours Duo #2, there are four building maintenance units installed. Tractel installed motorized Davits on floors 17 and 23, and on floor 27, a Jupiter BMU, On level 28 Tractel installed one Demos BMU with tracks fixed on the parapet.

Powered Davits

On levels 17 and 23, powered Davits were chosen for the facade maintenance work. These powered Davits travel on a track fixed to the parapet. In this way, the system leaves the of and floor free of equipment and provides a simple and efficient solution.

Shining facades due to Tractel BMU

Tours Duo will be one of the prominent landmarks in the Paris skyline. The complexity of the building's facades demanded a lot of planning and thinking to organize the maintenance work of shining facades. Tractel people had to work hard to find an optimal solution to do the job. With a combination of customized products and standard BMU: they developed a solution with six machines that the customer is now happy with.

Contact Tractel

For more information about the BMU's installed on this project or for custom advise about any maintenance project, we are happy to assist you. Please contact our Project Team via [email protected].

Tours Duo

Tours Duo are two skyscrapers located near the Paris ring road and Ivry-sur-Seine. The multi-use construction project covers more than 108,000 m2. The two buildings will comprise offices, a hotel, a restaurant, a bar with a panoramic terrace overlooking an auditorium, shops, and green terraces. Philippe Starck designed the hotel, which with 139 rooms, will take up a ten floors part of the Tours Duo #2 building.

When completed the Tour Duo n°1, with 180 m, will be the third tallest building in Paris. Taller in Paris are the Eiffel Tower (324 m) and the Tour Montparnasse (209 m), which is at par with the future Tour Triangle. Work began at the end of March 2017. Delivery of the two towers is scheduled for the end of 2021.

Tours Duo Facts

BMU Facts