Dubai, UAE, 7 April 2019: Technal is celebrating its 40^th year anniversary in the Middle East with ‘World of Technal’, a series of multi-city gathering of building and construction industry leaders, across the GCC region to analyse trends and developments in the industry. In Dubai, the event focused on the importance of ‘User Centric Design for Tall Buildings’.

Sam Robinson, General Manager, Technal Middle East, said: “As per United Nations data, 68% of the world’s population is projected to live in urban areas by 2050. As urban areas get crowded, the only option left is to build higher-rise buildings (vertical cities) to accommodate this mass urbanisation. High-rise buildings have a higher surface area of the building envelope than low-rise buildings, when put into a ratio with the specific ground area use. This increase of surfaces can be used to integrate more features into the building skin than before, for comfort of the occupants of buildings and also for better urban planning for city developers. ‘World of Technal’ Dubai edition addressed this transition of cities into ‘vertical cities’ of tomorrow. The core focus of the conference was on the building envelope of these vertical cities, which will have to answer specific challenges of ‘compressed’ urban spaces, where more and more people will live per square kilometre.”

Sam Robinson, General Manager, Technal Middle East

Robinson said that exterior challenges, due to climate change are now even more severe, especially with the increase in dust storms and “wind loads up to tornado scale”. Noise-related reduction of ‘comfort’ is a key concern when designing purpose-built product solutions for the building skin and the shape of the building itself, he said. He emphasised that building skin will be a key factor in the future.

“Today, the skin just reduces the impact of the exterior climate on the interior environment conditions, by acting mainly as a separation layer,” he said. “In the future, the building skin can also minimise the environmental impacts of the urban ambient areas, by active and passive design measures and products. Today’s building envelopes should also be designed to face threats, such as fire, blast and ballistic attacks. Security for end-users is of prime importance in today’s tall buildings. The building envelope of tomorrow will become a “connecting layer”, providing a connection to the interior with exterior, whenever possible and truly enriching the ‘user living experience’ in buildings.”

A special highlight of the event was the global launch of Technal’s TIGAL, a pull-and-slide system for buildings, which the company claimed, gives the highest protection against noise, promotes high thermal comfort and demonstrates the highest level of tightness to prevent dust, rain and any external threats due to ever-changing weather in the region and beyond. The launch was broadcast live from Barcelona, streaming on YouTube across 20 countries.