Business Bay's O14 tower handover in September
Developers of the O14 tower project in Business Bay will handover the office building in September, according to senior executives.
"The project was due to finish in April but was delayed due to various issues. We had initial problems getting access to Business Bay and to our site," Shahab Lutfi, Development Director of O14 at District Investment & Development (DID), told Emirates Business.
"There were many contractors working at the same time on the site along with the RTA's contractors. When that issue was sorted out, we had some concrete shortages last year. We plan to hand over the building in September so that the tenants get enough time to do the interior fit-outs," he said.
Tower O14 is owned by Creek Side Developments (CSD), the holding entity for the project. Majority stake in CSD?is owned by DID. Lutfi Properties, which is owned by Shahab Lutfi, has a minority stake in CSD. The project started in end-2005.
The project is a 22-storey tall commercial tower with a two-storey podium. It is located alongside the extension of Dubai Creek and faces the waterfront esplanade.
Kareem Abu Ghazaleh, General Manager at DID, said: "We also had some delays in the façade but that was a while ago. The façade features 1,236 holes and it is not a normal façade."
The building has drawn a lot of attention in the Business Bay due to its unusual façade design in which super-liquid concrete was cast around a fine meshwork resulting in a perforated exterior shell. The holes were achieved by introducing computer numerically cut polystyrene void forms into the rebar matrix, and sided with modular steel slip forms prior to the concrete pour, according to a statement from the architects. The result is a building that eliminates the regular curtain wall solutions seen in Dubai.
The openings on the shell were modulated depending on structural requirements, views, sun exposure, and luminosity, add the architects.
A space nearly one metre deep between the shell and the main enclosure creates a "chimney effect", a phenomenon whereby hot air has room to rise and effectively cools the surface of the glass windows behind the perforated shell.
The whole mock-up was first executed in China. CSD then had a structural engineer to come from the United States to make minor changes in the design.
"The initial plan was to use steel bars of size 20, which could not be bent easily. So we increased the amount of steel but reduced the sizes of the steel bars to size 12," said Lutfi.
No two holes are repetitive in the facade.
"We have five sizes but they are all on a curve and either inwards or outwards. That is what makes it more difficult. In a normal building cycle, a floor is constructed in five days. We started with a rate of three weeks per floor and as we went higher, we went to two weeks because it is non-repetitive," he said.
"At one point, the contractor had got it down to 12 days," added Abu-Gazaleh. He said CSD has to provide its own chillers for the project and is awaiting more details from Dubai Properties, the master developer in terms of a concrete schedule for electricity.
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