Cybertecture savvy

"We are standing here in one of the most historic and iconic buildings of all time," says Mehdi Amjad, as he peers up at the roof of the Norman Foster building housed within the British Museum. "And this is a suitable setting because we believe we are writing history." It's a bold statement from the president and CEO of Omniyat Properties, but one that he is intent on carrying through.

A few minutes after his speech finishes, the audience stands as opera music floods the room and an enormous block of ice is wheeled in. We all stare on as ten men dressed in black from head to toe begin driving their pickaxes into the ice. As the ice falls off piece by piece, we begin to see the formation of a cubic structure with a distinctive hole eroded in the middle.
Omniyat's latest project - The US$235m Opus - emerges from its chrysalis. That it is a dramatic unveiling goes without saying, but it is also a clear message that Omniyat want to be recognised on the world stage as pioneers in a new field, which it has dubbed ‘Cybertecture' - architecture that incorporates technology into the design and operations of a building to make it more efficient and user-friendly.

Earlier in the day, Amjad admits that its reason for launching the Opus in London was a simple one: "We want to attract international investors, specifically British investors and generate a global awareness of Omniyat Properties."

The company is now setting its sights on the overseas market, which is all the more astonishing considering Omniyat Properties (Omniyat translates as ‘the wish' in Arabic) was only founded in December 2005. To date, the company's portfolio of development projects is currently worth approximately US$1.6bn - forecast to rise to US$2.75bn by the year end - making it one of the fastest growing real estate developers in the region.

Integral to its success has been that it has not simply subscribed to the ‘build it and they will come' philosophy which has been the propensity of many developers in Dubai. Rather, the company prides itself on creating architecturally iconic buildings that focus heavily on integrating state-of-the-art technology. Upon realising the potential of the real estate market, Amjad combined this with a vision to develop the most technologically advanced buildings in the Middle East.

In this sense, he had a unique advantage. In 1995 Amjad founded Almasa Holdings, a group of IT hard and software-related companies which had grew into the largest IT distribution company in the MENA region in less than a decade. Omniyat Properties was formed as a result of Almasa spinning out a five year-old real estate investment division which had implemented numerous successful investment projects in the UK and Iran in previous years.

Today, Omniyat Properties is the real estate development arm of the US$544m Almasa Holdings and combines its mother company's two core areas of IT expertise in all its developments. Believing in the potential of the Business Bay District in new downtown Dubai, (Dubai's free zone commercial district on Sheikh Zayed Road), Amjad was among the first developers to buy land there for the site of the first Omniyat tower - One Business Bay. Almasa Holdings itself has bought three floors within the building for its corporate headquarters.

Two residential offerings, The Pad and The Square and four commercial towers followed - Bayswater, The Binary, The Gemini and more recently The Opus, which Amjad claims is of "worldwide and international significance."

For its design, Omniyat commissioned none other than the Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid whose work is described as a combination of art and architecture and has won her international acclaim. She became the first woman to be named Laureate when in 2004 she was chosen as the Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and she has also held prestigious posts at several of the world's best universities including Harvard and Yale.

The revered architect is famed for consistently pushing the boundaries of architecture and urban design which is evident in The Opus, for although the building itself will appear as a singular unified whole with a distinctive void, it will be constructed of four buildings - three for office space and one for retail space. Furthermore, her work experiments with new spatial concepts which, according to Hadid, "intensify existing urban landscapes in the pursuit of a visionary aesthetic". For example, the Opus has been designed in such a way so that it will appear to hover from the ground.

Dressed in a flamboyant green silk jacket, Hadid steps onto the podium to explain her creation in her own words: "I thought it would be interesting to design something other than a high rise, so we concentrated on creating a degree of density in a cube," she says in her deep and authoritative voice. "I wanted to break an existing language of form with manipulation so I eroded a cube structure - a concept we have used for ground-level projects but until now not for high rises." Indeed, The Opus' low design of only 20 storeys will stand out in Business Bay - an area which is largely to be characterised by high rises, and where the cost of land is very high.

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