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The 82-storey Ocean Heights apartment building in the upmarket Dubai Marina area is super-tall: at 310 m it is the fifth tallest residential building in the world. Not content with just being tall, the building has a dramatic twist which is both a kind of visual metaphor and a physical reality. It is as if a giant hand has grasped the top of an originally square-planned tower and rotated it, forcing the column to deform all the way down.Aedas spoke with developer DAMAC and they gave us two weeks to produce a 72-floor, 60,000-sq m tower design. The engineers said it was do-able and we started work on the structural design. Then all of a sudden the developers said they wanted 82 floors. This was for a building 310 metres high. And they wanted its design completed in a week. They had already sold apartments off plan. And they had started selling from the bottom of the building effectively locking in every floor above.One of the client's major requirements was that the building's apartment layouts had to be consistent. That was not obviously possible with the building's feature twist. Aedas way of dealing with this was to establish a system of standard four-metre wide modules. Their sides stack up all the way down the building, with only the front part of the module changing to produce the exterior twist. This simplified the structural system and reduced the amount of construction materials.The tower’s front elevation that faces the ocean is clad in glass sounds counter-intuitive in this very hot climate. But the glass comes as insulated panels with a lowE coating which provides shading from the sun. Both insulation and coating reduce the need for mechanical cooling and allow natural daylighting.The building's twist starts at base on three of the four sides.The fourth side remains constantly orthogonal all the way up. By the fiftieth floor the building has over-topped its neighbors and the effect of the twist is to reduce the size of the elevation facing south west thus reducing solar gain. Equally importantly on level 50 and above it brings apartments, which at lower levels faced uninteresting views, round to view the ocean and Dubai's most northerly Palm Isle.

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79,710 sq m
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Bentley Design International Property Award Best Architecture 2005
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What we do / Architecture / Mixed use / Xihongmen Mixed-use Development, Da Xing District
Ocean Heights
Dubai / UAE
Gross area of the entire development
79,710 sq m
Completion year
2011
Gross area of the entire development
79,710 sq m
Completion year
2011
Location
Location
Location

The 82-storey Ocean Heights apartment building in the upmarket Dubai Marina area is super-tall: at 310 m it is the fifth tallest residential building in the world. Not content with just being tall, the building has a dramatic twist which is both a kind of visual metaphor and a physical reality. It is as if a giant hand has grasped the top of an originally square-planned tower and rotated it, forcing the column to deform all the way down.


Aedas spoke with developer DAMAC and they gave us two weeks to produce a 72-floor, 60,000-sq m tower design. The engineers said it was do-able and we started work on the structural design. Then all of a sudden the developers said they wanted 82 floors. This was for a building 310 metres high. And they wanted its design completed in a week. They had already sold apartments off plan. And they had started selling from the bottom of the building effectively locking in every floor above.


One of the client's major requirements was that the building's apartment layouts had to be consistent. That was not obviously possible with the building's feature twist. Aedas way of dealing with this was to establish a system of standard four-metre wide modules. Their sides stack up all the way down the building, with only the front part of the module changing to produce the exterior twist. This simplified the structural system and reduced the amount of construction materials.


The tower’s front elevation that faces the ocean is clad in glass sounds counter-intuitive in this very hot climate. But the glass comes as insulated panels with a lowE coating which provides shading from the sun. Both insulation and coating reduce the need for mechanical cooling and allow natural daylighting.

The building's twist starts at base on three of the four sides.


The fourth side remains constantly orthogonal all the way up. By the fiftieth floor the building has over-topped its neighbors and the effect of the twist is to reduce the size of the elevation facing south west thus reducing solar gain. Equally importantly on level 50 and above it brings apartments, which at lower levels faced uninteresting views, round to view the ocean and Dubai's most northerly Palm Isle.

Winning Awards
2012
Finalist, Future Residential Project
2005
What we do / Architecture / Mixed use / Xihongmen Mixed-use Development, Da Xing District
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Ocean Heights
What we do / Architecture / Mixed use / Xihongmen Mixed-use Development, Da Xing District
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