The Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which runs through the city a few hundred metres from the coast and parallel to it, will soon have a new jewel of residential architecture. An investment of €920 million, 81 storeys, 1,701 keys and a floor area of 326,769 m2 will make Al Habtoor Tower the largest residential tower in the world. The Al Habtoor Group, a conglomerate with interests in the hotel, automotive, real estate, education and publishing sectors, is responsible for the project.
After a careful tendering process, in which local, European, Indian, Middle Eastern and Chinese construction companies participated, the group finally awarded the contract for the construction of the residential tower to the Asian company, China Railway 18th Bureau Group Ltd. According to statements by Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor, founding chairman of the Al Habtoor Group, the criteria for awarding the construction project to the company included “meeting the projected target for completion of 36 months“, “their full technical compliance for state-of-the-art quality“, and “their successful track record in mega projects“.
The construction of a tower of the size of the Al Habtoor Tower and on a site such as the Dubai coastal strip requires innovative techniques. In this respect, Bauer, the contractor for the foundation work, says that it has developed “a unique foundation solution with the Client, Project Consulting Engineers and Architects to enable the construction of the superstructure, above an existing three-level deep basement“. Specifically, the system chosen to establish the foundations of the residential tower is the barrette foundation.
The barrette foundation is a way of founding buildings by excavating and extracting the ground in shafts where steel bars, which act as reinforcement elements, are inserted and finally injected with concrete. This foundation method, used especially in soils with low bearing capacity or where greater structural strength is required, provides a solid foundation for the building.
President Al Habtoor said of this unconventional foundation method that it is “a structural system used for the first time in Dubai and validated by a detailed engineering peer review from world-renown experts”. He was referring to the engineering firms Structural San Francisco, Imperial College of London and Terrasol Paris. He concludes that by retaining the existing basement structure “instead of demolishing it and building afresh at a lower cost”, it avoids “more than 3,000 trucks of wasted concrete and sand” that were needed for its construction.
Source: Al Habtoor Group. Images: Al Habtoor Group.
