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The Oval Tower, Another Landmark For Dubai Posted Jun 1st 2007 The Oval Tower is the latest piece of architectural whimsy to come out of Dubai. As you might guess, it is shaped like an oval. The tower in the Business Bay area will be home to 19 floors of office space and a leisure deck with a gymnasium with a sauna, shower and lockers. The building as two distinct parts, the tower and the podium. The podium of the tower will hold a dining area with a panoramic lift and staircase. There will be parking in both the podium and the basement for 651 cars. |
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Floating Tower Planned For Dubai The past month has seen once again the extravagance of Dubai architecture hit the headlines. First we had the tower that spins and just recently we had the Death Star inspired building. Now Dubai has gone further and decided to have a building that seems to float above the ground. A little more digging and i find its from the makers of the iPad Tower, Omniyat Properties, who have a range of eye catching developments and have now added the Opus to their stunning portfolio! The Opus will cost a staggering $266.7 million and Omniyat said the Opus would appear to hover above the ground. Furthermore, The 22-storey development will consist of three separate towers designed to appear as a single cube-shaped structure. The structure will also feature an asymmetrical hole through its centre, dubbed “the void”, which will be clad in reflective curved glass. |
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Rem Koolhaas's Dubai Deathstar by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 05.21.07 Design & Architecture We show a lot of proposals for buildings in Dubai, often draped in photovoltaics and covered in propellers, or twisting and turning, it is a Disneyland of architecture. Sometimes we think they are going a bit overboard, as they evolve from Disney to Lucas with buildings like OMA's Ras al Khaimah Convention and Exhibition Centre. We have used Picasso's bon mot, updated by Le Corbusier before: "Good architects borrow but great architects steal" but never was the homage so obvious. Architectspeak below the fold. So far the 21st century – in a desperate effort to differentiate one building from the next – has been characterized by a manic production of extravagant shapes. Paradoxically, the result is a surprisingly monotonous urban substance, where any attempt at ‘difference’ is instantly neutralized in a sea of meaningless architectural gestures. RAK is confronted with an important choice: Does it join so many others in this mad, futile race or does it become the first to offer a new credibility? This project represents a final attempt at distinction through architecture:not through the creation of the next bizarre image, but through a return to pure form. ::OMA via my favourite source for wild and crazy architecture. Note: Gravestmor suggests that it is not modelled on the deathstar, but on a Panasonic radio from 1972, five years before the first Star Wars movie, calling it "the little Japanese radio that could." |
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Hydropolis Underwater Hotel The £300 million Hydropolis Underwater Hotel opens this month Naveen | Dec 12 2007 The news in the air is that the world’s first luxury underwater hotel, the Hydropolis Undersea Resort, is all set to open its doors in Dubai this December. The £300 million, 220-suite hotel is a one of its kind resort, which will encompass a whopping 1.1-million-square-foot of area offering shopping mall, ballroom, island villas, restaurant, high-tech cinema and surprisingly, a missile-defense system for your security 60-feet underwater. Located 20m beneath the surface of the Arabian Gulf near the scenic Jumeirah Beach coastline, the underwater hotel offers 220 theme suites to the tourists within the submarine leisure complex. The resort is designed with a petal-like retracting roof to organize open-sky events. The land on which Hydropolis is being built belongs to His Highness General Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai. The original idea for Hydropolis popped out of its designer Joachim Hauser’s passion for water and the sea. Interestingly, guests won’t need to dive in order to reach the luxurious resort. Instead, they will be transported by trains via connecting tunnels to the Land Station. The undersea resort also has a children’s seaworld. A ballroom links every storey of the hotel and has been fixed with a petal-like retracting roof for staging of open-air events. Let’s see if the news is true this time as we have already heard of it to be opening-up in December 2006 and the news turned out to be fake. Crescent Hydropolis Resorts PLC has plans of lining up a chain of similar-concept underwater hotels that have already attracted interest from several countries. Check out our list of top 10 futuristic luxury hotels. Special thanks to http://www.eikongraphia.com/ |
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iPod, by Cybertecture.jpg) The human mind has it tricks. When you first read ‘a building that looks like a giant iPod’, and after that you look at the image, you project what you’ve just learned on the thing you look at. If you read in a museum it’s a Rembrandt, who’s to question that?  