MULTI Elevator Finalist for Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s Innovation Award

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23 Jan 2018

Thyssenkrupp Elevator’s groundbreaking rope-less and sideways-moving elevator, MULTI, has been selected as a finalist for the 2018 Innovation Award by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). The winner will be selected at the first annual Tall + Urban Innovation Conference, which will be held May 30-31, 2018, at the Aqua Tower in Chicago.

In 2017, the MULTI elevator won Gold at the Edison Awards, was awarded the German Design Award and was named one of the Top 25 Inventions of the Year by TIME magazine. “It is an honor for the MULTI elevator to be selected as a finalist for CTBUH’s Innovation Award,” says Andreas Schierenbeck, CEO of thyssenkrupp Elevator. “MULTI is a genuine game-changer that has the potential to revolutionize tall building transportation and urban mobility for generations to come.”

MULTI – unveiled to the public in June 2017 at thyssenkrupp’s 800-foot, state-of-the-art test tower in Rottweil, Germany – requires fewer and smaller shafts than conventional elevators, and can increase a building’s usable area by up to 25 percent, offering additional revenue opportunities from the extra rentable/leasable space. This is particularly important considering current elevator-escalator footprints can occupy up to 40 percent of a high-rise building’s floor space.

Instead of one cabin per shaft moving up and down, MULTI offers multiple cabins operating in a loop, much like a metro system inside a building. This results in a higher transport capacity – up to 50 percent – as well as reduced waiting times for passengers. MULTI also requires dramatically lower peak power – as much as a 60-percent reduction when compared to conventional elevator systems. This allows for better management of a building’s energy needs, and reduces investment costs in the power supply infrastructure.

The Innovation Award recognizes a recent innovation in a tall building project that has been realized in a design, implemented during construction/operation, or thoroughly tested and documented for its suitability in a high-rise. The CTBUH Awards are an independent review of new projects, judged by a panel of experts. The awards aspire to provide a more comprehensive and sophisticated view of these important structures, while advocating for improvements in every aspect of performance, including those that have the greatest positive effect on the people who use these buildings and the cities they inhabit.

“The Finalists for the 2018 Tall + Urban Innovation Conference truly represent the pinnacle of excellence in the field of tall buildings,” says Awards Jury Chair Karl Fender, Director at Fender Katsalidis Architects. “Being recognized by the world’s premier authority on tall buildings is a great honor, and the opportunity to showcase these quality projects to a global audience helps drive innovation across all disciplines in our industry.”