Sky high

Once a city known for just two iconic skyscrapers, Riyadh’s skyline will soon be a sea of them. AECOM, Gensler, Goettsch, SOM and Foster and Partners are all among the firms that have tall towers under construction at the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) while a few miles away, the Burj Rafal is racing ahead, set to eclipse both the Kingdom and Al Faisaliah Towers on King Fahd Road.

The CTBUH recently announced that 2010 was the best year on record for tall towers, with 66 buildings of 200m or higher completed in 2010. China had 21 tall buildings completed in 2010, and the UAE 11, including the Burj Khalifa, which was one of eight supertalls (buildings over 300m in height) completed that year.

All this suggests that the trend for building tall in emerging markets like China, Saudi Arabia and the UAE is still going strong despite the financial crisis. At the same time, as Riyadh’s spate of tall towers shows, it is getting a lot easier to hit 200m or 300m when building new skyscrapers.

“The knowledge base in the profession has definitely changed. I think the idea of doing a tall building isn’t seen as being a particular challenge,” explains Duncan Swinhoe, Gensler principal and lead architect on the 300m World Trade Centre at KAFD. “There’s a lot of competent architects and engineers that have the knowhow to do these things.”

“I think we’re now into the next bracket up, which is into the super tall buildings, those that are 300m plus, that are still a technical challenge.”

Gensler’s WTC tower is one of two that the firm is developing at the KAFD, both commercial and both utilising a range of new technologies in order for them not just to be tall, but to be aesthetically interesting. In the past, where the emphasis may have been on building tall for the sake of building tall, technology is allowing new towers to be both big and beautiful.

“The material we are using on the facade is glass reinforced plastic (GRP). It’s not a new thing but it’s very lightweight, very durable and very strong,” Swinhoe explains

“As a structural element it is self supporting, so that has allowed us to create these very distinctive facade profiles. They’re made out of moulds so it gives you much more flexibility to create apertures that are much more architecturally interesting. It allowed us to mould to the facade to respond to the environment.”

Another key element to GRP, Swinhoe says, is that it allows an architect to use large windows without compromising on sustainable targets. At the KAFD, where green benchmarks are extremely strict, Gensler was able to protect the glass from excessive heat gain without overtly reducing the windows in the south and west facing facades.

“There are very few ways of accommodating a regular arrangement of windows that allows offices to be put into a commercial floor plate and create a usable workplace around the whole perimeter of the building, especially one that allows the interiors to work and allows you to have a relatively opaque wall,” he says.

“Using GRP allowed us to hit those numbers in terms of opacity and transparency but in a way that makes the building look much more fluid and dynamic and contemporary.”

Niall Mc Loughlin, senior vice president at Damac Properties, agrees that materials have come a long way in the last decade, but points out that cost and an aversion to the risk of using new products is keeping some architects away.

“Some innovations, such as photovoltaic glass, are likely to be increasingly important in the future, but right now are very expensive for the early adopters,” Mc Loughlin says.

He adds that while Damac uses new materials in its designs where there is a strong case for them, they are not reckless.

“We are not experimental with new technology, because the risks are too high if we make the wrong decision,” he says.

Materials isn’t the only area where technology has allowed architects to build taller, more aesthetically pleasing towers in recent years. Modelling too, both in terms of BIM and wind tunnel testing, has come on in leaps and bounds.

“Wind modelling has improved and, more importantly, there seems to be a greater acceptance amongst clients that they now recognise the worth of it. Before it was seen as a bit of an unnecessary expense,” says Mark Lavery, an associate director of tall buildings at Buro Happold.

He cites both the Burj Khalifa and the as-yet-unbuilt Nakheel Tower as examples of where wind modelling not only tested the strength of the buildings, but also had an effect on the design. The facades and other design elements were actively effected by how the models performed.

“The facade was integral to the structural design,” Lavery says. “The slots and the shapes and the angles and so on all had a huge impact and were studied at very early stages to try and define and overall external geometry that was optimised for wind.

“There is a real move towards that now,” he adds. “We can get earlier testing and earlier results. The earlier you get these results the more options we’ve got in the geometric design and addressing the geometric properties of the building and the facade and shape issues.”

And it’s not just in terms of design where modelling can have a major impact, Swinhoe adds, it’s cost too. At Gensler’s Shanghai Tower, due to be the tallest building in Asia when it is completed next year, wind modelling was able to save a great deal of money.