Dubai: Union Properties, a Dubai-based developer, has awarded a Dh1.06 billion contract to Nasa Multiplex, a UAE-Australian joint venture construction company, to design and build Index a 328-metre mixed-use tower with 86 floors.
Construction will start this month and it will be completed in three years.
Nasa Multiplex officials in Dubai declined to comment on the project yesterday, citing a secrecy clause in the contract.
The project, initially named One Central Park, will be located in the heart of the Dubai International Finance Centre complex, with 25 levels of office space, 520 apartments and penthouses over 50 levels with parking, retail, services and landscaped podium on other levels, Multiplex Group said.
"The project will be delivered on a guaranteed maximum price contract, which is the result of a two-stage negotiation process with Union Properties, for whom Multiplex has already successfully completed The Tower and Creekside Apartments projects," it said on Monday.
Foster and Partners of London produced the architectural concept for the project, while Multiplex has engaged architects Woods Bagot and structural engineers Bruechle, Gilchrist and Evans to complete the design.
Union Properties has engaged edara-APP, a joint venture between edara, a Dubai-based project management group, and APP, a well-known Australian project management company, as project manager during both the design and construction phases.
"The eye-catching shape of the tower has been generated by a desire to clearly express the structural system and internal organisation of the tower," Foster and Partners said.
"The upper-level block of apartments offering the highest residential views in the world are supported by four attenuated A-frame 'fins' at 27-metre centres, which are buttressed at each end elevation. Twenty-five levels of column-free office accommodation are held within from these fins, separated from the residential levels by a glazed sky-lobby."
The tower is orientated east-west to maximise views over the DIFC and to the coastline and desert. This orientation also reduces solar gain, with the building core mass absorbing heat to reduce mechanical ventilation loads. A system of sunshades shelters the interiors on the exposed south elevation.
"On a contract value, it's a very significant win for us," a spokesman said.
Nasa Multiplex is one of the major contractors active in the UAE with 15 projects. It has 470 staff.
The contract would boost Sydney-based Multiplex's profitability, which warned recently that rising expenses at its Wembley Stadium project in Britain could wipe $60 million (Dh220.38 million) off its profit.
But it still maintained its profit guidance of about $215 million for the current financial year.
In June, the company was forced to admit that cost blowouts and delays at Wembley would result in a $109 million loss on the project, which is due to be completed in time for the FA Cup in May.
