LANGAN International is a key consultant on the Kingdom Tower, providing multiple engineering services – geotechnical, site/civil, traffic, and parking planning – to support what will be the tallest tower in the world.

Langan International’s Khaldoun Fahoum, vice-president, Middle East regional manager, and Alan Poeppel, vice-president based in New York City, have been working with the Kingdom Tower design team from the very beginning. They have provided their technical expertise, and managed the internal coordination of Langan engineers from multiple disciplines located in firm offices from Abu Dhabi and Dubai to New York and San Francisco.

Langan designed the Kingdom Tower foundation to overcome challenging subsurface conditions consisting of very weak rock and highly permeable coral rock, which impacted pile capacities and settlement, among other critical design issues. Important geotechnical aspects of the project included a sophisticated sub-surface investigation using specialised field and laboratory testing, an advanced pile and barrette testing programme, and a site-specificseismic hazard analysis.

With respect to site/civil engineering, Langan is managing multiple challenges ranging from locating and orienting a tower in the centre of a planned city to stormwater designs that will mitigate flooding in a region recently stricken with severe flooding disasters. Part of the overall stormwater management system designed by Langan will eventually collect, detain, and discharge rainwater into a massive reflection pond at the base of the tower. Also, Langan will support the transformation of the conceptual masterplan into construction level documents complete with roadway elevations, defined property boundaries, subsurface utility layouts, and stormwater detention requirements.

For nearly a year, Langan traffic engineers and parking design consultants have been examining on-site circulation patterns and reviewing the traffic masterplan for Jeddah’s Kingdom City, designed by HOK Architects, to design the site access points, which includes provisioning for sophisticated security screening to be installed at entry plazas. Langan also provided innovative recommendations on the internal circulation patterns to the tower’s parking, the layout of spaces inside the car-parks, and the design and orientation of helixes.

In addition to the Kingdom Tower, Langan has designed the foundations for numerous high-rise projects around the globe, including the 450-m WorldOne Tower in Mumbai (the tallest residential-only tower in the world); the Four Seasons in Miami (the tallest building in South Florida); the Fontainebleau Hotel Resort and Casino in Las Vegas (slated to be the tallest building on the Las Vegas strip); One Rincon in San Francisco, (the tallest residential building in the Bay Area); Turnberry Tower in Virginia (the tallest residential tower in the Washington DC area); and The Brooklyner (the tallest structure in Brooklyn).