Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, on Al Maryah Island, UAE,  is a unique and unparalleled extension of US-based Cleveland Clinic’s model of care, specifically designed to address a range of complex and critical care requirements unique to the Abu Dhabi population. The facilities at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi combine state-of-the-art amenities and world-class service standards. The hospital is a 364 (expandable to 490) bed facility, with five clinical floors, three diagnostic and treatment levels, and 13 floors of critical and acute inpatient units. The building is one of the largest structural steel buildings in the UAE, weighing in at more than 30,000 tonnes.

Atom Consultants assisted Balfour Beatty with bid assistance on this 940 million Euro contract and helped them win the technical bid. We also assisted with the commercial bid and developed the construction sequence planning with the use of building information modelling, which also involved looking at the hand over sequence for the building.

In conjunction with Balfour Beatty’s planning engineer, we identified an alternative method of construction, which would have provided a six month time reduction in the delivery of the project. The key aspect of this was the adoption of a modular approach to the delivery of the twin-walled diamond shaped glazed elevations- only 8 modules would have sufficed to cover the entire elevation of the building. The glazed façades of Cleveland Clinic are the first double skin curtain walls with a 1.6m catwalk (gap) high transparency outer skin with high heat absorption performance characteristics providing a veiled appearance, cooling mechanism by pushing exhausted air through the gap.

The Six Construct and Samsung C&T Joint Venture, the same team which built Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, ended up successfully implementing Atom’s design and carrying the project through to a successful completion.