NEW YORK - An Italian architect said he is poised to start building a skyscraper in Dubai that will be "the world's first building in motion," an 80-story tower with revolving floors that give it an ever-shifting shape.
The spinning floors, hung like rings around an immobile cement core, would offer residents an ever-changing view of the Persian Gulf and the city's futuristic skyline.
A voice-activated computer would spin a few penthouse villas. The rest of the building's motion would be choreographed in patterns that could be altered over time.
At a New York news conference on Tuesday, the designer, David Fisher, declared that his tower will revolutionize the way skyscrapers are made.
Mr. Fisher acknowledges that he is not well-known, has never built a skyscraper, and hasn't practiced architecture regularly in decades. But his project has drawn top design talent, including Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer for the World Trade Center and the Shanghai World Financial Center.
"I did not design skyscrapers, but I feel ready to do so," Mr. Fisher said.
Twisting floors are just one of several futuristic features in the building, the first of several Mr. Fisher hopes to build with a similar design. Wind turbines installed between each floor, he said, will generate enough electricity to power the entire building, and lifts will allow penthouse residents to park their cars at their apartments.
A second version, to be built in Moscow, would have a retractable helicopter pad. Both structures, at more than 1,300 feet, would be taller than the Empire State Building.
Even the method of construction would be unorthodox.
Mr. Fisher said each floor will be prefabricated in an Italian factory and then shipped to the site to be attached to the core. Assembling a building in this fashion, he said, will require only 80 technicians and take only 20 months, saving tens of millions of dollars, for a total cost of $700 million to build.
On its face, the project seems to pose a number of complicated engineering puzzles.
How would the plumbing hookups work in an apartment that is constantly moving? Mr. Fisher said the pipes will connect to the core via attachments like the ones used by military aircraft for in-flight refueling.
Wouldn't people get dizzy? No, Mr. Fisher said. The rotations will be slow enough that no one will notice.
With so many moving parts, wouldn't the building be a maintenance nightmare? He said the modular construction will allow easy access to parts that need to be replaced.
Mr. Robertson, who attended the news conference, said the skyscraper might be unusual, but is "absolutely" buildable. "You can build anything," he said.
Mr. Fisher declined to say where in Dubai the tower will be built or when site work might start. He insisted, however, that factory production is set to start within weeks and that the tower, which will contain office space, a luxury hotel, and apartments, will be complete by 2010.
Sales of individual apartments will begin in September, with asking prices of around $3,000 per square foot. The smallest, at 1,330 square feet, would cost about $4 million and the largest, a 12,900-square-foot villa, $38.7 million.
Skeptics might question Mr. Fisher's credentials to pull off the job. In a biography he had been distributing, he said he graduated from the University of Florence in 1976, came to New York in the mid-1980s, and later developed hotels and ran a firm specializing in stone and prefabricated construction materials.
The biography also said he received an honorary doctorate from "The Prodeo Institute at Columbia University in New York." No such institution exists and Columbia said it had not given him an honorary degree.
Mr. Fisher said through his publicists that he had been awarded the degree by the Catholic University of Rome in 1994 at Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, which is near Columbia's campus. Asked again to clarify the school's name, his publicists said in an e-mail that the information has been removed from his bio.
Source: Toledoblade.com
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