The new tower being built at Dubai Creek Harbour by Emaar Properties will be 100 metres taller than Burj Khalifa, according to Mohamed Alabbar, the Emaar Properties chairman.
Mr Alabbar has said that work will start on the project to build the tower next month, according to CNN. Designed by the Spanish-Swiss architect Santiago Calatrava, the new cable-tied tower is planned as the centrepiece to a major new district based on the banks of Dubai’s creek close to the wildlife sanctuary at Ras Al Khor.
Emaar Properties said in April, when revealing plans for the tower, that the area that will be twice as big as Downtown Dubai, with a footprint of 1,200 hectares, compared with the 500 hectares of Downtown Dubai. It will have 2 kilometres of creekside waterfront and will house 679 million square metres of residential space, 851,000 sq metres of commercial property, 22 hotels with 4,400 rooms and 11.16 million sq metres of retail. By comparison, The Dubai Mall has an overall footprint of 1.1 million sq metres.
During his interview with CNN, Mr Alabbar said that a mall within the new district would be substantially larger than The Dubai Mall.
“Our [Dubai Mall] corridors, even though when we designed it are 30 per cent bigger than traditional shopping mall corridors, we still got it wrong. I think we need to do more. We need to get it a little bit bigger," he said.
“But I think size is not the issue. With the digital world, e-commerce … you really don’t go shopping any more. You’re going for the environment, to entertain, to eat, to communicate and to shop, by the way. But technology is going to drive it all for us."
A tower that is 100 metres taller than Burj Khalifa would be 928 metres, which is taller than anything currently standing in the world, but not as tall as the 1km-plus Jeddah Tower being built in Saudi Arabia.
That is due to be delivered in 2019, while the target for Emaar Properties’ Dubai Creek tower is for it to be ready by the time Dubai’s Expo 2020 begins the following year.
The tower will house a boutique hotel, vertical gardens, a 360-degree observation platform, restaurants and function hall spaces.
At the tower’s launch, Mr Calatrava said that its construction was likely to be separated into three packages, with one contractor responsible for the piling work, another for the tower’s main concrete base and a third for steelwork, including fabrication of cables, which will be the longest ever used on a structure.
“Certainly we want to start on the foundations very soon," said Mr Calatrava.
“For the moment, we are concentrated on the packages we need to send out as soon as possible."
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