Upcoming Events

ASCE-NO March Luncheon
Burj Dubai Tower - Philosophy of Structural Engineering
Program		11:30 Registration & Social 12:00 Seating & Lunch 12:30 Presentation 1:30 Adjourn
Speaker		Lawrence C. Novak, SE, SECB, LEED® AP Director, Engineered Buildings Portland Cement Association
Menu		Seafood Gumbo, Bayou Chicken, and Praline Cheesecake
Cost		$35.00 RSVP (prior to Monday Mar 2) $40.00 late RSVP or walk-ins
PDH		1.0 PDH
Contact		Darla Morales at 833-5300 or by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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The Burj Dubai Tower, when completed, will be the world’s tallest structure. The superstructure is currently under construction. The final height of the building is a “well-guarded secret”. The height of the multi-use skyscraper will “comfortably” exceed the current record holder of 509 meter (1671 ft) tall Taipei 101. The 280,000 m2 (3 million square feet) reinforced concrete multi-use Tower is utilized for Retail, a Giorgio Armani Hotel, Residential and Office. The goal of the Burj Dubai Tower is not simply to be the world’s highest building; it’s to embody the world’s highest aspirations.

The Tower, located in Dubai, UAE, an equivalent UBC 97 seismic zone 2A, is schedule to be completed in 2009.

Designers purposely shaped the structural concrete Burj Dubai – “Y” shape in plan – to reduce the wind forces on the tower, as well as to keep the structure simple and foster constructability. The structural system can be described a “buttressed” core. Each wing, with its own high performance concrete core and perimeter columns, buttresses the others via a six-sided central core, or hexagonal hub. The result is a tower that is extremely stiff laterally and torsionally. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the architects and engineers for the project, applied a rigorous geometry to the tower that aligned all the common central core and column elements.

Each tier of the building steps back in a spiral stepping pattern up the building. The setbacks are organized with the Tower’s grid, such that the building stepping is accomplished by aligning columns above with walls below to provide a smooth load path. This allows the construction to proceed without the normal difficulties associated with column transfers.

The Tower’s width changes at each setback. The advantage of the stepping and shaping is to “confuse the wind”. The wind vortices never get organized because at each new tier the wind encounters a different building shape. This enhanced wind behavior coupled with the mass and damping provided by the high performance concrete, work together to minimize the forces and motions of the structure. High performance concrete is becoming the material of choice for the next generation ultra-tall high-rise buildings.

The presentation will discuss the philosophy behind the structural design of the world’s tallest structure.