Osaka Maritime Museum

The Osaka Maritime Museum is a maritime museum in Osaka, Japan. It was opened by the Mayor of Osaka City on July 14, 2000 have started on site in March 1998. Designed by architect Paul Andreu in Engineering Design and Arup Tohata.The museum was built on reclaimed land in Osaka Bay at a cost of 12.8bn yen, with a replica Edo Period trading ship, the Naniwa Maru in the center. The requirement of the dome to seismic, wave and wind loads and the successful completion, led to the building winning a structural Special Award in 2002 from the Institution of Structural Engineers resist UK.Osaka City wanted a museum that maritime reflected development history of the port. She planned to be placed on reclaimed land in Osaka Bay, where a number of office systems and a convention center was built to create a building to sign
people from the center. When approaching Paul Andreu he preliminary sketches show a dome, and suggested that the museum should be placed in the water itself and as a 300,000 sqm pool had to be excavated from the land reclamation with a spherical
dome seems to float in the bay, reached by a tunnel under water.Andreu, based on the dome of a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. Arup was responsible for the design of structural, mechanical,electrical and seismic technical solutions for the dome and the internal structure within the exhibitions, while the Japanese company had Tohata
responsible for the engineering of the building entrance, the tunnel under water and the dome base.

With a site consisting of 25 m of reclaimed land on the top 15 m of alluvial clay, piles were designed to be 40 m long. To prevent the building sinking into the ground like an earthquake causes liquefaction of the ground, the top 10 m of the piles designed as precast concrete piles with steel tubes. To prevent the building rises due to buoyancy of the piles were cast with a floor plate from 1.6 to 2.5 m thick enough to weight.The hemisphere landside building contains a ticket office, hall and administrative offices, with storage and plant space in two underground floors below. From the hall, visitors descend to the sunken tunnel in glass risers. The tunnel is made of reinforced concrete and is 15 m wide and 60 m long, but the shortest distance from the dome to the coast is 15 m.The final design was for a 20,000 m2 building, which consists of a 5,000 m2 land side entrance building, the 60m underwater tunnel of 1,000 m2, opening in the dome, four levels totaling 14,000 m2 locked.