A view from the top

MENA Infrastructure takes a look at the latest offering from the portfolio of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the US based architects behind the Burj Khalifa.

“We knew that the project automatically would be an office building and mixed-use tower of offices and rental residential units with a special consideration for penthouses off the building.”

Dubai's Sheikh Zayed Road is not short of skyscrapers. An estimated 82 towers sit along the highway that links Dubai with its neighbouring Emirates, a reported 25 of which reach heights greater than 100 metres tall. Some glamorous and symbolic of Dubai's ostentatious appeal, some outdated, some awaiting completion as the financial crisis brought cash flow for such projects to a halt, they all serve as evidence of the emirate's propensity towards the biggest and best constructions in the world.

More famously known in the Gulf as the brand behind the Burj, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill celebrated the inauguration of its new Rolex Tower, along the Sheikh Zayed Road this quarter. While significantly more modest than its record-breaking cousin and neighbour, the Burj Kahlifa, the Rolex Tower shines as a beacon to claim that though having endured tough times, Dubai's construction sector is far from dead. The 60-storey mixed-use project, the latest offering to come on the market on this prominent and celebrated road, aims to set a new standard for tall buildings, by implementing the latest techniques for design, building principles and innovative materials.

"The concept that we had for the project was really in a reaction to the site," explains designer Peter Ruggiero. "We knew that the project automatically would be an office building and mixed-use tower of offices and rental residential units with a special consideration for penthouses off the building." Indeed, Ruggiero and his team were faced with the challenging task of building a new structure in an already well-populated area of Dubai, that stood out as innovative and appealing.  "It was a very tight site," explains Ruggiero. "Basically, it really only has two exposures, one towards Sheikh Zayed Road and the other back towards the dessert, because side to side, their adjacent buildings were very close."

He explains that the difficulty comes as both the adjacent buildings and the other buildings along Sheikh Zayed Road are all trying to call attention to themselves and distinguish themselves by being slightly more outrageous than the previous one. "We felt that the way to distinguish ourselves and for our client to distinguish themselves on this prestigious address was to really be a new quiet neighbour. And that elegant, very simple approach would be the project's noblest noble qualities."

Creating such an arresting building would involve some innovative thinking from the design team, and with the challenges posed by limited space, Ruggiero's team had their work cut out trying to put this vision together. "It was, as I mentioned, a very tight site, and a very tall building," says Ruggiero. "So the idea to was focus the building just on two orientations, front and back. When the building was being developed and constructed, we had a client who was very interested in, and took a very assertive approach to shopping around the world for a project's components. So it challenged us in the sense that we were looking at new markets for building products and building assemblies. It was a learning curve both for us and our client, taking us to areas where building components were being built and sourced that we really had not been before, such as sourcing a curtain wall and building systems from China and Southeast Asia."

Indeed, emerging markets are opening up some attractive business opportunities for firms such as SOM. Ruggiero explains that while traditional markets have long been a reliable source of business, new destinations are proving opportunities for innovative practices and developments. "These emerging markets are where new companies are developing and they're looking for a competitive edge," he says. "I think they're interested in doing projects or in working on solutions that perhaps more established markets and more established companies would shy away from, or not wholly embrace." And given the tough market conditions, both in SOM's home market of the United States, and in Dubai, the opportunities presented by emerging markets are proving increasingly attractive. However Ruggiero is not worried about the challenges posed by the financial climate. "In terms of what's happened in Dubai over the last few years, I think it's during these periods of re-evaluation and re-establishing values we hope that this building - its qualities of very good plans, sound design and highest quality construction - will really be its trademarks that carry us through the slow period."

His quiet confidence about the state of the market belies his company's position. Both SOM, and their investment partners in the project are firm in the belief that the luxury and quality of the established Rolex brand will speak for itself when it comes to the commercial success of the project. Beyond this, Ruggiero claims that SOM's operations in Dubai have remained largely unaffected by the downturn. "It's clearly had a negative effect; I don't know of any significant new opportunities that have occurred in the last year or two in Dubai.  I think the region still has some opportunities in Qatar and Abu Dhabi but Dubai particularly I think is very quiet right now. [But] it hasn't affected us at all. We still have the Infinity Tower under construction, and we still maintain an office in Dubai, so we believe in the long term that the region is a worthy investment."

