Site visit: Bab Al Qasr, Abu Dhabi

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Abu Dhabi’s Corniche is home to an intense area of ambitious development that will do much to change the capital’s skyline.

Across the street from Emirates Palace Hotel and alongside Etihad Towers, a crowd of hotel projects create a continuous noise of industrial activity and constant deliveries along the re-routed roads.

Bab Al Qasr, a twin-tower, mixed-use development over 16.8ha, is muscling its way up in the construction crowd, and may be the most impressive of the lot.

The project is a result of a new developer, Emirates-Morocco Trading & General Investment Company, that had a vision back in 2006 of a different kind of hotel in terms of structure and facade architecture. As the name suggests, the company, formed specifically for the project with a view to doing more, is a joint venture of investors from the UAE and the North African state.

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The influences on the outside are plentiful, and include Moroccan-style stone cladding in the podium with elegant minaret archways, and the bronze tint to the glass in the towers, both giving the building a distinctive, gleaming facade to stand out in the precinct.

The structure contains four basement levels and 32 additional floors, with the two towers joined by a four-storey bridge. The first tower will contain a five-star hotel operated by Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, containing 408 rooms and all the expected leisure amenities, from spas to restaurants.

The second tower will contain apartments and a retail plaza and its own leisure equivalents. The podium sits underneath the towers and also juts out on one side. This will contain a number of food and beverage outlets, as well as shops.

The hotel will face out to the sea and to the city, while the apartment tower – ultimately containing 265 apartments – will face the precinct of towers springing up nearby. The two towers will be linked by two multi-storey bridges; the first between the fifth and tenth floors, and the second bridge between the 20th and the 26th. These will contain some hotel amenities.

The five years since initial conception has seen the client bring in a host of international talent to work on the project. In 2006 it began work with Surbana International Consultants, the international arm of Singapore consultants Surbana Corporation, which specialises in town planning. The company is the lead consultant as well as the consultant overseeing the MEP work and the interior design.

The following year, Jacobs International, the regional entity of the US giant Jacobs Engineering, was on board to provide project management services. “Jacobs had been working informally on the project since February 2007 and formally from June 2007.

The design stage was then followed by tendering and award,” says Ashraf Owaida, project manager at Jacobs International’s office on-site. “At that time the concept and design and layout had been completed, and we were talking with Surbana about the hotel.” Perhaps unusually, selecting the hotel operator was not the first issue to resolve.

Though by 2008 the client signed a deal with Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, the agreement came after the laundry, waste management, security, lighting and landscaping agreements were in place, according to Owaida. These contracts were awarded in the final months of 2007. “So the actual hotel operator was one of the last but, of course, it is one of the most important when it comes to the building as a whole.”

The first area of contracting was the shoring work. Local firm NSCC won the mandate, and could set about preparing the site and working on the shoring and piles while the design was still being completed.

The anchoring, piles and other related work were started in February 2008 and completed in March 2009, though dewatering continued up to June this year, a common duration for projects so close to the coast. “After a while you are constructing the podium and towers and you have enough weight from above,” says Owaida. Mohammed Al Kaff, project manager for NSCC, was unavailable for comment.