Dubai Informer
Information about Dubai in all aspects
« Dubai Informer | Dubai Financial Market IPO Starts »
Sunday, November 12, 2006
The soon to be world’s tallest tower is to be hit by curtain wall delays posing the question just how soon it will be finished. ‘Construction Week’ reported that cladding work has still not started on the tower, which has reached 81 storeys, meaning that the planned 2008 completion date could face delays.
The original timetable for the tower saw cladding, which makes sure that the basic concrete structure of the tower is not left exposed to the elements, beginning several months ago and to subsequently continue at the same rate as progress on the structure – currently rising at an impressive rate of one floor every three days. With just 115 weeks to run until the project is due to be completed, ‘Construction Week’ estimated that even if cladding work started tomorrow and was installed at a rate of 1.3 floors a week, the project would still miss its end-of-December-2008 deadline.
The 160-storey Burj Dubai is being built at a cost of around $900 million (dhs3.285 billion) and will form the central feature of the $20 billion Burj Dubai district being developed by Emaar Properties. The cladding delay, together with recent design changes affecting the overall height of the project, means that contractors Besix, Arabtec and Samsung might well seek a time extension in order to complete the work backlog.
According to experts, by the time a tower is as high as 70 floors more than half should have already been fixed with the curtain walling. However Emaar told the magazine that that work would be accelerated to keep the project on track. “We are still hitting for substantial completion by the end of 2008 or the early months of 2009,” a spokesperson said.
More Information about the Burj Dubai in our earlier report Burj Dubai Reaches Level Seventy
Labels: Burj Dubai, Construction, Dubai, Properties
Previous Posts
Categories + Archive
Some rights of this page's plain text stuffs are reserved for the author. © Dubaiinformer 2007
Dubai Jobs Dubai Informer - Information about Dubai
Miss Belgium 2006 was in Dubai this week along with Miss Belgium 2005, both with a mutual desire to achieve world peace while wearing swimwear, evening dress and national costume.
Visiting celebrities of this calibre are usually intercepted on arrival and whisked away by speedboat for a tour of The World – the Belgian beauties were instead transported to the no less impressive site of the Burj Dubai, where Belgian contractor Besix had invited local journalists on a rare tour of what will be the world’s tallest structure.
Ironically, had they been whisked away to The World, they may indeed have achieved ‘World’ peace – as there is not a sinner to be found anywhere on that particular development. But that is to pointlessly digress.
The selection of the Miss Belgia (the correct way to refer to more than one Miss Belgium, should you ever need to) was in many ways an apt choice. Like the Burj Dubai, the Belgian beauties were tall, slender and impressively built. And like the Burj Dubai, they were also scantily clad.
But even so, they were both wearing a lot more than the building they had come to visit. Eighty storeys high and the tower is still without even a fig-leaf sized piece of cladding on its exterior to spare its blushes.
This situation has arisen largely as a result of the demise of global cladding giant, Schmidlin, in February of this year. While the Dubai operation of the company was spared from the insolvency of its now bankrupt Swiss former parent, it has nonetheless had a major impact on the critical path of the world’s tallest building.
There are around 115 weeks left until the Burj Dubai is due to complete and in that time there will be around 160 floors to clad. It doesn’t take a Miss World contestant to do the maths.
Even if cladding was to start tomorrow morning, they would need to complete nearly one-and a-half floors every week in order to meet the project’s current 2008 year-end deadline. That is a very big ask and there are few, if any, towers currently under construction in Dubai achieving anything like that rate of progress.
As things stand, Miss Belgium 2009 might yet make it for a site visit.
Towering glory: Burj Dubai, the architectural pride of Dubai and the centerpiece of Emaar’s Downtown Burj Dubai development, has now reached 95 levels. Billed to be the tallest tower in the world, Burj Dubai employs the latest advances in engineering technology to complete the project on-schedule.
Currently 329 metres high, Burj Dubai has used 235,000 cubic metres of reinforced concrete and 44,200 tonnes of reinforcing steel, to date. At the current height, Burj Dubai is taller than the Burj Al Arab at 321 metres, but short of the Emirates Towers office tower which stands at 355 metres - the only other building in Dubai that is presently taller than Burj Dubai.
With a development value of AED 3.673 billion (US$1 billion), Burj Dubai will encompass retail, residential and commercial components. A highlight is The Armani Hotel, Dubai, developed by Emaar in association with haute couture major Giorgio Armani S.p.A. Burj Dubai is engineered after extensive planning to withstand wind forces, high summer temperatures and seismic forces.