Site visit: KAFD's Crystal Tower

For novelty and innovation, look no further than the Crystal Tower, also known as Parcel 1.10.

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The scale and ambition of the King Abdullah Financial District in Riyadh has allowed room for not only new and fresh construction designs, but a variety of contractors and suppliers.

With around 50 buildings planned and many seeing swift progress, it seems a necessity for each designer and contractor to be distinctive, from superstructure to façades and interiors.

For novelty and innovation, look no further than the Crystal Tower, also known as Parcel 1.10. One of around 30 large structures to be built by the Saudi Binladin Group, the twin-tower project will serve as a substantial commercial offering to white-collar tenants and retail outlets, as well as constituting a gateway to the heart of KAFD, the six-tower Financial Plaza.

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One tower will be 18 storeys, at 95m, and the second 26 storeys at 135m. These are relatively low in height compared to surrounding towers, but it is not on scale that the building is seeking to break new ground.

The walls of the towers that face each other lean away and narrow gradually as they go up, creating an unusual, asymmetrical architectural vision. Rather than the standard corporate walls of glass, the stone façade will be studded with what looks like scattered diamond-shaped embedded crystals in varied patterns, which in fact serve as regular windows.

“We wanted to carry on the crystalline tradition,” Jacob Kurek from designer Henning Larsen Architects comments on the outer design. He adds that the façade is very deep, with the crystal windows set as far back as 30cm. This technique, and the direction the building faces, both help to minimise the direct exposure to sunlight for the occupants behind the windows.

The building represents the entry point between the carefully-cultivated Wadi area and the Financial Plaza. The two towers are connected by a raised podium 70m in length that slopes from its higher point of entry to the 18-storey tower to the 26-storey tower.
This will link the two towers and, with the vertical, sloping tower walls, forms a frame for the Financial Plaza, which will contain the CMA Tower, among other structures.

This will create a dramatic entrance to the lobbies and allow a shaded meeting area and small shopping hub underneath, cooled by the breeze coming over the Wadi.

At the heart of construction is Specialised Contracting, a Jeddah-based company for whom Crystal Tower is its first project in the capital. Project manager Joseph Felfly says the company mobilised on-site in the first week of October last year.

Its first job was to complete the excavation started by Saudi Binladin, which technically is the main contractor on the project, but which has mandated Specialised with the construction in line with a wider government effort to involve Saudi firms.

“When we came [on board], some of the work was done in some areas, the raft work, but in some areas the excavation was not yet completed. So we came in and completed the job,” says Felfly. The dewatering, however, had already been completed – one of the benefits of working in Riyadh compared to a coastal development such as Jeddah’s Corniche.

At the time of CW’s visit, the company had reached the top of four basement floors, and was closing in on the ground floor by the end of June. Felfly explains that Specialised is also constructing two towers for what is currently known as Parcel 1.11.

The two projects have a combined value of $159.9m, he estimates. The company will carry out all structural, civil and architectural work on Crystal Tower. Structural engineering has been provided by Thornton Tomasetti, the US-based engineering firm that has a Riyadh office and helped design the record-breaking Kingdom Tower.