Design unveiled for new world's tallest tower

TALL STORY: Nakheel has unveiled plans to build the tallest tower in the world to dwarf the Burj Dubai. (Supplied)

Nakheel is to trump rival Emaar Properties in the contest to build the world's tallest building, with the Dubai-owned developer on Sunday unveiling plans for a tower that will dwarf the Burj Dubai.

Nakheel is poised to build a tower that will be more than one kilometre high, as part of a 140 billion-dirham ($38.12 billion) project that will include the world’s first inner city harbour, company executives said.

Emaar's Burj Dubai, currently the tallest man made structure in the world at over 630 metres, is expected to be up to 900 metres tall upon completion in early 2009. The company has refused to reveal its final height.

At a launch event on Sunday night, Hollywood movie stars Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones joined company officials and local dignitaries as a huge model of the structure was revealed.

"It will be ambitious, creative and innovative," chief executive Chris O’Donnell said of the Nakheel Harbour & Tower, which will be funded through a combination of private land sales and other project financing.

The development, located at the intersection of Sheikh Zayed Road and the $11 billion Arabian Canal currently under construction, will cover an area of more than 270 hectares and eventually house more than 55,000 people.

"It is four towers contained in a single structure connected by sky bridges,” O’Donnell said.

Nakheel said the project will take more than 10 years to complete, but with some stages coming on line much earlier.

It will include 19,000 residential apartments, ranging from affordable family homes to exclusive penthouses, it said.

High speed shuttle lifts will enable visitors to see the sunset twice, from the bottom and again from the top of the tower, it added.

Sources at Australian architects Woods Bagot told Arabian Business in April that Nakheel was planning to build a 1,200-metre high tower on the Arabian Canal.

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READERS' COMMENTS

Sustainable-build
Posted by Khalid Husain, Torrance, USA on Wednesday 8 October 2008 at 10:25 UAE time


Its good to see how Dubai has set the benchmark, to build big and the tallest. Hope, they should build using green building practices,and enviromental freindly

So sad......
Posted by A.L.S, Dubai on Wednesday 8 October 2008 at 10:00 UAE time

It is so sad to read about an even higher Tower to glamourise this City. If Dubai thinks it is so great how come it cannot even look at the people struggling in this city. People are being evicted out of their homes, men are sleeping in their cars, and yet there is enough money to build a tower that at the end is not needed! Prioritise!!!!

Don't you get it???
Posted by Trojan on Tuesday 7 October 2008 at 23:00 UAE time


Doesn't anyone beside me see what this really is? This great spin machine has all along been playing on an ancient common falacy: affirming the consequent, which goes as this: If A leads to B is a fact, then if B then there must be A. In other words, the fact is that if there is demand then there will be building. But the reverse does not necessarily hold, especially not in a market that lacks transparency and is flood with excess liquidity.

This is just another desparate attempt by the spin doctors to save their inevitible demise...but it seems the stock market is not falling for it.

Superlatives
Posted by Cholo Jopson, Dubai, UAE on Tuesday 7 October 2008 at 12:27 UAE time


With the superlatives coming before and after the name of Dubai, the city would soon earn the world's city of the odds.

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