Turandot Hotel: The Creation of a Multi-Curved, Irregularly Shaped Steel Staircase

Located in the wine cellar lobby of the Yinchuan Anmo Resort Hotel, this spiral staircase stands nearly 13 meters tall. It features a double-layer, four-run, bidirectional box-girder design, presenting an overall multi-curved, irregular staircase form. However, the journey from design drawings to on-site implementation was not without its challenges.

Located in Northwest China, Ningxia has a dry climate with significant temperature fluctuations between day and night, placing higher demands on the welding quality and dimensional stability of the steel. The on-site construction team had to adjust welding process parameters based on local climatic conditions to ensure that every weld remained strong and reliable despite temperature fluctuations.

An even greater challenge stemmed from the staircase’s sheer scale. Standing nearly 13 meters tall, the irregular spiral staircase has an extremely heavy self-weight. Combined with the eccentric loads resulting from its multi-curved, irregular shape, this placed extremely high demands on the foundation’s load-bearing capacity and the structure’s overall stability. During the preliminary phase, the team used finite element analysis to precisely simulate stress distributions across each section and custom-fabricated high-strength steel components for the core structural elements.

Precisely for this reason, the client paid particular attention to the safety performance of this large-span, irregularly shaped steel staircase and required on-site load testing prior to formal handover—using actual measurement data to verify the structure’s load-bearing performance under real-world conditions.

On the day of the test, white sandbags were hung on both sides of the steel staircase’s main steps, and loads were applied step by step to simulate the stress conditions the staircase would experience under full-load operation. Sensors were attached to the staircase’s key load-bearing joints to monitor the steel structure’s stress and strain data in real time during the loading process. As the number of sandbags increased step by step, the data on the monitoring screen fluctuated steadily—each set of data confirming the accuracy of the preliminary calculations.

Ultimately, all test data met the design requirements. Underpinning these results and bringing the project to fruition was the dedication of the entire team behind the scenes.