Fast track to new exhibition centre
Visitors to this year’s IDEX may be forgiven for thinking that they have arrived at the wrong venue, but the transformation of the site is quite staggering. In place of the semi-permanent individual halls there stands the brand new, futuristic looking Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre.
Believed to be the fastest built exhibition centre of this size and standard, the new ADNEC building was also extremely challenging, as it required operable walls, loading docks, a public concourse bigger than those in some airports and food courts for hundreds of people. The steel beams had to be designed to span 66m to support the roof for the 28,500m2 column-free halls. In addition, 9,500m2 of specially manufactured glass had to be sourced, delivered and installed. The development of the building, which has a gross floor area of 94,000m2, took just over eight months to complete, with a further month to commission and activate.
ADNEC chief executive, Simon Horgan, attributes the remarkable speed at which the project was built to a number of factors: “Today, the building process from design through construction, and later on into facility management, is more complex than ever. The vast number of people involved in a project of this scale can lead to disagreements and delays. One of our solutions was to bring all the teams together into a single office on site and split them up so a building contractor was sitting next to an architect. Communication was dramatically improved – it’s hard to argue with the person you get to know and understand. It may sound simple but this approach is very unusual on construction projects of this scale where the main contractors can be adversarial and challenging with each other.
“A second major factor was the decision to design an exhibition centre using materials that had already been identified as available. This increased the architectural challenge but ensured the construction team could rely on
materials arriving on time.” All main contractors as well as the management of ADNEC had worked on major projects such as this before and this level of experience proved essential and beneficial.Building contractor Al Habtoor provided more than 5,000 workmen who were employed on Phase 1 of the project in a concentrated programme of 24-hour construction. Architects were RMJM and consulting engineers Mace International.
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