Cleaning The Most Difficult Windows In The Middle East

The UAE’s expanding array of towering and bizarrely shaped buildings requires ever more extraordinary measures to keep them clean. Burj Khalifa, Dubai Height 828 metres, Emaar’s Burj Khalifa is the tallest building in the world.

Window cleaning reaches for new heights in the United Arab Emirates: Dangling on ropes 150 metres in the air in the desert heat, six young men are systematically washing down the 12,500 glass panes that clad the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Company's (Adnec) striking Capital Gate centre. Not a job for anyone with a fear of heights, the precipitous descent involves clinging to the underside of the world's steepest man-made tower using specially designed suction cups. Meanwhile, a team at the bottom of the tower has the less terrifying task of hosing down the lower floors from a moving platform.

It takes the team 30 days to wash the entire building (pictured below). And the moment they finish they have to start again. "We have to use a variety of techniques to clean our buildings, from rope access to boom systems, gantry systems, cradles and spraying with high-pressure hoses," says Alain El Tawil, the managing director of Grako, the company in charge of cleaning the tower, which leans at an angle of 18 degrees off vertical. It is also responsible for keeping the Burj Khalifa gleaming as well as a host of other oddly shaped and difficult to clean edifices.

The Capital Gate tower has gondolas built into the design to clean it's exterior.

With some of the world's tallest and most bizarre buildings, the Middle East has become a study in the art of the possible. For window cleaners, it's becoming more and more of a challenge to keep up. "Each company wants to build something different," says Mr El Tawil. "And that means making their buildings bigger and more complicated. Over the last eight years we have seen the company grow by 100 per cent each year in terms of staff numbers and we always have to keep recruiting in order to meet the demand."

Mr El Tawil's firm is not the only one challenged by the growth of bizarre building design. The struggle to maintain such structures is a problem faced throughout the construction process. "As tall buildings grow more sophisticated, systems to maintain them are increasingly addressed in the initial designs. Architects need to determine how workers will handle issues, where materials will be stored and how crews can move around the building without affecting tenants," says Kevin Brass, the public affairs manager at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a think tank based in Chicago. "In buildings, space is always at a premium. Anything that takes up rentable space slices in to the economics of a building. As buildings grow taller, the designers spend an extraordinary amount of time determining where to locate the mechanical apparatus," he says.

 Capital Gate, Adnec headquarters, Abu Dhabi- Height 160 metres Known as Abu Dhabi’s “leaning tower”, this 53,100-square-metre building leans four times as steeply as the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. Although the building has sets of gondolas built into the design to clean its exterior, Grako’s Alain El Tawil says abseilers are used instead because the unusual building’s lean makes it hard for ordinary machinery to reach the windows. Abseilers can also work in bigger teams, making the cleaning process quicker. To reach the underside, each window cleaner must first descend on a rope then use suction pads to overcome gravity and get to those hard-to-clean surfaces. The bottom of the building is cleaned using a device on wheels with a mechanically raised and lowered platform and high-pressure jets of water.

The trend is big business for Theo van der Linde, the operations manager for CoxGomyl, a company that specialises in installing the gondolas used to clean many tall buildings. As a rule of thumb, the more complicated and bizarrely shaped the building, the more work for specialists such as Mr van der Linde. "We work from the start with the architects who will be doing the overall design of the building and then assist them to ensure that the building maintenance units can reach all areas of the building to do cleaning or maintenance on the facade," he says. "Our specialist design team then design the gondolas according to the geometry of the specific building. The actual cleaning process is conventional using water, detergent and a applicator with the window wiper to remove the access water, the same as what they will do when they clean your car windows at the filling station, except that it is a few hundred meters above ground level. Whoever is going inside the cradle needs to have an aptitude for heights."

Aldar headquarters building, Abu Dhabi - Height 110 metres
 The world’s first and only circular tower, Aldar’s 23-storey, 666,000 square feet head-office building requires some of the most complicated and advanced cleaning and maintenance equipment in the world to scale it. “The building shape is quite interesting here as it is round in the one plane and oval if you look at it from the side,” says Cox Gomyl’s Theo van der Linde. “The BMU [building maintenance unit] was designed to cover the whole building, therefore it can travel all the way around the building from one side to the other side in order to offer access to all the facade. “This BMU has three cradles to carry out the cleaning of the facade. We have two cradles on either [circular] side of the building. Therefore, two teams can work simultaneously.”

Facilities management companies, too, say the job is getting more demanding as the shapes and sizes of buildings become ever more complicated. "We use a number of techniques to carry out facade and roof cleaning, including abseiling or rope access, man-lift equipment, suspended platforms and, finally, cleaning from the ground with a water-fed pole system," says Mark Cooke, the general manager of business operations in the Middle East at the facilities management company UGL. "It depends on the type of buildings and the possible accessibility for facade cleaners to conduct their cleaning. Each building is treated individually, which includes a risk assessment and a safe work method statement."

So how much does all this cost? Mr El Tawil says an average tall building can cost anything between Dh30,000 (US$8,167) and Dh60,000 per cleaning. A large part of that relates to the access requirements and the skill sets, training and the certification required in carrying out the cleaning, says Mr Cooke. Labour costs and the level of safety standards adhered to are also important. Window cleaners and their managers can earn anything between Dh1,500 and Dh25,000 a month. 

Aspire Zone, Doha Sports City, Qatar - Height 300 metres for the tower, making it the country’s tallest The futuristic tower, which makes up the centrepiece of the 250-hectare Aspire Zone, was designed to resemble a torch during the 2006 Asian Games. It also has a special video screen woven into a wire mesh measuring more than 1,000 square metres. The rest of the complex includes a mosque, sports dome and football stadium. The Australian company UGL is charged with facilities management at the site, which requires cleaning from ground level using a telescopic pole and abseiling down the tower to clean the facade by hand. “We need to complete six cleaning cycles per year and each cycle comprises of 60 calendar days with a team of six facade-cleaning specialists,” says Mark Cooke, UGL’s general manager for business operations in the Middle East.

Why We Build: the story of storeys, getting ever taller. The past few years have seen the development of a certain sport among western writers in gently mocking Dubai. Astronomical construction figures are laughed at, outrageous designs ridiculed and architecture intellectuals pretend to be vexed about what Dubai might represent as a model for the cities of the future. Readers are invited to shake their heads at the state of affairs at the Burj Khalifa, a building that boasts an Armani Hotel and the world's highest restaurant but needs sewage trucks parked at its base to take away the waste. Read more..

 

 From the many skyscrapers of JBR and the flamboyant Palm Jumeirah to the elegance of the Burj Al Arab and the colossal Burj Khalifa, Dubai has a wealth of imposing structures.

Burj Khalifa, Dubai Height 828 metres, Emaar’s Burj Khalifa is the tallest building in the world. The Burj’s complicated shape makes it one of the most challenging buildings a window cleaner is ever likely to face. Designed to incorporate traditional Islamic patterns into a tri-petalled flower resembling a desert rose, the problem for window cleaners is to get around the glass curves in order to clean. The building is cleaned using both abseilers and cleaners standing on elevated gondolas. CoxGomyl has set up 18 gondolas to maintain the building including the highest building maintenance unit in the world working at a height of 715 metres. Three sets of machines – stationed at levels 40, 73 and 109 – are mounted on horizontal tracks, which means they can travel across the facade.