Kingdom Tower, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s project to erect the world’s tallest building in Jeddah, is designed to imitate the contours of a sprouting desert plant. Adrian Smith’s task is to make sure it doesn’t sway in the wind like one.
|||Kingdom Tower, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s project to erect the world’s tallest building in Jeddah, is designed to imitate the contours of a sprouting desert plant. Adrian Smith’s task is to make sure it doesn’t sway in the wind like one.
The American architect has the right resumé for the job. He already grappled with effects like horizontal wind divergence and negative pressure high above the Persian Gulf desert when he designed Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, today’s highest tower.
“Wind can move the tower from side to side and when the movement is rapid, people inside will feel it,” Chicago-based Smith, 67, said in a telephone interview. “We design to reduce that effect.”
Kingdom Tower will rise from three separate bases in continuous slopes that end at different heights, helping to balance the building’s weight and stabilise it against gusting winds. The 1 000m structure will cost $1.2 billion (R8.4bn) to build over the next five years and will include a Four Seasons hotel, apartments, offices, three lobbies on the upper floors and the world’s highest observation deck on the 157th level.
Wind is the enemy of tall buildings, Smith said. The Burj Khalifa was designed as a collection of tubes reaching various heights around the central core to help “confuse” the wind by preventing it from forming whirlpools of air, he said.
“We learned from Burj Khalifa that the more steps you have, the better you shed the vortices, and that helps stabilise the building against any horizontal wind divergence,” Smith said. “Kingdom Tower will do that by having a continuous series of slopes to the top, which is more effective but more expensive.”
The tower is designed to move about 1m side to side at 500m in the most severe storms that occur once every 50 years or so, he said. The movement will be much less in more typical weather conditions.
Smith worked at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill when he designed the Burj Khalifa, which opened in January 2010. Now a partner at Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill Architecture in Chicago, the architect says his passion for reaching new heights hasn’t diminished.
Filling a giant tower is another matter. Apartment owners in the Burj Khalifa were forced to slash rents by 40 percent after the building failed to attract tenants, Better Homes, a broker that marketed the properties, said last October.
The project’s owners haven’t provided any estimates of property prices in the tower.
Designing the world’s tallest buildings presents numerous challenges beyond high winds. The observation deck will stick out from the building in an 240m-wide disc that was originally designed as a helicopter-landing platform, Smith said. The idea was abandoned after several pilots judged that landing there would be too risky.
Water must be pumped up the 163-floor Kingdom Tower in stages, using holding tanks at various levels, to avoid too much pressure building up in the pipes and causing them to burst, Smith added.
Evacuation also requires special planning. The Jeddah tower will have emergency refuge rooms every 20 floors, where people can stop to get water and protection as well as emergency instructions while descending to the ground. Smith said he was looking at ways to use the lifts in emergencies rather than following the common practice of banning their use.
“Any time you are fighting a fire in a tower, it’s localised to a particular floor or part of the building,” Smith said. “You don’t have to completely evacuate the building and the structure will be very robust here. It’s all concrete with thick walls, so fire won’t bring it down.”
Smith’s design includes a system that collects moisture out of the air and from mechanical systems within the tower, producing enough fresh water each year to fill 14 Olympic-size pools.
Saudi Binladin Group, the country’s biggest construction firm, has been hired to build the tower as the centrepiece of a 100-billion-riyal development in Jeddah known as Kingdom City.
The group will own 17 percent of Jeddah Economic, the project’s owner. Alwaleed’s Kingdom Holding and Abrar International Holding each hold a third of the company and Abdurrahman Sharbatly owns the remaining 17 percent. - Bloomberg
Source: http://www.iol.co.za/jeddah-landmark-aims-for-heavens-1.1130783
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