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Andrew Bromberg at Aedas’s 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. Bromberg's involvement with the developer began when an engineer friend told him that developers in Dubai had an appetite for what he had been doing.Bromberg spoke with developer DAMAC and they gave him two weeks to produce a 72-floor, 60,000-sq m tower design. The engineers said it was do-able and he 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.Bromberg says, 'We had to stick with the original sketch design because that is what the developers were selling from and the same foundations because they has started digging. The only thing which could change was the building's height with all the implications of massively increased loadings and extensions to lifts and stairs and services. Fortunately that all turned out to be possible. And we got to understand that everything in Dubai is pre-sold.'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. Bromberg's 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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Andrew Bromberg at Aedas’s 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.
Bromberg's involvement with the developer began when an engineer friend told him that developers in Dubai had an appetite for what he had been doing.
Bromberg spoke with developer DAMAC and they gave him two weeks to produce a 72-floor, 60,000-sq m tower design. The engineers said it was do-able and he 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.
Bromberg says, 'We had to stick with the original sketch design because that is what the developers were selling from and the same foundations because they has started digging. The only thing which could change was the building's height with all the implications of massively increased loadings and extensions to lifts and stairs and services. Fortunately that all turned out to be possible. And we got to understand that everything in Dubai is pre-sold.'
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. Bromberg's 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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