The Dar Al Awadi is not just another 34-storey tower with a mall covered with curtain walls – it has a class, quality and style of its own, which made it a highly challenging project, says a spokesman for Alico, the curtain-walling contractor for the project.

“The project presented several challenges in engineering design as well as in terms of the logistics in executing it due to its unique features,” says Osama Alwazir, senior project manager. “The task of installing the curtain-walling the structure required a facade company with extensive experience, a strong design team, a company that has a large pool of production facilities and site experience. Alico fit this bill perfectly and did accomplish a quality installation.”
High-quality glass and stainless steel components are utilised extensively throughout the mall and the tower, he points out.
Tower
The 34-storey tower is dressed in a special blue-tinted double glass curtain wall and featuring horizontal stainless steel cover caps or stainless steel sunshades.
The curtain-walling curves outwards at the top three executive floor levels and is lined with vertically curved stainless steel fins spanning 12 m high and connected to the curtain wall.
Another distinctive curtain wall with special steel-frame back-up supports has been installed at a height of 120 m in front of the panoramic lift.
Some elements of the curtain-walling were cantilevered by 6 m outside the concrete mainframe of the tower at a height 120 m, Alwazir points out.
“Although the tower is mainly pentagon in plan, the contours of the tower presented more than 20 different elevations that had to be covered with curtain walls,' he says. “The tower features portal columns up to mid-height, which entailed that the work had to be phased,
“All these design intricacies meant that access to install the curtain walls could only be obtained by using more than 34 cradles and special cantilevered scaffoldings.”
The tower features extensive use of stainless steel components such as sandwich panels cladding, curved cladding, mashrabiyas, motifs and sunshades.
“In fact, a stainless steel ring cladding with a diameter of 1,600 mm encircles the top of the tower which has a circumference of around 80 m,” Alwazir points out.
Internally, the tower features specially-designed glass doors with custom-made handles and glass patterns; curved glass and stainless steel balustrades with glass risers and steps that connect the executive floors; glass walls in front of the lift lobbies; frameless skylights; and hidden louvres behind the curtain-wall glass.

The stainless steel-clad ring around the top of the tower.

The arcade of the tower is embellished with trellises made of decorative stainless steel pipes that hang above it and cladding.
A skylight covers the concrete bridge that connects the tower with the mall.
Mall
The ground floor of the mall has special glass units that provide vision to the inside of the mall, while the upper three levels of the mall are covered with special blue glass vertically curved curtain walls.
“As with the tower, the curtain wall curves outwards and features stainless vertical steel fins, tied to the curtain wall with horizontal stainless steel pipes that thread the fins with a precision that would be expected of the traditional watch-making process rather than a construction process,” he emphasises.
The arcade around the mall has distinctive stainless steel trellises that are connected to stainless steel beams and cladded columns. Its outside contour is hugged with marble chairs below which are perforated stainless steel cladding features that conceal the lights and louvres.
The three main entrance areas to the mall comprise specially-supported glass units that rise four-levels high and are accentuated by a luminous glass/stainless steel logo that is fixed to the units with stainless steel supports. Pyramid-shaped skylights that are surrounded by curved stainless steel-cladded beams surmount these entrances.
In addition, there are three other skylights – one over the mall and the other two above the panoramic lifts.
The most impressive of these skylights covers the centre of the mall at a height of four levels. “In fact, the distance from the shops in the basement to the tip of the skylight is around 34 m high,” Alwazir points out.
Elaborating on this skylight, he says: “This gothic cathedral-style skylight is about 900 sq m in plan but is actually around 2,000 sq m in surface area,” he explains. “The steel frame of the skylight gives it a special ribbed body, which are covered with high performance glass and special sandwich panels made of three metal layers – one of which is made of perforated stainless steel for acoustic purposes – with insulation in between them. A 600-mm-diameter stainless steel cladding ring hugs the contour of the skylight, which has stainless steel-clad columns beneath it.”
Again, echoing the overall accent on stainless steel and glass in the interiors are the doors, which are made of patterned glass that is offset with tailor-made handles. In addition, each floor has a glass wall feature in front of the elevator lobby, which opens to a specially-designed glass floor motif. All glass doors have a patterned design and custom-made handles.
All columns in the walkways within the mall are stainless-steel-clad and capped with a glass collar. In addition, a curved glass balustrade with stainless steel cladding beneath which is joined to the columns, surrounds all walkways. All fascias of shopfronts also have stainless steel cladding.
Alico drew up some striking statistics in implementing this challenging project, which required more than one million site man hours to install around 19,000 sq m of curtain-walling and 3,900 sq m of stainless steel for the columns and beams alone (see table).