Abu Dhabi Visit (Team 1)

Today we visited the ADNEC tower in Abu Dhabi. The ADNEC, Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center, tower is a residential building which has one, two and three-bedroom apartments, duplexes and penthouses. There are 267 apartments in total. The entire building has four basements levels, a ground level, two mezzanine levels 21 stories, a roof and an upper roof. The tower as a whole measures 100m. The four basement levels are the parking area, which have 418 proposed parking spaces. ADNEC tower has a built-up area of 60,000 m2 and a project cost of AED 216 million. The duration of the project is 22 months but currently the project is 75 days ahead on the concrete work. The tower has a raft foundation that varies in thickness from one to three meters. There are tension piles under the south and west sides of the building. The weight on the east side of the building needs to be balanced out on the west side. The tension piles even this weight distribution out. The slabs in the building are post tensioned. This requires conduits to be put in the slab and strands pulled through the conduits. These strands are
tensioned after the concrete has began to cure.

ADNEC was an extremely clean site and we were all very impressed. DCC has stressed to us the importance of a clean and orderly site and their persistence has paid off as the project is about 2 months ahead of schedule.

On Tuesday June 7th, the team went back to Abu Dhabi to the ADNEC tower. Mr. Superman, the project manager, gave us another tour of the building and then took us to the upper floors to view the concrete curing and the post-tensioning. Anthony El Khoury then went up the tower crane along with the safety officer to view how the crane operator works.

After lunch at Holiday Inn Hotel, Mr. Jihad Choueiri took the team to a completed site, the Guardian Towers, on which he was the project manager. It was designed by ERGA Progress, DCC's partners. The towers have 17 floors, 2 podium floors, and 4 basements. The towers only share the podium and basement floors, and one of them is a residential tower with 208 apartments, and the other is an office tower.
Mr. Choueiri then showed us the finishes in each tower. He told us the tile names and type of finish in the office lift lobby, the residential lift lobby and apartments, and the basement parking area. One of the unique aspects of this project was the exterior cladding, which was all angled and required eact dimensions to place the aluminum.