One of the more fascinating projects on display at Cityscape is the rotating tower, the first in the Middle East, being developed by High Rise Properties for the Jumeirah Village South project in Dubai.

Hussam Al-Emami, an engineer on the development, said the project is much more complicated than a single-story rotating restaurant because each of the top five floors of the 16-storey residential building will rotate independently.

Residents will be able to control whether they want their floor to rotate clockwise, counterclockwise, or stop altogether. The speed can also be set independently, which will allow residents to rotate their floor 360 degrees once every hour if they want an amusement park-like ride, or just once a day if they are in a more serene mood.

Al-Emami pointed out that not all of the floor will rotate. He said the best way to explain it is to picture the floor of the apartment like a running track, and only the outer lane (about 15 feet wide) nearest the window will rotate. He said the reason for this is that the rotation would disturb residents as they are eating or sleeping, so these areas remain stationary.

Interestingly, the outdoor elevator, which serves only the duplex on the building’s top floor, was initially conceived as a car port that would take the owner’s vehicle to the top floor. But the developer scrapped the idea after it determined that there would be little use for the vehicle on the top of the building.

Prices for the five rotating floors are not cheap. The four penthouse suites will cost between Dhs14-22 million. The duplex at the very top of the building is priced at about Dhs35 million. The building is expected to be complete at the end of 2009.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Cityscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.