Beach....again! I went with a couple, so I was able to be on the family side. Next time I'm going to try to rent a Jet Ski.

A lot of activity at work. For the last week or two, our New York office was doing an evaluation/peer review of a building which is already partly under construction in Dubai. We were asked to look at the building by a large group consulting which we are partnering with. We found a major detrimental design flaw, a couple of instances of un-buildable details, and many areas which were significantly over-designed. Last Monday night, we were asked to attend a meeting to present our findings.

All day Sunday and Monday we tailored our presentation for a lay audience as we were going to be meeting with the owners, the project managers, and maybe, the consultant. So we had a pre-meeting with our partner group and one of the three owners which asked us to do the review. The owner is an Emirate, in natural dress, and he spoke very frankly with us. He said that he was unhappy with the current consultant, and that he has the power to replace them. He informed us that we were going to go directly to the Emirates Palace to meet the design and construction team, and that he fully expects us to have to fight for our position and defend ourselves well.

We arrived at the business center at the Emirates Palace to find over 20 people in the room. Later we find out that everyone in the room had just driven from Dubai (1.5 hrs away) and had no idea what we the meeting was for. So the owner had orchestrated an ambush. There were three empty chairs at the head of this large square shaped table. We had plugged in the laptop and were ready to go. Then the three Emirate owners walked into the room and were introduced to us. One of the three is the son of H.H. Sheikh Hamdan Bin Zayed Al Nahyan. (I think the H.H. stands for His Highness.) H.H. Sheikh Hamdan Bin Zayed Al Nahyan currently holds the position of Deputy Prime Minister of the U.A.E. I'm not sure exactly where this position falls in their government structure, but it sounds pretty high up to me.

So Mark gave the presentation we prepared, and nailed it. The engineering consultant was caught completely unprepared, and only got off a mediocre defense of his design. At one point, he admitted that the design could be further optimized. The owner then jumped down his throat and said, 'I have been a good client, I always pay my bills on time, and for that reason, I expect to get your best design the first time."

The whole thing felt a bit unfair, but we didn't know that the consultant was unprepared, and we didn't know he didn't know we were doing a review. The meeting concluded with an invitation for our team to visit the construction site the next day. We are waiting to hear if our group was hired, and if the job will be to work with the current consultant to fix the design, or if we will be asked to finish the project ourselves.

Shearwall detail.


12 layers of overlapping hoops.



184 verticals at 4.4% reinforcing. The construction manager told us that this column would not be able to accept a splice and that the next floor of construction would not be buildable. This just happened to be one of the comments in our presentation.

Foundations for 50+ story building.

Foundation for 20+ story Building


View from the parking lot. This project is directly on the water in the very lucrative Dubai Marina area.

Over this last weekend, I went to the beach, slept a bunch, and played video games on a new XBox Elite 360. I also stayed out again till 2 AM on Friday night. At one point we were at a dance club with a live band which turned out to be more than just a dance club. since this is a family blog, that is all I'm going to say about that. I also went to a Flamenco dance show. This is a traditional Spanish dance, and it was beautiful to watch.

Just about two weeks to go now.