The Regent Emirates Pearl hotel rises 255 metres above Abu Dhabi’s seafront and stakes its claim as one of the emirate’s most recognisable structures.

The mixed-use complex contains 60 luxury serviced apartments on 10 levels, and a five-star hotel with 437 keys from level 11 upwards. The podium area includes five levels of restaurants, retail areas, spas, swimming pools and a gym. Below are five levels of parking.

The building’s signature feature is the 45-storey twisting elliptical floor plan and columns. Post-tensioned concrete slabs frame the tower’s floor levels and allowed for an efficient construction cycle and obstruction-free ceiling. Each tower column transfers at the podium roof through an arrangement of splayed sloping columns. Three-storey sloping columns at the building’s mid-height levels connect each perimeter column to the core.

The real mixed-use space and the twisting nature of the building presented great challenges to the construction team. While visually arresting, the 1.4-million-square-foot facility required extensive modelling and analysis to accommodate its complex geometries.

The sloping columns mean the building rotates at each level, inducing a torsional force in the elliptical concrete core wall, with the force accumulating over the height of the building. DeSimone analysed the torsional force, and formulated a solution to relieve the torsion from the core.