Dubai Tower By Grimshaw

‘The design concept for this multi-use tower by Grimshaw architects emerged from the need to balance three major factors: to reflect Arabic culture and the traditions of Islamic vernacular architecture; to create a building with multiple functions, including office, retail, hotel and residential areas; and to give an intelligent response to hot, humid climate.

The intensity of the Arabian sun posed a dual challenge: to utilise the benefits of the strong sunshine and to tame its ferocity. Reference to the architecture of the region gives insight into how to achieve the necessary level of climate control; creating comfortable internal conditions with minimal energy consumption.

The Dubai Tower adapts the vernacular mushrabiyah screen (a projecting window of timber latticework) and incorporates the principle of having controlled openings and internal squares that maximise benefit from daylighting without being subject to the sun’s heat.

With the mushrabiyah screen in mind, experiments were conducted to test light permeability through narrow vertical slots. Together with a consideration of the site’s dimensions (too small for independent towers, too large for a single tower), these experiments led to a basic floorplate of four quadrants organised around a central core.

The quadrants, separated by a nine-metre gap, serve as the living/working spaces while the core functions as a communal atrium, providing access to the perimeter offices or apartments. The effect of this flexible design is to create a series of ‘vertical villages’. In order to achieve variation in the facades, by creating offset vertical light slots, the basic floorplate is stacked at alternate orientations. Periodically, one of the quadrants is removed completely to create dramatic recesses that can be used as exterior space.

The tower is designed to accommodate eight of these vertical villages, each with their own atrium and comprising different numbers of floors dependent on the requirements. The quadrants are linked across the light slots by glazed bridges and, should it be required, quadrants can be fused to supplement usable floor area. These villages – or units – are stacked to varying heights dependent on their function.

The core can be understood as a stiff, hollow rectangular extrusion that extends throughout the building. Continuous solid shafts occur at each corner and accommodate stairs, fire-fighting lifts, goods lifts and service risers. Passenger lifts occupy central areas. With the solid shafts in the core connecting with the primary perimeter columns to carry the vertical load, the floor space in between can be completely column free allowing for maximum flexibility.

In the residential areas, the atrium serves as the ‘village square’. The residents will access their apartments via an open balcony. All apartments have perimeter views and twelve of them have corner views. Each residential village has access to an external pool. The office spaces follow the same principles, but they can enjoy dedicated lifts and fused quadrants to increase usable area. In the hotel unit, the atrium houses the public facilities, including restaurants, bars, lounge areas and retail units. At street level visitors can access one of four express lift-groups servicing each area. The upper five storeys of the entrance villages are occupied by retail space. At ground level, water flows from a central rectangular fountain via a system of glass-covered channels to four perimeter reflecting pools. Here, daylight penetrates deep into the plan.

The facade of the tower comprises three elements: the envelope for the building blocks, the glazing partition of the ‘gaps’ between the quadrants and the mushrabiyah screen. The cladding system used to enclose the main building blocks is composed of three panel types organised randomly to create a patterned face: vertical red opaque floor to ceiling panels, a horizontal spandrel panel in yellow (both these panels are of glazed ceramic) and a horizontal bronze-tinted double-glazed panel.

The glazing line that covers the gaps between the quadrants is set back from the facade to meet the line of the connection bridges. This keeps the glazing within the shadowed zone of the building’s volume and increases daylight penetration to the building’s core whilst limiting solar glare. Mushrabiyah-influenced screens are introduced where building blocks have been cut back; these overtly reference the regional architecture style and serve either as an open transition between inside and outside or as a glazed sunscreen.

The graphic power of the tower is revealed by night when the building is seen as though in negative: floodlighting pours through the vertical slots, highlighting the building’s structural dynamism.’

Scheme: 2004




14 Responses to “Dubai Tower By Grimshaw”

  1. Marc says:

    It is a fantastic buildung. I’m coming from Germany and I was in Dubai two weeks ago. I drove with a taxi 10 minutes through the sites. It was amazing, because next to the 800m tower they build some 400 m towers. We don’t have this in Germany here and I never saw so many new and gloryful buildungs in the making never on one place. Now we will see if all this will be sold and rented in economic crisis. In my point of view it was fantastic to see.

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  5. Agathe says:

    The people in Dubai are crazy… more money then brains ^^

  6. CamSex says:

    Dubai sucks, it’s a country with a lot off simple people.

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