Contract award

Meraas awards Atélis groundworks to International Foundation Group

By Staff Writer  |  14 August 2026

Meraas has awarded the groundworks contract for Atélis at d3 to International Foundation Group, starting work on a 45 storey residential tower in Dubai Design District.

The contract covers site preparation, excavation, soil improvement and dewatering, together with the design and construction of shoring and piling works. Those activities prepare the site for the following phases of construction. No value has been published.

Meraas is part of Dubai Holding Real Estate. The tower is designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and will hold one to four bedroom apartments together with penthouses, over three levels of amenities including wellness facilities, co-working spaces and communal areas.

A design and construct groundworks package is a narrower thing than it looks. The contractor takes design responsibility for the temporary works that hold the excavation open and for the piles that carry the permanent structure, on ground conditions it has not chosen and often on information it has not produced.

Where the risk sits in a piling and shoring package

The ground is the first question. Where a package is let on a design and construct basis, the allocation of ground condition risk turns on what the contract says about the site investigation data, and specifically on whether the contractor is entitled to rely on it. A contract that provides the data for information only, and requires the contractor to satisfy itself as to the conditions, puts the risk of an unforeseen stratum on the party least able to have investigated it.

Dewatering makes that question sharper. Groundwater control is priced on an assumed permeability and an assumed drawdown, and both come from the investigation. Where the assumption proves wrong, the cost consequence arrives quickly and continues for as long as the excavation is open, so the entitlement question has to be answered early rather than at final account.

The interface with the following trades

The second question is what the groundworks contractor hands over and when. Shoring and piling packages are almost always the first on site and are followed by a substructure contractor working inside the box the first has formed. Two matters commonly go unrecorded and later become disputes. The first is pile tolerance, since a pile within the specified positional tolerance may still require the following contractor to redesign a pile cap, and the cost of that redesign belongs to whoever the contract says it belongs to. The second is the condition of the excavation at handover, including the state of the formation and the loads the temporary works are permitted to carry.

Where the same employer lets both packages, as here, the interface is managed by the employer rather than by a main contractor, which means the employer carries the coordination risk unless the contracts say otherwise.

Reading the announcement

The award is stated as the commencement of groundworks. That is a start on site rather than a start of construction of the tower, and the two are frequently reported as the same event. For a supplier or subcontractor tracking the scheme, the useful inference is about timing: the main works package for a tower of this height typically follows the completion of the substructure, not the award of the groundworks, so the tender for the superstructure is some way behind this announcement.

The tower is described as having balconies whose form is drawn from flowers native to the desert, with views over Dubai Creek and the city. Meraas presents the scheme as part of the continued development of Dubai Design District as a residential as well as a commercial destination.

Only the groundworks contractor has been named. No main contractor for the tower has been announced.