Like Spinning Plates

Dubai is a city built by press releases, where buildings flicker into life and disappear like struck matches. Some, like SOM’s Burj Dubai, are built the old fashioned way, with a design chosen by an international competition. But for most prestige buildings the concept comes first, with engineers and architects brought in to test their feasibility only after the brochures are printed. If such a concept secures a financial backer, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee it will be realised. Anantara Towers, a set of three flame-like skyscrapers beside the artificial Jumeirah Lakes, made it to the construction stage but died on the slab when the site was mysteriously boarded up and abandoned. It was instantly deleted from the developer’s website and never mentioned again, though it leaves a trail of footnotes and broken links on wiki sites and blogs. It is a building culture reminiscent of Monty Python’s El Mystico, a magician and architect who erects council flats using the power of hypnosis, that fall down when people cease to believe in them. “You don’t mind,” one of his tenants is asked, “living in a figment of another man’s imagination?”

David Fisher, an Israeli-Italian architect with an unplaceable accent and an unplaceable name, is determined to take his own pet concept toward realisation. Fisher dreams of skyscrapers in which entire floors rotate independently around a concrete core, skyscrapers which follow the sun, or simply respond to the whims of their residents for a different view. Like a stack of roughly assembled playing cards, Fisher’s Dynamic Tower would be a collection of eighty uneven and overlapping floor plates, approximately triangular in plan, falling in and out of alignment as residents pause or reverse the spin of their apartments. With its semi-detached floors, Fisher imagines these buildings being almost entirely prefabricated, with 2000 steel and aluminium living modules hoisted up into place and fixed mechanically to the core. In between each of the floors, Fisher would tuck horizontal wind turbines and fix solar panels on the outstretched rooftops, making the building net energy-positive. Dubai was an ideal host for this concept, Fisher says, because “they did in the desert what other people would have said impossible”.

In late June 2008, Fisher gathered together architecture and real estate journalists for a press conference in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Plaza Hotel. This was intended not just as a launch, but as an event: day one of a revolution. Fisher was impeccably turned out, his dignified quiff of grey hair offsetting a calm and gently humour-filled face. Behind the podium, and again in interviews for evening news bulletins, he argued forcefully for the tower’s imminent material reality. Not one but two of his Dynamic Towers had already been commissioned, he told the press, for Dubai as well as Moscow; expressions of interest were also being fielded from Swiss, German, Canadian, Italian and Korean cities. He introduced a heavyweight name as his head structural engineer – Leslie E. Robertson, who engineered the Twin Towers, and most recently the Shanghai World Financial Centre. Alongside Robertson was Bosch Rexroth, a German engineering firm specialising in automation. The team was light on specifics, but full of confidence. “You can build anything”, said Robertson.

The Dynamic Tower’s financial viability rests on its capacity for duplication. A factory will produce the living modules and outfit them with services and appliances – a small but important shift in the IR environment of the Dubai building industry. Only ninety workers will be required to lift and attach the modules to the tower’s concrete core, with each floor completed in only a week, and total building time cut from 30 to 18 months. The process reduces costs, improves quality and standardisation, and makes for a cleaner building site. And if some of the expressions of interest turn into deals, the factory system will form the basis of a Dynamic Tower franchise, churning out and shipping living modules round the world.

Fisher’s tower is not an entirely out-of-theblue idea. Belgian eccentric François Massau built one of the earliest revolving homes in the 1950s, to regulate the internal temperature of his home, and to ensure his invalid wife could always look out at the sunshine. The foundations and roof of the home were fixed, while the middle pivoted on a steel track powered by an electric motor – a mechanism that still works today. One of Massau’s greatest problems was connecting utilities to pipes and electrics beneath the floor and ensuring they would function even as the house turned. It is a problem Fisher now confronts on a grand scale.

The press in the Grand Ballroom peppered Fisher with such problems. If there is more than one apartment per floor, who controls the rotation? (A: Only the top-level penthouses will occupy whole floors and manage their own rotation. The rest will spin according to computerised presets.) And what about electricity delivery? And maintenance? And loading on the central core? How much power could the wind turbines actually generate? Would they be noisy?

Certainly the technology and components exist to make the tower theoretically feasible, and Robertson listed a number of solutions under consideration. The plumbing could be simplified by using the sprinkler system as the backbone for piping in all the building’s cold water requirements, and heating the water close to where it’s used. Like fighter jet mid-air refuelling operations, apartments could hook in to the sprinkler system using a flex-connector whenever more water is needed. Power can be delivered to the moving units in a similar way a moving train picks up power through a third rail or overhead line. Many appliances can be delivered power wirelessly.

Whether the power needed to turn the tower’s floor plates can be covered by integrated green power stations is, however, highly debatable. Dubai has 4000 hours of wind per year at an average speed of 16km/h, and each of the 79 turbines is expected to produce 0.3 megawatt hours of electricity. But one expert in the field told New Civil Engineer, “There is not a hope in hell that the energy generated from wind loading would create enough power to move the floors. A stationary unit has an enormous amount of inertia to overcome”. Indeed, while Fisher says the tower will sell power back to the grid at maximum output, it will still need to be connected to the grid to meet all of its power needs.

As for the in situ-cast concrete core on which the building relies, Robertson is convinced a straight, non-tapering tube with varying wall thicknesses will support the tower’s maximum dynamic loading. A huge volume of simulations will have to be run to test wind effects for each of the tower’s nearly endless permutations. But the tower’s changeability has one benefit, with the building able to snap into a pre-programmed protective shape in high winds, defusing the small pockets of low pressure that can rattle skyscrapers back and forth.

So: theoretically feasible, but will it actually be built? The tower’s credibility was dealt a serious blow when the Associated Press discovered Dr Fisher wasn’t a doctor as he’d claimed, and that the “Prodeo Institute” at Columbia University that awarded him his honorary doctorate doesn’t in fact exist. Fisher has never built a skyscraper, nor any major project, though he does have experience in prefabrication and construction. He founded the New York-based design firm Fiteco Ltd in the 1980s, and developed the prefabricated “Smart Bathroom” for the Leonardo Group. “I did not design skyscrapers but I feel completely ready to do so,” he assured the press at the Plaza. Fisher’s panhistorical rhetoric – frequently invoking the pyramids and Leonardo da Vinci in promotional videos set to Richard Strauss – is almost charming for its lack of slickness, and it defines his role as ideas man and salesperson. It is apparently Robertson and his team that are doing the heavy lifting. And it will be their perseverance that determines whether the Dynamic Tower becomes an improbable engineering coup, or merely a figment of another man’s imagination. +

1 A view showing the uneven, overlapping floor plates and the spaces set aside for green power production. Exposed areas on the roofs will be given over to solar voltaic cells, while gaps between each floor will be filled by horizontal wind turbines. 2 The unusually-shaped floor plate, which will pivot around an in situ-cast concrete core. Services will flow through the core, with various technological strategies being developed to bring water and electricity into individual units. The designers promise that tenants will be able to take their vehicles up to their floors in large carlifts. 3 to 5 Views of Moscow’s Dynamic Tower and its programmed rotations. A huge volume of simulations will have to be run to test wind effects for each of the tower's nearly endless permutations.

IMAGES courtesy and copyright of David Fisher, Dynamic Architecture