SAUDI Bauer Foundation Contractors, a subsidiary of Bauer Spezialtiefbau, signed a contract last month (October) to provide the enabling works required for the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The Kingdom Tower will succeed the Burj Khalifa, also founded on Bauer piles, as the tallest building in the world. At 1,001 m, it will be the first skyscraper to break the one-kilometre mark.

Thomas Bauer, chairman of Bauer’s management board, said: “This contract demonstrates the client’s confidence in our ability to handle large, complex specialist foundation engineering projects. It is great for us to be working on this building.”

The enabling works include 270 bored piles of 1.5 and 1.8 m diameters, which have to be installed into the difficult ground conditions down to depths of 110 m in order to provide firm foundations for the building. This challenging task is being carried out using two each of Bauer’s state-of-the-art BG 28 and BG 40 pile drilling rigs.

The foundation works, which are scheduled to begin before the end of next month (December), will take about 10 months to complete.

The contract is worth approximately $32.75 million.