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RELATED ARTICLES: French spiderman up for challenge of Kingdom Tower | Engineer: Kingdom Tower is practical challenge | Experts: tapered form of Kingdom Tower is ideal
Supertall towers are not built on a whim, and while many dream to build immense towers, very few ever realise their ambitions.
The push to beat the Burj Khalifa’s height record will take more effort and expertise that went in to Dubai’s world topper, and it will tax the best minds in the construction industry as the project unfolds. That’s why the team behind the Kingdom Tower ranks as one of the most experienced in the world, with some of the globe’s most notable skyscraper designers, engineers and construction experts on side for the project.
The Tower’s architect Adrian Smith is no stranger to tall building design. With a 40 year career covering some of the world’s most recognisable buildings, Smith is seen by most in the market as the go-to guy for supertall tower design.
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After a 26-year stint at Skidmore Owings and Merrill, the company which pioneered supertall construction with the Sears/Willis tower in the early 1970s, Smith formed Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill Architecture with partners Gill and Robert Forrest in 2006. All three left the Chicago office of SOM, and have now beaten their former employers to two major projects: the Kingdom Tower and Masdar City’s HQ in Abu Dhabi.
Smith’s most notable achievement is, of course, the Burj Khalifa which he accomplished while employed at SOM as a Design Partner. He has also led teams behind the design of 34 other towers: 24 of them complete, six that remain unbuilt and four of which have been given the green light.
The choice of structural engineering firm is also unsurprising given Thornton Tomasetti’s knack for landing contracts for some of the world’s tallest buildings. Thornton Tomasetti is a relatively small structural engineering consultancy that was established over 50 years ago and now has 550 people spread around the globe. Despite its size, the company has an impressive portfolio of work.
The most notable include Taipei 101 – currently the world’s second tallest habitable building – and the Petronas Towers, once the tallest towers in the world, and now the tallest twin towers on the planet.
The company also worked with AS+GG on the designs for the proposed Wuhan Greenland Centre, a 606m 119-storey tower designed for developers the Greenland Group, and destined for the Chinese city of Wuhan. Its links with Adrian Smith also stretch back to his SOM days when the company was employed to complete structural engineering work for the Times Square Tower and Random House Tower, both in New York.
Thornton Tomasetti’s other notable projects include the Kohn Pedersen and Fox Associates penned Ping International Finance Centre Tower – a 660m project in China’s Shenzen city. Construction began on site in 2010 and is scheduled for completion in 2015.
The company also has another supertall under construction. The 632m mixed-use Shanghai Tower, designed by Gensler, broke ground in 2009 and is scheduled for handover in 2014.
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FEATURED COMMENT
I find the Kingdom Tower project interesting to say the least. It is funny that Adrian Smith is the architect, the same