The Green Planet

Located at City Walk, The Green Planet recreates an exotic, sensory experience of travelling through a lush and verdant rainforest. Visitors can explore a range of striking landscapes from mysterious forest pools to tree top canopy platform, cliffhanging gardens and waterfalls surrounded by living habitat, birds, butterflies and aquatic animals.

Ramboll was the Design and Build contractor’s lead consultant for Green Planet where our role was to provide full engineering design and site supervision for the signature landmark of a living organic Amazon rainforest museum space.

Dubai’s first indoor tropical rainforest

A unique feature of The Green Planet is the environment within the bio-dome. Ramboll’s Mechanical, Engineering and Plumbing (MEP) team recreated the characteristics of a natural environment experienced in the heart of the deepest rainforests.

To create the controlled and conducive environment, our MEP team had to model the bio-dome with an engineered solution developed to allow for control environment and interconnection for the public from the more normal air-conditioned spaces.

Our team also had to consider the size of the building, which has a built-up area of 4,365 square metre as well as the fact that the building has a 30 metre by 30 metre cube over a single basement, with three sides concrete, the fourth side glazed facade and an atrium roof.

Environmental parameters in the bio-dome have been designed specifically to maintain the plants and wildlife, with humidity set at 70 percent and temperatures between 25°C and 28°C.

Although the project came with many challenges, it was crucial that the MEP design met the overall design elements for the living museum and that it incorporated the external landscape and hardscape so that the controlled environment ensures that the live rainforest plants, birds, and animals flourish.

Overcoming structural challenges

The Green Planet provided structural engineering, resourcing and communication challenges. The complexity and intricacy of some of the details were such that the information could not be adequately conveyed through industry standard 2D drawings and reports. A range of 3D software packages was used to interrogate or convey critical information. Ramboll supplied software models to the contractor and fabricator in support of 2D contractual deliverables.

The accurate spatial coordination for the steel embedment plates provided a further challenge, with many of the anchors being installed on hard-to-define doubly curved inclined beams.

Ramboll interfaced the steel fabricator’s Tekla model with the in-house 3D BIM model to accurately coordinate the locations of the embedment plates. This innovative interface paid immediate dividends: it was further used to carry out a clash detection exercise throughout the building. Resolving these issues at design stage removed the time and risk associated with the potentially hazardous work at height required for detailed survey and alterations.

Façade innovation

The project façade involved the design and detailing of a complex suspended tension rod façade system; which was braced intermittently to the primary diagrid structure. The design and engineering had to take into account detailed consideration of the various loading conditions, building movements, pre-tensioning, as well as the dynamic forces exerted by a series of spring supports at the top of the structure.

Such a complex façade required close integration between the façade design team, structures design team and the specialist façade contractor to achieve a fully coordinated and developed design.

Award-winning

The Green Planet was awarded Project of the Year at the 2016 Middle East Consultant Awards. The award honours the best designed, planned and executed project in the Middle East for 2016.

The project also received Highly Commended for Mechanical Project of the Year at the MEP Middle East Awards in 2016, the most prestigious recognition within the MEP field in the Middle East.