Dubai will host the world’s first rotating skyscraper, designed by Italian’s Architect David Fisher, set to complete by 2010. It will rise 1380 feet into the air with 80 floors. The rotating floors will be made of prefabricated units that spin around a concrete core. By prefabricating the rotating units at least 10 per cent of normal construction costs will be saved.
Plans require the buildings to be self-powered by horizontal wind turbines that spin between each floor to generate electricity. Solar power will be provided by photovoltaic cells on the roof of each rotating floor, 15 per cent of which will be exposed to sunlight at any one time. Each turbine has the peak ability to produce around 0.2 megawatt hours of electricity. Given Dubai has an average of 4000 hours of wind annually, with an average wind speed of 16 km/h, the turbines are estimated to produce around 1,200,000 kilowatt-hours of energy per year. Four of the 48 turbines in the building will be enough to power the entire tower, leaving the other 44 to provide surplus energy back into Dubai's power grid.
Most of the floors will be controlled from the architect's laptop, so that they are synchronised to make undulating architectural forms. Each Floor will be a single apartment. Owners who buy an entire floor will be able to use voice activation controls to command it to rotate at will, so that they can change the shape according to the will. The spinning will not cause inhabitants permanent motion sickness because it will move very slowly. There will be office space, parking area and luxury hotels.
It is the first skyscraper, being created by the architect David Fisher. The second dynamic skyscraper will stand in Moscow, completion scheduled for 2010 followed by third in New York. The Moscow tower will have 70 floors and be 1,310 feet tall.
It has a unique construction process. Parts of Dubai’s skyscraper are being made in factories in Italy to then be shipped to Dubai. Most skyscrapers are built from the ground up, floor by floor but the spinning tower will be built in parallel stages. If one team of workers is developing the core, the other team will be busy prefabricating each floor in segments. The advantages of this method are that it consumes lesser time, fewer workers need to be on site at a time in difficult and dangerous conditions and each modular apartment can be easily customized.
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