Liebherr overcomes access restrictions to lift a Derrick crane onto a Paris high-rise roof

On the roof of the Opus 12 tower in La Défense, a Liebherr Derrick crane is lifting materials for a new technical installation on top of the building. The crane, a Liebherr 200 DR 5/10 Litronic, was chosen because conventional tower cranes could not be transported to the site or erected on the roof.

Limited access and missing capacity on the roof

The Opus 12 tower stands around 100 metres tall with 26 floors in La Défense, the business district west of Paris. Built in the early 1970s, the office building is currently being modernised for the French construction group Legendre, including a new technical installation on the roof. To build it, construction materials needed to be lifted onto the roof, but a conventional tower crane was not a realistic option. The building sits in a dense inner-city location that articulated lorries cannot reach, and the roof structure could not carry the load of a standard tower crane. A conventional Liebherr tower crane would have been unrealistic in terms of transport, weight and component size. A Derrick crane, by contrast, can be broken down into small individual parts and reassembled on site, making it suitable for complex rooftop projects.

From Bad Waldsee to the construction site, in stages

The Derrick crane was provided by the Liebherr Tower Crane Center in Bad Waldsee, Germany and transported, to France. It was then moved to the storage yard of Liebherr France (LDF) in Paris, where individual components were pre-assembled. From there, the parts were loaded onto smaller vehicles and brought to the construction site. The narrow streets around the site made direct delivery by articulated lorries impossible.

Getting the crane onto the roof required two transport methods. Ballast weights, pins, connecting materials, spreader beams and smaller components were sent up in the building's goods lift. The heaviest of these parts weighed around 1,200 kilograms.

The largest assemblies, including tower sections and jib, did not fit into the lift and were flown onto the roof by helicopter instead. The heaviest of these parts weighed around one tonne. Components were picked up from a suitable open area nearby and set down directly on the building's roof. The operation was carried out in May 2026, using an Airbus H225 Super Puma helicopter with an 80 metre sling line. Six flights were needed to bring all the components, including the spider crane, onto the roof, and the entire operation was completed within around 30 minutes.

A steel substructure to carry the load

To allow the Derrick crane to be erected on the roof at all, a dedicated steel substructure was required. Liebherr Tower Crane Solutions, which provided technical consulting, engineering and project support, supplied the crane's loads, static data and technical requirements. The customer's construction team used this data to design the substructure. To install it, the roof was opened at several points, a steel structure was built down into the building's load-bearing structure, and the crane's load was safely introduced into the building. The Derrick crane's spreader beams were were connected to the building via a specially designed steel substructure, which safely transferred the crane loads into the supporting structure.

Expertise direct from the manufacturer

The request came from Legendre to Liebherr France (LDF). It became clear early on that conventional lifting solutions were not suitable, and TCS was brought in via LDF to develop a technical solution. TCS analysed the requirements and confirmed that a Derrick crane was the most practical technical solution. The project illustrates how Tower Crane Solutions typically works.

The Derrick crane used in Paris is a genuine specialist machine. Around 20 units of this type exist worldwide, three of which are owned by Liebherr Tower Crane Center (TCC), the entity that owns and rents out the crane. "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.", says Marco Scheuerl, Global Sales Manager Used & Rental Equipment, Tower Crane Center, Liebherr. “It is deployed only for exceptional requirements, such as the dismantling of very large tower cranes, high-rise projects, roof renovations, building extensions and projects with severely restricted access.”

Previous references for this crane type include the Çanakkale Bridge in Türkiye, as well as projects in Vancouver, London, etc. The Paris deployment is among its more unusual applications, since the Derrick crane was not used primarily to dismantle another crane, but as an erection solution for a rooftop extension.

Once work on the rooftop installation is complete, the Derrick crane is due to be dismantled again, expected in early November 2026. As with its erection, the dismantling will require detailed logistics planning, since the crane must once again be broken down into individual components and transported off the roof.