Vertical City

Kingdom Tower is part of a larger urban development project in Jeddah.

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Jalayerian has considerable standing in the MEP field. With over 28 years’ experience in HVAC and sustainable design, Jalayerian has been responsible for the building system design of a number of global projects, including high-rise towers and other high-performance buildings.

However, his attention is now focused firmly 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 they were shortlisted to about six. After several months, it was shortlisted to two primary contenders.

One of them was our team, including ourselves and Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, the architect for the project, and Thornton Tomasetti, which is providing the structural engineering.

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“We competed for the last six or seven months with SOM, the other team. Finally our collective team won the project, and now we have been working on it for the last few years,” says Jalayerian. While he expects the building project to pose challenges, Jalayerian is confident that ESD will rise to the occasion.

“The fundamentals of the design, the physics, are really the same for all tall buildings.

"For high-rise buildings, and especially supertalls, the system pressures are now the most challenging parts of the design. Due to the extreme 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,” says Jalayerian.

He adds that the concept designs for most high-rises are dependent upon the proposed occupancy levels of the project in question.

Jalayerian goes on to explain that systems are usually organised in a vertical stack to serve particular areas of the building. A supertall such as the Kingdom Tower can be viewed as various 20- to 40-storey buildings stacked on top of each other.

“The fundamentals are basically the same; it is simply a matter of how you apply these. The obvious challenge is the integration of the systems with the structure, as well as the architecture.”

The taller the building, the more complex and heavier the structure becomes, and the more problematic it is to retain structural integrity at great height.

In order to overcome these types of problems, ESD works closely with the rest of the professional team to coordinate its systems with the overall design. For example, Kingdom Tower will therefore incorporate intermediate floors that will serve the dual purpose of bracing the superstructure and housing the mechanical equipment and services.

“Obviously there are other challenges posed by the configuration of the building,” says Jalayerian. In the case of a supertall, where you are dealing with a lot of products, standardisation becomes very important in order to facilitate the construction schedule and procurement process.