If the rumor hits the newsstands before the images do, such as with this project that has been unveiled for Dubai, all blogs and magazine repeat after each other ‘It’s an iPod’, while it looks more like the Fashion Line of Nokia, a reference we’ve seen before on Eikongraphia with the BBC Music Center of Foreign Office Architects. The building even reads in the top ‘iPad’, in case you would overlook the iconography. Agreed, the overall form, the rounded edges, the tilted form (6 degrees), look somewhat like an iPod in a dock, but what if you hadn’t read the headline of this post? The project is being designed by Hong Kong architect James Law, who thinks himself as doing ‘cybertecture’, which means – according to the interiors he decorated until this project – installing a lot of colorful lamps, displays, interactivity, etc. The nineties are coming back, it seems. The building specifications: 23-story, 200 apartments, completion in 2009, and located in the Business Bay area around the Burj Dubai, the 800+ meter high tower designed by SOM. Before the first pictures of the iPad arrived rumors crossed the gadget websites, and the visualization firm Archpartners even made a nice rendering of a possible iPod building. Ironically it looks better than the proposed building with its abstract square and round framing in the façade. It made me think of some projects by Louis Kahn. The balcony with the trees is ridiculous off course. Will Apple release next year a special ‘iPad’ edition of the iPod? Rumors have it that a developer in Australia works on a 34-story apartment building shaped like a mobile phone, “complete with rooftop antenna and enormous buttons.” Special thanks to http://www.eikongraphia.com/ |
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Iris Bay The British architectural firm W.S. Atkins has designed a 170-meter 32-story tower called ‘Iris Bay’ for Dubai. The construction of the building has started last week. The building is sited in the Central Business District of Dubai; a zone of towers called Business Bay that folds around the Burj Dubai, the 808-meter tower designed by SOM. The iconography of the project is – as the name ‘Iris Bay’ seems to indicate – the pupil of an eye. The elliptical form refers not to the round human pupil however but to something different. It could be the pupil of a cat’s eye. The eye of the Tiger? After the Asian Tiger, now a Middle-Eastern Panther? If we would stretch it the blue Dubai-sky could be the blue iris, while the building acts as the pupil. Another reading might suggest the correspondence to the Eye of Sauron of Peter Jackson’s movie-trilogy Lord of the Rings. And more ironically one could suggest Iris Bay looks like the eye of a crocodile or a snake, whose (imitated) skin is used for the exclusive purses that the wealthy Dubai buy. The references to the eye of a panthers, tigers, snakes, and crocodiles gives the building a positive charge of exclusivity and exoticism that fits Dubai. Is this reading too far ‘out there’, and am I overlooking a more obvious reading? Leave a comment if you have an idea! A friend of me suggests it looks more like a seed or nut (such as an Amandel), a flower (like an iris) or even a vulva. That would make the third vagina-building then. |
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Dubai Renaissance project |
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There are currently not many buildings being designed that oblige a critic
to refer to Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, simply because the
design has a so obvious relation to that heritage. The Dubai Renaissance
project by OMA/Rem Koolhaas is such a project. In a sense the design is very contextual as the Gulf States, Dubai included, have loads of slabs from the sixties and seventies. This one fits right in, even enhances the existing Modernist architecture. In scale it is really something else though. With a projected height of 300 meters it is almost as high as the Eiffel Tower. Compared to the adjacent 700 meters of the Burj Dubai it seems not that huge, but if you compared it to the original Unité d’Habitation of Le Corbusier it is six times higher. Six times! The Dubai Renaissance is also twice the height of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. It is a scale that is almost unimaginable, for a slab. We could say it would be the biggest slab on earth, creating a new league in addition to the ‘highest building’ and the ‘highest structure’. Proposing the biggest slab ever is a smart way to beat the competition. When everybody else makes form, you do abstraction. When everybody else makes towers, you do a slab. In the words of OMA: “The ambition of this project is to end the current phase of architectural idolatry – the age of the icon – where obsession with individual genius far exceeds commitment to the collective effort that is needed to construct the city… Instead of an architecture of form and image, we have created a reintegration of architecture and engineering, where intelligence is not invested in effect, but in a structural and conceptual logic that offers a new kind of performance and functionality. So far, the 21st century trend in city building leads to a mad and meaningless overdose of themes, extremes, egos and extravagance. What is needed is a new beginning, a Renaissance… Dubai is confronted by its most important choice: Does it join so many others in this mad, futile race or does it become the first 21st century metropolis to offer a new credibility? […] It proposes a single monolithic volume constructed, like an elevator core, in one continuous operation – 200 meters wide and 300 meters tall [comprising of offices and business forums, hotel and residential suites, retail, art and urban spaces]. Instead of competing with the Burj Dubai merely in terms of height, it overshadows it in terms of presence and substance…” The presented arguments repeat the old dogmas of Modernism: - The box is the most functional form for program and construction. - Architecture can and must build the community. That latter point, the community, is ‘solved’ with vertical streets. Pretty much like Le Corbusier did in his first Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, before he found out that it did not work and left it out in his later projects. OMA has put three double-story lobbies on different heights in the building: 1. A Business Forum in the middle of the first half of the slab, which is programmed with offices. 