Project overview
Al Jazirat Al Hamra Heritage Village is a heritage site in Ras Al Khaimah. Wrenze Steel provided structural design and detailing for steel structures at the village, working for Atkins, who acted as client and consultant.
The design render shows a two-level building wrapped in horizontal louvres, with an external stair and a tall rust-coloured portal frame standing over the whole structure. It is a modern steel structure placed in a historic setting, where the steel is meant to be seen.
Our scope
Our scope combined structural design and detailing. These are two stages of the same job:
- Structural design decides what the steel is: the frame layout, member sizes, connection types and the forces each part carries.
- Detailing decides exactly how it is made: every plate, bolt, weld and hole, shown on drawings the fabricator can work from directly.
Doing both in one team helps on exposed architectural steel. The engineer who sized a connection also controls how it looks when detailed, so the final joint can be both adequate and neat. Our steel shop drawings and detailing service covers that second stage.
The structure
The render shows three kinds of element that are typically built in steel on a structure like this.
The large portal frame is a statement element: two tall legs and a deep beam across the top. A portal frame relies on rigid corner joints to stay stable, so the knee connections and the column bases carry significant bending and need careful design and detailing.
Louvres like these are secondary steel. Each blade is light, but together they catch wind across a large area and pass that load into their support rails and back to the main frame.
The external stair is a small structure in its own right, with stringers, treads, landings and a handrail, all checked for the loads and deflection limits that apply to stairs.
A rust-coloured finish and exposed connections leave little room for error. Clean lines in the model must become clean lines on site.
Read about our structural steel design service, or request a quote for architectural steel on your project.
