Newtecnic, the British based international building engineering firm has announced that they have been appointed by the main contractor, BACS Consortium in order to oversee the construction stage of the advanced facade envelope planned for the King Abdullah Financial District Metro hub located in Saudi Arabia.

It is great news that a British building engineering firm has been selected to work on a prominent international project such as this one. The Metro hub in the King Abdullah Financial District, or KAFD has been designed by Zaha Hadid and includes an intricate facade that is intended to illustrate the patterns generated by desert winds. The facade of the building was design engineered by Newtecnic, the British company, in order to reduce the solar gain of the building as well as producing air currents that can be utilised to cool the building.

Newtecnic’s building research team has had to develop new algorithms in order to achieve the desired performance level from the facade envelope. The KAFD has been planned in order to create the capacity to manage Riyadh’s expected 50% growth over the course of the next few years. The KAFD is a part of the new citywide transport system that has been planned and includes 6 metro lines as well as 85 different stations, and more than 100 miles of track. It is thought that work on this project will be completed in 2018.

The facade was complex to design engineer. This complexity was created from the continuity of the KAFD’s self-supporting, 200-meter-long, high performance concrete composite walls and roof used on the building. New adjustable building components have been created in order to build this structure as well as fixing methods that needed to be invented and tested by technic specifically for this project. Newtecnic tested these components in partnership with the Engineering Department of Cambridge University.