Seven jobs that show the range of Liebherr Tower Crane Solutions

From the Sagrada Família to the Fehmarnbelt: seven jobs from Liebherr Tower Crane Solutions

Liebherr’s Tower Crane Solutions (TCS) department has picked seven deployments – from a luffer above Barcelona’s basilica to more than 20 rail-mounted cranes on the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel – that show how far bespoke tower crane planning now stretches.

At the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, a 710 HC-L 32-64 Litronic luffer stands centrally above the nave to complete the Tower of Jesus Christ – the first deployment of a luffing jib crane of this class in Spain, working in a sensitive, space-starved setting. In Türkiye, two 357 HC-L luffers topped out the 318-metre pylons of the 2,023-metre Çanakkale Bridge, the world’s longest suspension span, coping with 40 km/h winds in the Dardanelles, temperature swings from −5 to +20 °C and barely 100 square metres of working space per pylon. TCS stayed on board through to dismantling by derrick crane.

Not every job is a megaproject

In Passau, the restoration of the world’s largest Catholic church organ – 17,974 pipes in St Stephen’s Cathedral – is being served by an L1-24 fast-erecting crane, planned together with the Beutlhauser Group. The challenge was never capacity: the crane had to thread through the old town’s lanes under police escort, and the cathedral’s marble floor is protected with anti-slip mats while pipes of over eleven metres and more than 300 kilograms come out. The restoration runs until 2027.

Scale returns in Chile, where TCS advised on 23 tower cranes for the expansion of Santiago’s Nueva Pudahuel Airport to 30 million passengers a year. With flight operations capping crane heights, a 250 EC-B 12 Litronic flat-top was set on rails so it could cover more of the site and be rolled clear of its slewing position between shifts.

Bridges, tunnels and Manhattan

In Helsinki, a 630 EC-H 40 Litronic with 40 tonnes of capacity is working the 135-metre pylon of the Kruunuvuori Bridge, Finland’s longest and tallest, placing formwork, reinforcement cages and concreting equipment. TCS calculated the tower configuration and tie-in geometry for an exposed Baltic site with subarctic winters and no sheltering terrain to blunt the wind loads.

The Fehmarnbelt Tunnel turns the usual geometry on its side: the world’s longest immersed tunnel stretches some 18 kilometres, and more than 20 Liebherr tower cranes – many of them rail-mounted – shuttle between work areas producing and assembling the tunnel elements. And in Manhattan, two 710 HC-L 32/64 Litronic luffers built the 320-metre MoMA Tower, where dense-city logistics meant the first crane was erected within 17 hours of arriving on site.

Different continents, one common thread: none of these jobs worked with an off-the-shelf crane plan.