Materials

Though equipped with a cutting edge portfolio of products and building materials, SOM still had to tackle the challenges posed by the building's location and the specifications laid out by the clients. The glass facades, for example, was a stipulation of the clients in order to create the desired image of the building. "A glass tower is a hard sell in a desert," Ruggiero says. "The occupants of the buildings want to maximise their views; the tenants want views. It's good to have controlled introduction of sunlight into the buildings. So you have to balance the climate and the environment with the great aspects of glass."

To tackle this problem Ruggiero and his team chose a high-performance glass for the external walls, with the appropriate coding to give a balance between transparency and reflectivity. In addition they introduced a pattern of ceramic frit on the glass in order to create a sense of opaque surface, while at the same time - because of the nature of the pattern - allowing residents see between the opaque parts of the pattern. "It's almost like drawing the blinds on a window partway," he explains. "You can still see through the blinds, but it is doing a job in terms of cutting down the solar again."

More significantly, Ruggiero was keen to implement some of the more innovative health and safety plans into the building that SOM has incorporated in the past. An American based firm with a strong presence in New York City, SOM was the company to design the first building to appear in the Lower Manhattan area after the 9/11 attacks. Ruggiero was also involved in the design of this project, and highlights that the Rolex Tower team were very familiar with the latest thinking in fire safety, and the necessary techniques were all incorporated in to the building. "On all of our high-rise projects, we develop a comprehensive set of recommendations for fire and life safety, which incorporate the most stringent and toughest requirements of both the local municipality as well as our experience as a global practice."

This does not necessarily involve the most high-tech approach. Indeed, sometimes the tried and tested practices and materials are the best. "In terms of its use of non-combustible materials, it is a concrete frame building, a concrete structure," Ruggiero explains. "So it's a very basic idea because concrete is a non-combustible material. You get a lot of benefit in terms of protecting the structure of the building that way.

"Then we went through a series of fire separations on each floor to minimise fire travelling from floor to floor; smoke controls on each floor that, again, prevent or minimise smoke travelling from one floor to the next and quarantine these areas during a fire, as well as ensuring that the building is entirely sprinklered."

Ruggiero believes that buildings such as the Rolex Tower, incorporating the most innovative thinking in terms of fire safety and passive fire prevention, go far towards improving the standards and practices in markets such as the UAE. "I think anywhere in the world where there's an emerging market and suddenly there are buildings that are well beyond things that have been built previously in those markets, the codes need to be rewritten or updated to address these larger buildings. And then I think coming with these buildings also comes a learning curve for the local officials and the local fire brigades in terms of how they re-evaluate and establish new methods of training and fire prevention and fire fighting."

"Clearly you have to address the code requirements regarding stairs, quarantining smoke, smoke evacuation, as well as evacuation of people.  I think with a project like this we're fortunate in that there's basically four major uses - residential units, the office tenants, the car park and health club - and they're primarily separated. So there's a benefit of having some separation of these different kinds of occupancies; and then each floor of the tower is treated as a separate compartment with fire separation, the stairwells and the floor slabs; and each residential unit and office tenant is separated from the public areas by fire-rated partitions. Combining this with fully automated sprinklers, you create a create a situation where various scenarios of emergency conditions are addressed in trying to provide as much protection as possible for the occupants should they need to evacuate the building."

Despite the tough real estate the Rolex Tower is facing, the future looks positive for the Sheikh Zayed Road's latest addition. The industry slump will, he is confident, turn around and in the mean time the innovations in health and safety practices will speak for themselves in the highly competitive market. The Tower's rigorous and thorough safety strategy will, Ruggiero hopes, become the standard procedure for designers and contractors in the future.

-       60 storeys, or 235m tall

-       31 floors of office space

-       Ground floor retail outlets and restaurants

-       25 floors of residential space

-       Wider stair wells.

-       Concrete, fire resistant frame

-       Ceramic frit glass facades

-       Independent concrete structure for staircase.