Best Project, Residential/Hospitality: Regent Emirates Pearl Hotel
Composed of two semicircular hotel wings that spiral around an elliptical core, the 45-story Regent Emirates Pearl Hotel, located in Abu Dhabi, rises to a height of 840 ft and dominates the surrounding coastline. While visually arresting, the 1.4-million-sq-ft facility required extensive modeling and analysis to accommodate its complex geometries.
The facility's structural gravity framing system comprises post-tensioned slabs, concrete perimeter columns and a central core wall. For the design, the columns were inclined 15º vertically, shifting them to the side 19 in. per floor; from bottom to top, the total shift is 70.8 ft. In all, each floor rotates 0.56º, or a total of 25º of rotation from the first level to the roof.