Passing through the entry of the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, U.A.E.—currently the world’s tallest building—one encounters a complex, double-curved wood ceiling floating overhead that approaches the complexity of the tower that hosts it. The ceiling was detailed, built and shipped to the Middle East, and installed in an aggressive 11-month timeframe by an integrated project team comprised of Imperial Woodworking, the design team at Skidmore Owings & Merril, Rick Herskovitz at ICON Integrated Construction, and the New York office of Gehry Technologies.
Early on in the process, the team took a unitized panel approach to the ceiling. Panels were fabricated in Imperial’s shop in Chicago and then transported in groups, sequencing the fabrication and the installation to meet the schedule. While constructing and finishing the panels in the shop helped out with control and quality, the design needed to be pre-coordinated and fully detailed before arriving at the building site.