Site visit: Bay of reckoning, Dubai

Al Rostamani Pegel was hired as main contractor in July 2006 for the estimated $120million contract, with the foundation work already well underway.

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It has overcome design changes and market volatility. Now Park Lane Tower is one of the fastest rising projects in Dubai’s Business Bay.

Though Dubai’s Business Bay overall has been a casualty of the 2009 recession, the Park Lane Tower is one structure making strong construction progress.

A mixed-use, high-rise development close to Sheikh Zayed Road, the project is typical of the ambitious plans for the district formed earlier in the last decade, yet its background is not entirely straightforward.

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The 37-storey building comprises a basement carpark and a podium level of two retail floors, followed by 17 floors of office space and eight hotel floors, to be occupied by the Tamani chain. It is only the second tower in Dubai in which the hotel floors do not start from the ground floor.

Looking from above, the tower’s slabs are almost the shape of an ellipse, with a roof that most closely resembles the nose of a speedboat.

Business Bay itself has had a resurrection of late, and last month saw the opening of the O14 tower, a 22-storey freehold project by H&H Investment & Development, a Dubai-based boutique property developer, designed by New York-based architect Reisur & Umomoto.

The project was first launched by KM Properties in 2006, originally scheduled for occupancy in 2008. It has a total built-up area of 64,000m², designed by Carlos Ott, the architect behind the National Bank of Dubai.

Al Rostamani Pegel was hired as main contractor in July 2006 for the estimated $120million contract, with the foundation work already well underway.

“When we started, the excavation had already been done, the piling was cast in situ and was ongoing when we mobilised,” explains Wolfgang Kopf in Al Rostamani Pegel’s site office.

He and T. Gopalakrishnan, construction manager, explain that there will be two separate entrances, one for the hotel and one for the office floors – with entrances generally a minor difficulty at first.

With the site squeezed among other developments in Phase One of Business Bay, the company has had to be nimble in getting in and out, and has coordinated with contractors nearby to ensure a smooth process logistically.

Though the tower is climbing into the sky at a rate of one slab a week, the project had been halted in the last few years of the last decade by the client.