The lecture “Kingdom Tower” by Robert Sinn will take place on March 17, at 2 p.m., in the congress centre. This event is organised by Fórum Civil.
Robert Sinn is a Principal in the Chicago office of Thornton Tomasetti and is the firm-wide director of structural engineering design for new buildings. He has over 32 years of combined experience at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and TT and has been involved in the structural design of several large complex building projects including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago. His current work includes the direction of structural design on the one kilometer tall Jeddah Tower, currently under construction in Saudi Arabia.
The construction of the 1000+ meter Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, is currently well under way and the tower’s piled raft foundation height is now 200 meters. The lecture will focus on the significant technical engineering challenges of designing the next world’s tallest building. A brief overview of the architectural and master planning scheme for the tower and the surrounding developments will be presented.
Important aspects of the geotechnical site exploration program, piled raft foundation design and significant foundation-tower interaction studies are presented; along with long term settlement predictions, the completed pile load testing program, and ground seismicity studies. The superstructure frame is composed almost entirely of reinforced concrete walls and coupling beams. The structural system was developed based on the need for simplicity and repetition during the construction process. The concrete bearing wall system chosen is unique for ultra tall tower schemes in that it relies on no outriggers or belt walls, no column transfers and very little differential shortening in vertical elements.
The presentation will focus on the development of the tower structural system including historical precedents, the wind tunnel testing program and other unique aspects of the tower structural engineering design and construction planning. Particularly critical technical issues such as the prediction of vertical shortening due to the long-term creep and shrinkage of the concrete frame, and behavioural characteristics of the tower under lateral and gravity loadings are also highlighted. The project is scheduled for completion in late-2019.
