Mashreq Bank – Dubai

35 story headquarters office building for Mashreq Bank. The lower portion of the building is square in plan, and houses parking and conference facilities. The plan then changes to an ‘L’ shape, and is primarily tenant office. The bank headquarters occupy the top four stories of the building, and the plan changes back to a square, resulting in a 90′ cantilever that completes and re-establishes the building form, 30 stories in the air.

The primary structure is reinforced concrete, consisting of a core wall system with an innovative reinforced concrete braced frame. The top four stories are structural steel, and are supported by utilizing cantilevered multi-story deep steel trusses.

Much analysis was performed to provide an efficient solution that also resulted in a level floor when construction was complete. The structure has been optimized holistically considering parameters such as cost of steel, cost of various strengths of concrete, cost of reinforcement, stiffness of the materials utilized and also value of the floor area taken by the size of the columns. The cantilever trusses were designed to facilitate their erection, allowing for them to be either built off of the supporting concrete structure, or erected on the ground and strand-jacked into place.