Ahmad Abdelrazaq Bio
Rise Global LLC, Managing Director & Founding Partner | Former Senior Executive Vice President and the head of the Highrise and Complex Building Division at Samsung C & T Corporation | Member of National Academy of Engineering (NAE)
Ahmad Abdelrazaq earned his B.S. and M.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984 and 1986 respectively. Ahmad Abdelrazaq is Senior Executive Vice President and the head of the Highrise and Complex Building Division at Samsung C & T Corporation, Seoul, Korea. Since joining Samsung in 2004, Mr. Abdelrazaq has overseen the Division transition from a traditional construction only provider into the successful design-build, pre-construction, value engineering, and fast track design/construction for highrise and complex buildings.
Among many projects at Samsung, Mr. Abdelrazaq has been involved in all aspects of construction planning, pre-construction services, and structural design of the Burj Khalifa, Jumeriah Gardens in Dubai, Samsung HQ, Seoul, the 151-story Inchon Tower, and the Yongsan Landmark Tower (620m Tall Tower, 111-Story Tower) in Seoul. Presently, Mr Abdelrazaq is directly involved in the design and construction of several mixed-use highrise and complex building projects in Asia and the Middle East, including the Worli development project, Mumbai, the Tanjong Pagar Tower complex, slated to be the tallest Building in Singapore, the UIC project in Singapore, and the Rasuna Tower, Jakarta.
Prior to joining Samsung, Mr. Abdelrazaq was Associate Partner and Senior Project Structural Engineer with Skidmore Owings and Merrill in Chicago, where he was engaged in all aspects of structural engineering works, from early planning/feasibility studies to project completion. Mr. Abdelrazaq has extensive experience in the design of buildings ranging from complex buildings to ultra high-rise towers, and long span structures. Among many projects, Mr. Abdelrazaq structural design responsibilities during his tenure at SOM included Burj Khalifa in Dubai, Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, Tower Palace III in Seoul, LG Kangnam Tower & LG Art Center in Seoul, Millennium Park Project in the heart of Chicago, Hong Kong Convention Center, Hotel de Artes Tower in Barcelona, and the COEX Convention Center development in Seoul.
In addition to presenting at several International professional conferences and workshops, Mr. Abdelrazaq serves also as a lecturer at Seoul National University where he teaches graduate classes for the structural design of highrise buildings and spatial structures. Mr. Abdelrazaq served as an adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture, where his research interest included the development of innovative structural systems in concrete/steel/composite structures, and in aerodynamic shaping of supertall buildings to mitigate wind effects to reduce the dynamic wind forces and resonant vibration; these mitigation measures were later incorporated in real projects including Tower Palace III, Burj Khalifa, and twisted towers. Mr. Abdelrazaq served as the Chair of the ASCE/SE Tall Buildings committee for two terms during which a special monograph is slated for publication in 2013 on the “Effects of Wind-induced Motion on Habitable Tall Buildings: State of the Art Report and Best Practices”.
Mr. Abdelrazaq is also an investigator in a National Science Foundation-sponsored project with the University of Notre Dame, The University of Western Ontario/ Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP that seeks to improve correlations between actual wind load responses of tall buildings and those predicted by computer models and wind tunnel studies. Mr. Abdelrazaq continued this research by sponsoring and financing (through Samsung) real time Structural Health Monitoring Programs (SHMP) at Tower Palace III and Burj Khalifa Tower. Through this research, Mr. Abdelrazaq conceptualized and executed one of the most comprehensive research programs in the history of supertall buildings. Mr. Abdelrazaq developed several real time SHMP for Burj Khalifa to correlate the predicted structural and foundation behavior to the actual measured response during construction and the tower lifetime, including wind and seismic events. The completed Structural health monitoring program included comprehensive testing programs of all structural materials and their mechanical characteristics, load flow into the pile foundation, raft foundation behavior, foundation settlement, column shortening, dynamic characteristics of the tower, system identification, and the realization of continuous full scale testing (24/7) under wind and seismic excitation.
Mr. Abdelrazaq is involved in the CTBUH activities worldwide, where he is serving with the CTBUH as an Advisory Group Member (2008-present), CTBUH Journal Editorial Board (2008-present), CTBUH Awards Committee (2009, 2010), Member of the Editorial Board of the CTBUH Research Journal (2012-present), and contributed to the Outrigger Design for High-rise Buildings. Mr. Abdelrazaq delivered several keynote speeches at the CTBUH conferences in Seoul (2004, 2011) and spoke at several CTBUH Conferences (Seoul 2004, NY 2005, Dubai 2008, Mumbai 2010, Seoul 2011).
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