Helicopter lifts Liebherr derrick crane onto Paris high-rise roof

The Opus 12 tower, a 26-storey office building of around 100 metres in the La Défense business district west of Paris, is being modernised for French construction group Legendre, including a new technical installation on its roof. Lifting the construction materials to the top posed a problem: the early-1970s building sits in a dense inner-city location that articulated lorries cannot reach, and the roof structure cannot carry the load of a standard tower crane.

Liebherr Tower Crane Solutions (TCS), Liebherr France (LDF) and Legendre instead developed a rooftop solution around the 200 DR 5/10 Litronic derrick crane, a machine that can be broken down into small individual parts and reassembled on site.

“We do not start with a crane, we start with a challenge. In this case, the challenge lay in lifting several tonnes of material onto a high-rise rooftop in the heart of Paris. Restrictions on access and load-bearing capacity ruled out conventional lifting solutions. Only after analysing those constraints did we conclude that a derrick crane was the right answer.”

— Jochen Wille, Project Manager Tower Crane Solutions, Liebherr

Goods lift and Super Puma

The crane came from the Liebherr Tower Crane Center in Bad Waldsee, Germany, and was pre-assembled into individual components at the LDF storage yard in Paris before being delivered to site on smaller vehicles. Getting it onto the roof then took two routes. Ballast weights, pins, connecting materials, spreader beams and smaller components — the heaviest around 1,200 kilograms — went up in the building’s goods lift.

The larger assemblies, including the tower sections and jib, did not fit in the lift and were flown up instead. In May 2026 an Airbus H225 Super Puma working with an 80-metre sling line picked the parts, each weighing up to around one tonne, from a nearby open area and set them down directly on the roof. Six flights — which also carried a spider crane for the assembly work — completed the airlift in roughly 30 minutes.

Steel substructure carries the loads

Even a derrick crane could not simply stand on the roof. TCS supplied the crane’s loads, static data and technical requirements, which Legendre’s construction team used to design a dedicated steel substructure. The roof was opened at several points so the steelwork could reach down into the building’s load-bearing structure, and the crane’s spreader beams were connected to it, transferring the crane loads safely into the frame of the tower.

One of about 20 worldwide

The 200 DR 5/10 is a rare specialist: around 20 units of the type exist worldwide, three of them owned by the Liebherr Tower Crane Center, which rents the Paris machine out.

“We only have a handful of these derrick cranes in our rental fleet, and we lend them out for exactly this kind of project, where the site itself rules out a conventional solution. Paris is a good example of why we keep this specialist equipment available, even though it is used far less often than our standard tower cranes.”

— Marco Scheuerl, Global Sales Manager Used & Rental Equipment, Tower Crane Center, Liebherr

Previous outings for the type include the Çanakkale Bridge in Türkiye and projects in Vancouver and London, usually dismantling very large tower cranes. The Paris job is unusual in using the derrick as an erection crane for a rooftop extension. Once the installation is complete, the crane is due to be dismantled again — expected in early November 2026 — and broken back down into components for the journey off the roof.