26-FLOOR FOR H
HOTEL accommodation in Hong Kong will be increased by 930 rooms when the new American Hotel (formerly intended to be called the Marco Polo Hotel), now going up at the junction of Garden Road and Queen's Road Central in Victoria, is completed.
The basement and the first four floors will follow the shape of the site a segment of a circle with the curved frontage to the two boundary roads and will be topped by a T-shaped tower rising from the fifth to the twenty- fifth floors.
Construction will be in reinforced concrete column and beam for the basement and first four floors changing to reinforced concrete sheer wall above.
A layer of treacherous and poor loadbearing soil well below the surface of the area presented a piling problem which caused some delay in the construction of the rein- forced concrete raft foundation.
The problem was finally solved by introducing the method of "pre compressing" or "pre-loading" each of the 1,127 piles by using two machines, each carrying the con- siderable load of 200 tons made up of steel billets.
These machines, on special steel rollers and travelling on stout timber sleepers laid on the site, were moved from pile to pile by means of geared winches.
SECTION B-B
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SERVICE
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RESTAURANT
TITIT
THE HONG KONG & FAR EAST BUILDER VOLUME 16, NUMBER 2
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