Zaha Hadid Dances Onto Dubai's Skyline Stage

UK architect, Zaha Hadid, looks like making an impact on the skyline of the rapidly growing city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates with her designs for three dancing towers. Revealed in New York's Guggenheim Museum as part of an exhibition into Hadid's work, something that for many years was little more than paper-based with regards to skyscrapers, the exhibition was crammed full of a large number of projects the critically acclaimed architect is now working on around the world.

The Dancing Towers are the winners of an international competition that was held in Dubai to decide the designs for Business Bay by developer, Dubai Properties. They will contain, residential, offices and hotel space and all rise from a single shared podium, something that the developer hopes will allow residents to live their entire day in the complex without leaving though such closeness to work, home and leisure might prove too claustrophobic for many people.

The concept of the way the buildings relate to each other is based on "choreographed fluidity", presumably because their form flows like liquid with gentle curves despite the cubic floor-plans. The three bending towers, whilst not entirely new in concept (check out the SOM designs for the World Trade Centre in New York) have not yet seen anything similar realised in practise. Bending towers such as these have proven problematic in the past with architects because of the central services core that carry things such as elevators being unable to run continuously up them for the entire height of the tower, anything with too much of a bend adds substantial cost to the build by needing more than one core whilst balancing the weight loads on the structure is also a tricky design proposition.

That said, in oil rich Dubai the sheiks are hardly short of money, and with the skyscraper being the central actor on the stage of urban development there's an overwhelming desire for the flashiest costume and most outrageous showmanship possible.