Africa’s first supertall building rises from the Egyptian desert: inside the Iconic Tower

At the centre of Egypt’s New Administrative Capital stands the Iconic Tower, a 385-metre skyscraper that became Africa’s first supertall building when it was completed, its glass and steel silhouette rising out of desert that held nothing but flat, arid gravel a decade earlier.

The tower is the centrepiece of the new capital’s Central Business District and was designed and supervised by architecture and engineering firm Dar Al Handasah Shair and Partners, which was also commissioned to assess and validate the strategic master plan for the entire 71,400-hectare capital project, alongside six additional office towers, five residential towers and two hotel towers within the wider business district. Construction of the tower itself was carried out by China State Construction Engineering Corporation.

Building at this scale required solving a genuinely difficult engineering problem: casting the tower’s entire foundation as a single, uninterrupted mass of concrete. The steel skeleton rests on a semi-circular reinforced concrete raft laid directly onto a basalt rock layer, measuring 3,710 square metres in area and five metres thick, for a total volume of roughly 18,500 cubic metres, reinforced with around 4,600 tonnes of steel.

To manage the intense heat generated as that much concrete cured, engineers built a 5x5x5 metre mock-up beforehand to measure the heat of hydration, used a cement mix incorporating silica fume to control it, and ran a full 8,500 cubic metre trial raft on a separate tower first to test the entire casting plan before attempting the real one.