Design
The original design conceived by Pei Partnership Architects was to have 631,000 m2 (6,790,000 sq ft) of floorspace comprising ultra-luxury apartments, restaurants, a large health club, and an observation deck. The building actually consisted of three separate towers built around a hollow interior and joined together by several sky bridges functioning as sky lobbies. On top of each sky bridge was a sky garden. One of the towers was shorter than the other two with a large outdoor pool on the roof, while the other two were topped with large spires.
A later redesign had the basic shape remain the same - three towers connected by sky bridges with two twin spires and one tower shorter than the others. As for the number of sky bridges, the original design showed only 4, but later renderings showed at first 6, then 9 or 10. The building was also to be mixed-use rather than wholly residential.
With Woods Bagot replacing Pei Partnership as the architectural partner, the latest released design had named the development Nakheel Harbour and Tower. Though in exterior appearance and function it would be a single tower over 1,000 metres (3,300 ft) tall, this even grander incarnation would have been "made up of four towers with four individual cores forming an approximate 100 meters in diameter." Nakheel also claimed on their engineering page that the towers would be joined by four-level, full diameter sky bridges at approximately every twenty-five floors. The sky bridges would act to tie the buildings together structurally as well as to provide each part of the building with its own village centre in the sky. It is the four codependent foundations that would have provided the necessary structural support for such a great relative height increase over existing supertalls. The design included a distinctive crescent-shaped podium encircling the base of the tower.
The tower would have been serviced by 156 lifts at sufficient speeds and capacities to allow for travel from the ground floor to the observation deck in four minutes.
Read more about this topic: Nakheel Tower
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)