15th Asian Games – Operational Hub | 21 Jun 2007 |
Wright Style provided a unique curtain walling solution for the new US$31 million National Command Centre – a state of the art operational hub that monitored all aspects of the 15th Asian Games - held in December 2006 in Doha, Qatar.
Last year Wrightstyle landed one of the most prestigious building contracts in the Middle East – to provide internal and external steel glazing systems to the National Command Centre for the Doha Asian Games in 2006.
The National Command Centre is a state-of-the-art operational hub that monitored all aspects of the 15th Asian Games, held in December 2006 in Qatar's capital. The building comprises over 10,000 square metres of high-tech spaces, including monitoring centres, crisis management rooms, incident meeting rooms and an emergency call centre.
Wrightstyle supplied over 2,000 square metres of structurally glazed blast resistant curtain walling for the US$31-million-project, including large span, external glazing (as well as internal screens) and a number of high-security glazed doors. Wright Style also supplied pre-fabricated stainless-steel roof hatches, underlining the company's expertise and range of products across the whole building envelope.
The steel and glass systems were fabricated and installed by Alutec of Doha, a licensed Wrightstyle fabricator. They have the largest manufacturing capacity for curtain walling and cladding in Qatar. The main contractor for the project was Al Huda Engineering Works, one of the country's leading construction and engineering companies.
The Asian Games, held in Doha for the first time, had 44 countries and regions participating, which together comprises half the world's population – and was the largest sports event, after the Olympic Games.
With countries from Afghanistan to China, Mongolia to Thailand and East Timor to Iraq taking part, the three-storey National Command Centre was the focal point for all security and policing surrounding the event, which was spread across 14 multi-purpose stadiums. After the Asian Games, the building functions as a medical, security and military command centre for other major events or civil emergencies.
The command centre was designed by KEO International Consultants. KEO also provided engineering and interior design services, as well as construction supervision.
Wrightstyle was specified for the project because its systems deliver both aesthetic quality and high security. Indeed, the Doha project, based on traditional Islamic planning principles, required the architects to integrate a highly secured structure within a building that would be filled with natural light.
The extremely stringent specification called for an aesthetically pleasing finish, but with high security, weather resistance and blast-resistant requirements – not specifications that are generally bundled together within one building envelope.
Like it or not, with the iconic images from Madrid, Bali, New York's 9/11 and London's 7/7 still fresh in our minds, the threat of terrorism is one which we live with daily. Objectively and statistically, we may not have much to worry about; perceptually, it's a different matter.
However, we're also fighting back in other, perhaps surprising ways. At Wright Style, we identified some years ago that the main terrorist threat comes not only from the high explosives that are used in over 70% of terrorist incidents but from flying glass and the failure of the systems that support the glass. Having identified the primary threat, we channelled our research expertise onto the challenge and have come up with a systems solution that rewrites the architectural manual on what a safe and secure building should look like.
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