Dubai Skyscraper : Images + Information

P17 Tower, Dubai, UAE - Atkins unveil super slim design Leading international architecture and engineering firm, Atkins is designing a super slim tower which gives the illusion of constantly changing its appearance with the movement of people and the sun. Located on the city’s main artery, Sheikh Zayed Road, the Atkins designed ‘P-17’ makes another strong statement in adding to both Atkins’ and Dubai’s growing portfolio of landmark buildings. Standing tall at 379 metres, the tower’s darker front facade rises from the ground and twists slightly in a striking glass and steel design. Behind the elegant form, increasingly taller blades gently splay outwards, conveying the appearance of layered planes which dynamically move sideways to produce a challenging, gravity-defying form. P 17 Dubai - Tower Building : information 13 May 2008 from Atkins, Architects P17 Tower, Dubai, U.A.E. Client: Tasameem Real Estate Co. LLC Area: 140,000 sq.m Type: Mixed use (17 office floors, five star hotel, 74 serviced apartments, 176 residential apartments) P17 Tower is either a very retro building or a very optimistic building for its takes shape-making as the core act of architecture – a free and independent act parallel to understanding the overall task. This particular shape abstracts each of the emirates as a vertical layer of a massive monolith. Rotating these about a shared horizontal axis gives varying degrees of constancy and dynamism – a metaphor for the seven emirates’ interdependence and unity forming the basis for the national identity. Even without these associations, P17 Tower’s value as architecture comes from its strength as a concept and not from any decadence of structure or process for the concept readily translated into a building of planar surfaces and columns that line up. Side extensions of staggered height add office and retail area but also contain the apparent rotation induced by the emphasized ‘verticals’ on the side elevations and the downplayed horizontals on the front and rear. P17 Tower is a very slender skyscraper with its height to width ratio of 12:1 requiring considerable art to access and service the multiple high-end uses stacked inside. Starting from ground level, there are three floors of retail space, 17 floors of office space and a health club, 26 floors of hotel, 7 floors of serviced apartments, 16 floors of rental apartments and, finally, two floors of VIP zone. Two service floors separate each zone. The hotel zone has ‘back of house’ on floors 23 and 24, lobby, restaurant and lounge spaces making up the Sky Atrium spanning floors 25 and 31, and guest rooms on floors 32 through 49. This Sky Atrium is the true centre of P17 Tower. Its seven levels cantilever over each other and around a seven-storey atrium facing the sea. One third of the way up the building, it is a zone of elevation incident during the day but at night becomes a zone of activity and light. Since the birth of the skyscraper and Louis Sullivan’s vertical division of them into base, shaft and pediment, a disproportionate amount of architectural endeavour has been concentrated on the pediment – some progression or flourish at the top that terminates it. Paradoxically, P17 Tower reinvents skyscrapers by revealing their natural centre of gravity and bringing them down to earth. P 17 Tower Dubai - Building Facts Client: Tasameem Group Location: Sheikh Zayed Road - Dubai Facilities: Mixed use (17 office floors, five star hotel, 74 serviced apartments, 176 residential apartments) Total built-up area: 165,327 m2 Height: 379m Tower: 81 Storeys (3B + 1 + 77 floors) Car parking block: (3B + G + 10 floors) Status: Preliminary Design Stage Construction start: Nov 2008 Expected completion: Nov 2011