Dubai Skyscraper : Images + Information

Iris Mist, Dubai, UAE - Architects: Atkins Dubai tower image © from Atkins We’ve become accustomed to the shapes of buildings doing all manner of things and Iris Mist is doing one very visible and wavy thing. The connection between ocean, waves and a wavy building is equally obvious and direct and, because of this, more universally comprehensible than the ocean-boat-porthole-window association familiar to architects. Even if we’ve never seen a building shaped like Iris Mist we could have easily imagined one – in fact structural engineers do all the time. Nevertheless, the feeling remains that buildings aren’t supposed to make shapes like this and this makes Iris Mist ever so slightly surreal. Dubai tower images © from Atkins Some of Atkins’ more recent buildings have floor plates that rotate or warp, requring the use of stacked inclined columns to transfer vertical loads. The floor plates of Iris Mist For are relatively constant in shape and so, for all the curviness of its facades, nearly all vertical loads can be transferred by the core and two shear walls. These shear walls protrude past the façade on the lower half of the east and the upper half of the west elevations where they are at their most concave. They do enhance the transfer of vertical loads but their contribution to visual stability is equally crucial by providing vertical lines of reference against which the ebb and flow of the façade can be gauged. Instead of arbitrary distortion the building has rhythmic movement. Iris Mist is configured as a 6-storey podium and 49-storey tower but deviates from type in that the 200m tower springs from ground level with apartments beginning from as low as the second floor, above the double-height entrance lobby. What appears to be a five-storey retail and apartment building on one side of this lobby and a seven-storey office building on the other is actually the periphery of seven levels of car parking. The façades of this podium follow the same logic as the tower above but the overriding metaphor has the waves of the ocean rocking the horizontal podium which in turn makes the tower wave in sympathetic motion.