Skip to main content

The Building That Put Dubai on the World Map (Part 1)

Burj Al-Arab 

Image: Maddie Braswell (Pinterest)


With the oil wealth of Dubai fast depleting, The City's ruler, Sheikh Muhammad bin-Rasheed Al-Maktoum envisioned a project to put Dubai on the map of the world as a tourist destination. For this to happen, Dubai needed an iconic hotel that was meant to be a symbol of beauty and luxury. At 321 meters this building is the tallest and arguably the most luxurious hotel in the world. 

The Design

The Sheikh wanted something so iconic that would make Dubai and essential tourist stop. For that purpose he hired a team of young, inexperienced but known for their unique designs, architects under the leadership of Tom Wright. This team did not disappoint the Sheikh by designing a building so simple and so elegant that it became the center piece of  Dubai's tourism industry.

While explaining the design process, Tom Wright said: "If you could draw a building simply, with a few strokes of the pen and it was instantly recognizable as not only the building but the place where it was, like the Egyptian Pyramids; you have created something iconic". He put his design to this simple test and found the solution to this ultimate dilemma of designing a simple but elegant building when he was sitting with his team having a beer on Dubai beach and saw a boat with its sails billowing in the wind. That was his Eureka moment. Thus he decided that the building would be in the shape of a sail billowing in the wind which was truly representative of the nature of Dubai.

The Island

To make the building look like giant yacht, Tom Wanted the building to raise from water. It meant that the building had to be built on a low elevation island of which Dubai had none. Keeping in view the adverse climate of the gulf, Tom's team was against the idea of building an offshore skyscraper on an artificial island but he was not to compromise. The debate between Tom Wright and his team was still going on when the Sheikh intervened and decided that the building will be built on an artificial island off the coast of Dubai.

This is all for today, in the next blog we will discuss the challenges faced by the construction team during various phases of construction of this engineering marvel.
Labels:
Location: Unnamed Road, Qadir Abad, Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

Popular posts from this blog

Can Urban Floods be Controlled?

Recent Floods in Pakistan On September 2, 2021, life in Karachi was brought to a standstill by heavy rainfall and urban flooding. Before that, two people in Islamabad lost their lives to urban floods on July 28th. Urban floods, especially during the monsoon season have become somewhat of a regular phenomenon in Pakistan for several years now and the situation is getting worse by the day. Getty Images/AFP/R. Tabassum Causes of Urban Flooding in Pakistan While discussing the causes of urban flooding, the most obvious that comes to mind is climate change. One can hear things like excessive rainfall with a high intensity almost immediately after the floods start unraveling the cities' infrastructure, often from those responsible for the administration of the cities hit by these floods. The issue to be discussed is whether climate change and change in rainfall patterns are the only things responsible for these floods or are there some deeper structural issues in our governance model tha...
Read more

Britain's first "Outstanding" building

One Angel Square One Angel Square is an office building in Manchester, United Kingdom. It is the UK’s first building with BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Impact Assessment) outstanding rating. Construction work on the building began in 2010 and ended in 2013. The total construction cost of the building amounted to £105 million ($156 million). Image by 3DReid Design One Angel Square is a triangular shaped building albeit, one with gently curved walls. The building is specially designed to reduce the carbon footprint as well as the energy consumption. It consists of two underground floors and 14 floors above the ground. Its roof is made by severing the walls beyond the tenth floor to provide a series of stepped terraces in the upper 4 floors. Natural light enters into the building through the glazed windows of the upper terraced floors. This natural light then spreads throughout the building by flooding the full height atrium. This building has a double skinned ...
Read more

Civil Engineering

  What comes to your mind when you hear these two words; Civil Engineering. I will tell you what comes to my mind, a vast network of roads, highrises like Burj Khalifa [1] , Dams [2] , and amazing infrastructure of railway tracks, communication towers, and much much more. In fact, we are surrounded by Civil Engineering in each and every aspect of our lives. It provides us with shelter in the form of our homes, when we want to travel to work or for recreation, it has given us the amazing network of roads and railway tracks and airport facilities. it will be safe to say that it was Civil Engineering that brought man out of the caves and gave him the ability to build August infrastructure and ease the lives of all of humanity.
Read more