Sunday, August 28, 2011

Dazzling Designs | The 0-14 Tower

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a place that has stunned the world with dozens of world records is coming out with a new, very unique structure called the 0-14 Tower. 

0-14 Tower by Reiser + Umemoto

Photo originally from Reiser + Umemoto

      This building is short (only about 22 stories) compared to Skidmore Owings & Merrill's Burj Khalifa, currently the record breaking and tallest skyscraper in the world at 2,717 feet high.  But this building is very unique.  It is designed by a group of New York architects Reiser + Umemoto.  It's curvy, outer shell marked with tons of holes is what makes this building different from all others.  0-14 is named after it's site number at the Buisness Bay.  Also, the 0-14's structure, mostly made out of concrete, has 1,326 holes with five different sizes.

0-14 Tower



    Archrecord.com said, "The ghostly white exoskeleton stands 3 feet away from an inner glass-walled enclosure that follows its swerving contours: The two are linked by structural concrete tongues. With a central stair and elevator core, the interiors are column-free, allowing each floor to provide 6,000 square feet (net) of office space to its tenants."

   Earlier in the 0-14's design history, the architects designed the tower to be an amorphous shape with glazed apertures.  But there was a major problem.  They couldn't place gaskets around the glass and connect the shaft to the concrete floors.  This made the architects develop a better double-layer structure.

0-14 Tower
  
   The exoskeleton of the 0-14 is tough.  Its lateral resistance to wind allows elevator core and concrete shell to be lighter than normal.  All the holes in the structure had to be layered with a dense amount of re-bar to keep the tower sturdy.  By tying the re-bar at intersections with stirrups in the zones of high stress, the team created a grid with 40 percent openness.

  Inside the 0-14 Tower, guests are protected in a 400,000 square foot space from the dust storms and sweltering heat, while still being able to get a great look outside.  The tower could become a role-model for new desert buildings.  It becomes obvious that this was expensive to build, even with the integrated cooling design, which saves on cooling costs.  But the tower's up-front investment was higher than the conventional structure.  "Like many high-rise buildings erected in far-flung places," Archrecord.com states, "the willingness of clients, particularly before the economic free fall of 2008, has encouraged a liberty to experiment that could provide technical and sustainable lessons for the next building boom. Whenever that comes."


- All Information and Pictures from archrecord.construction.com

2 comments:

  1. Thats pretty awesome, so its like art you can walk into basically?

    ReplyDelete