King-size Challenge

Jalayerian Mehdi says that he expects the Kingdom Tower to set the next milestone for MEP in supertall buildings.

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Almost from the moment Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud announced that he had signed a $1.2bn construction contract for the Kingdom Tower, speculation over the contracts and tenders that would become available mounted.

The prospect of working on such a prestigious project has already whipped up massive amounts of interest from the region’s construction industry, as it begins bidding for contracts and tenders that will be worth millions of dollars.

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However, while contracts remain up for grabs, work on Kingdom Holding’s biggest ever project has already commenced, with foundation work underway and the building’s owners appointing consultants to tackle the challenges of building and designing the tallest man-made structure on the planet.

One of these consultants is Environmental Systems Design (ESD), which is providing its full services to the Kingdom Tower project. This includes MEP, building services engineering and fire protection, amongst others.

From its base in Chicago, the consultancy has provided engineering designs for thousands of buildings across the United States and throughout the world, including the Middle East, where it has offices in Abu Dhabi and Jeddah.

ESD has been in business since 1967, and provides consultant engineering services for all building system related components that go into the building. This includes HVAC, backup systems, plumbing and fire protection systems.

Active in the Middle East for more than twenty years, the company has worked on projects such as the Masdar headquarters and the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi. In addition, the company has expanded its operations in to Korea, China, Philippines and is currently aggressively working the Indian MEP market.

One of the men tasked with dealing with the kilometre sized challenge of the Kingdom Tower is Mehdi Jalayerian, the executive vice president of the company, and a man of considerable experience in the MEP field.

With more than 28 years in HVAC and sustainable design practice, Jalayerian has been responsible for the building system designs of a number of worldwide projects including high rises and high-performance buildings. This includes Masdar’s headquarters, the world’s first positive energy, large scale building, situated in Masdar City in Abu Dhabi.

However, his attention is now firmly focused on what is set to be the biggest challenge (quite literally) of his career.

“Over two years ago, there was an international design competition for this project (Kingdom Tower). Through a lengthy process, our team was selected,” he explains, “There were initially nine firms and then they were shortlisted to about six.

After several months, it was shortlisted to two primary contenders, one of them was our team, and our team includes Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, the architects for the project and Thornton Tomasetti, which is providing the structural engineering, and ESD,” he says.

“We competed for the last six or seven months of it with SOM, who was the other team. Finally our collective team won the project, and now we’ve been working on it for the last few years.” Jalayerian adds.

While he expects the building to throw up challenges, Jalayerian is confident that ESD has the capability to cope with whatever may arise, not matter how unexpected.

“The fundamentals of the design, the physics, are really the same for all tall buildings. For high-rise buildings and especially super-tall buildings, the system pressures are now the most challenging parts of the design. Because of the vertical heights, the piping systems obviously have a very high pressure and need to be coordinated within the limits of the manufactured products that are available,” he says, adding that the concept designs on most high-rises are dependent on the occupancy levels of the project.

He goes on to explain that systems are usually organised in a vertical stack to serve particular areas of the building as a dedicated distribution system.

“You view a tall building as 20 to 40 storey buildings stacked one on top of the other. So the fundamentals are basically the same, it’s a matter of how you apply it.