ICE UAE Learned Event
Design & Construction Of Louvre Abu Dhabi
By Brian Cole – Buro Happold - Project Director – Louvre Abu Dhabi.
Tuesday, 24th September 2019
The Club, Al Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi.
Speaker’s Biography
Brian is the Buro Happold Project Director responsible for the leadership of their large multi-disciplinary team on the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum project. Brian is a chartered civil and structural engineer with many years’ experience in the design and construction of large and complex building and civil engineering projects. Before transferring to Abu Dhabi in 2010, he was a Director in Buro Happold's Bath Office in the UK where he was responsible for leading a large structural engineering design team. Significant projects within his team included the four main stations for the Haramain Railway project in Saudi Arabia, extensive work for Arsenal Football Club including the conversion of Highbury Stadium into luxury apartments and the design of their new HQ building, the complex Sidra Trees project in Doha and the CUC University Campus in Cornwall, UK.
Prior to joining Buro Happold in 1998, and throughout the 1990s, he had a leading role on the £3bn Jubilee Line Extension project where he was the Client's line-wide Project Structural Engineer. His early career was with Ove Arup and Partners where he worked for several years on large civil and structural engineering projects in both their London and Hong Kong offices and gained early Middle East experience with them on several large retail projects in Kuwait.
Topic Overview
Born out of an intergovernmental agreement between Abu Dhabi and France in 2007, Louvre Abu Dhabi embodies the spirit of openness and dialogue among cultures, displaying works of historical, cultural and sociological significance from different times and civilisations. Now open, the museum’s permanent collection, as well as important loaned artworks from prestigious French institutions, forms an art historical narrative taking the visitor from ancient times to the contemporary through 23 permanent galleries in 12 separate sequences. The Museum stands offshore in the waters of the Gulf and is shaded by a 180m diameter steelwork dome.
The presentation will explain the context of the Museum within the Abu Dhabi Cultural District and will give details of some of the many engineering challenges which were overcome during the design and construction of this Iconic project.
Through this one-day Masterclass, students will learn about how the civil engineering profession has shaped the world in the past centuries, recent technological advances and succession of minds in seeking continuous improvement of quality of life. It will be a golden opportunity to interact with fellow high-flyer students to express views on topical engineering and societal issues and bring about new perspectives on the development and resilience of our cities.
Thank you to all our Annual Sponsors Atkins, Menard, Jacobs, Maccaferri and Ramboll.
