Week 4: Day 1

Sunday June 6, 2010

Abu Dhabi Visit

We woke up in the morning and hit the road to Abu Dhabi and in one and a half hour we arrived and we went to the site of the Guardian Towers. We were welcomed to the site by its Project Director, Mr. Subrahmanyam, who introduced us and gave us information about the Guardian Towers.

These towers are two 4 basements 19-story towers (2 podiums + 17 typical floors) that are characterized and shaped by a distinctive sliced and shifted geometry. The towers are joined by a podium. The built-up area of the towers is almost 80000sq.m

We were guided in the site by the project manager Mr. Jihad Choueiry who at first took us to a sample floor of the residential tower where we saw the different finishes this tower has. It contains single bedrooms and double bedrooms apartments of ceramic tiling with different sizes for the floors and painted walls.

We started going up in the levels of the tower to check the work so we saw different stages of construction as we ascended the building. Mr. Choueiry showed us how walls are finished starting from the block wall to either tiling or painting, as well as floor finishing and waterproofing.

.

We started building some block walls on the 16^th floor where we were divided into teams of four each. We did three layers of each wall; we put mortar between each block and on the surface of each layer without forgetting the steel mesh each three layers.

We then left for lunch at the Holiday Inn hotel and afterwards, we left to visit the Emirates Palace which is a very huge hotel compared to what we’ve seen as finished hotels.