The 82-storey Ocean Heights apartment building in the upmarket Dubai Marina area is super-tall: at 310 m it is the fifth tallest residential building in the world. Not content with just being tall, the building has a dramatic twist which is both a kind of visual metaphor and a physical reality. It is as if a giant hand has grasped the top of an originally square-planned tower and rotated it, forcing the column to deform all the way down.
To ensure consistency of the building’s apartment layouts, Aedas establish a system of standard four-metre-wide modules. Their sides stack up all the way down the building, with only the front part of the module changing to produce the exterior twist. This simplified the structural system and reduced the amount of construction materials.
The tower’s front elevation that faces the ocean is clad in glass sounds counter-intuitive in this very hot climate. But the glass comes as insulated panels with a lowE coating which provides shading from the sun. Both insulation and coating reduce the need for mechanical cooling and allow natural daylighting.
