The Moving Skyscraper of Dubai

Moving Towers

First Published Date: May 22, 2010

No, you did not read that wrong. There is indeed a skyscraper being built, which will be completed this year, which moves. It doesn’t move around the city but each floor within the skyscraper does move, giving the skyscraper a consistently changing shape. Called the Dynamic Tower, it is the first such skyscraper in the world to be called a moving skyscraper.

Designed by David Fisher, the tower has 80 floors and each floor spins on a central column for a total of 360 degrees. Each apartment in the tower is expected to cost between $3.7 million and $36 million, with the total cost of the Dynamic Tower reaching roughly $800 million.

Each floor of the tower rotates independently of other floors, completing a full rotation in the space of about 90 minutes. Each floor rotates at the speed of roughly 20 feet per minute. One of the more interesting aspects of this tower is that it is the world’s first prefabricated skyscraper. What this means is that the tower is made up of 40 factory-built modules for each floor and 90 percent of The Dynamic Tower will be built in a factory and shipped to Dubai. Amazingly, this allows the tower to be built in the space of just under two years, which is truly monumental and 30 percent faster than what a typical 80 storey skyscraper takes to be built. The only part that is built at the construction site is the central core that the floors all spin on.

This also makes construction of the tower much safer for workers since most workers will be located in factories where they preinstall kitchen and bathroom fixtures, along with pretty much everything else that the apartments in the tower need.

Now, the really cool thing about The Dynamic Tower is that it is extremely environmentally-friendly. Water is recycled within the tower and the entire tower is powered by wind turbines and solar panels. This gives enough surplus electricity for Dubai to power five other 80-story buildings within the vicinity of The Dynamic Tower. Each floor will have turbines hooked up to harvest the high winds located well-above ground level. In theory, these turbines could generate 1.2 million kilowatt-hours of energy. Each floor will also have solar panels attached to the roof.

For the people who live near the tower, they will never be bored by the look of it. The designers say that the tower will never have the same look at any time in its life. So, when you see it, you are seeing something that will never look that way again. A truly revolutionary concept that could change how skyscrapers look, are powered and are made from now on.

This concept of moving towers has proven to be so popular that there are already plans for a 70-story moving tower to be built in Moscow. It won’t be long before these moving skyscrapers are being made across the United States either.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the realestateexpedition.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to A Dawn Journal. This article originally published on the above website on May 22, 2010.