2. A Wellness Lobby in the middle of the upper half of the slab that is programmed halfly with a hotel, and halfly with condo’s. 3. A (public?) Panorama Lobby is placed on top of it all. Ingenious is the plan to enliven these air-‘streets’ by making three elevator shafts. The middle one stops only at the ’streets’. From there one walks to one of the other two cores to step in a lift that will bring you to your office, hotel-room, or house. Stunning, really. What if Le Corbusier had thought of that? Then maybe his shopping street in the air had worked. It would then not be ‘just an elevator stop away’, but actually something you would pass anyway on your way to your house. It will take however some courage from the developer and future-owner to actually implement such a traffic system. Because if you work on the second floor, you have to get first all the way up, then walk back the other elevator shaft, and then go back again, all the way down. Taking the emergency stairs would be an alternative, but the bottom line is that it would transform the whole concept of moving through a skyscraper. That is playing with psychology. Though OMA suggests its design is a subversive statement against the status quo of icon building, the paradox is off course their design is the most iconic one we have seen in a while. The main characteristic of the icon is not form, but difference. Difference by inventions in form, or difference just for the difference - as here is the case. By being abstract, by being a slab, and by being the biggest slab, this design is triple different. The bigness (in flatness and slenderness) comes with a big ‘awe’ that makes the project instantly attractive. A property all icons have. In addition to that, I think the project has the beauty Modernism was invented for. In a competition once held in Rotterdam there was an entry with the rightful title: ‘Silence is Sexy.’ In the case of OMA there are literal aspects to that sentence. In the ‘Content’ book there is an image of the Seagram Building with two Photoshopped tits hanging out of the façade. Here in Dubai it seems one of the tits has made it – be it smaller and more stylized - into the actual proposal… Or doesn’t it? Another bad joke would be to suggest with this project the Modernist slab is finally literally cut loose from its context, as the proposed building is supposed to turn. The renderings however show a nicely cut landscape in which the project is granted a premier location, including a ring of ‘spectator’ high-rises. According to the website of OMA the status of the project is that of an ‘ongoing concept.’ I hope the project will make it to reality. I just realize that the Renaissance building is both retro (Modernist) and an improvement of that retro (bigger, better, bolder). Turning back to early Modernism and reworking it can result in something new, something that is again contemporary. Like the Italian Renaissance was a re-appropriation of the Roman architecture, this ‘Renaissance’ is a redoing of Modernism. As a design method it is a step back to the time before Modernism when reworking and improving historic examples was all the practice there was. Now Modernism has become our architectural history. Special thanks to http://www.eikongraphia.com/ |
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| Dubai Towers |
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“The four towers, ranging from 54 to 97 floors, are clustered to form a
choreographed sculpture, representing the movement of candlelight”, the
architect write in their press release from January this year. A “[…] dramatic, […] sophisticated, […] innovative, […] creative, […] inspired, […] cutting-edge, […] bold, […] exceptional, […] landmark”, it also reads. The architecture firm Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback and Associates (who?), TVS Associates (oh, they!), try hard, and play hard. Dubai Towers is definitely the next thing in architecture form, after Foster’s iconic Swiss Re tower in central London. It is mystery why the architects thought it was necessary to come up with the candlelight-iconography. Maybe confused by Charles Jencks’ Iconic Building, they thought: ‘We need that too.’ Well girls and guys, you really don’t need that! Candlelight… that looks totally different, it is not related to the program (offices, and hotels), it is not derived from the context, and most of all: where is the virtue? One better not suggest the connection ‘office building – fire’. Look at the design, like you need any iconography! There is enough already. The towers twist, wave and taper. All at the same time. Note that the twisting is hardly visible, it is really subtle. Swiss Re merely suggested the twisting, Dubai Towers does it. And the effect is enormous. It is for the first time in architecture history – as far as I know – these three parameters are combined in reality. Dubai Towers take architectural form to a new level. AMO shows the project repeatedly in ‘Al Manakh’, because for them it symbolizes the definite step in the prevalence of form. The only step left, OMA proposes, is to get back to the modernist slab. ‘The game is over’, Koolhaas says. I don’t think so. The rejection by OMA should be read as a compliment for the project. There is so much more advancement in form left. Color, lines, skeletons, relief, screens, dents, holes, etcetera; this is just the beginning. There must be noted something else about the Dubai Towers in Dubai. The developer Sama has announced other ‘Dubai Towers’ in Doha (Qatar), Casablanca (Morocco), and Istanbul (Turkey). The developments in Dubai have become a brand in itself, which in its turn can simply be exported over Muslim countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Postscript: Every distinct form evokes iconography, Dubai Towers also. When browsing Flickr I found this photograph of a gate with forms that looked very familiar… To pinpoint an iconography for this project that actually fits is not necessary, but the candlelight nonsense triggered by me the question for a more appropriate metaphor. The metaphor of ‘tentacles’ (of some sort of monster, I suppose), that I read at Skyscrapernews is funny but not right. Personally I played with the idea of ‘flames’ or ‘seaweed’. That is not really it, but crucial for me is that the twisting and waving form of the project reminds me of something that moves in the wind. And that is a nice image. |
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