Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Friday 27 June 2008, 4:03 PM
Dubai’s 360-degree rotating skyscraper: an algorithm too far?
According to the Beeb, “The 420-metre (1,378-foot) building's apartments would spin a full 360 degrees, at voice command, around a central column by means of 79 giant power-generating wind turbines located between each floor.”
Do they honestly think this thing is going to stay up? OK, they may have employed huge layers of algorithmic logic in the design phase to make sure it is stable wherever the rooms stand in relation to each other… but what about the weather? You can’t predict ALL the effects that the building may face.
Although I know the weather pretty well in the UAE having spent three years there (it only rains for 10 days a year and when it does it all comes at once, there’s a bit of fog too but that’s about it apart from the sand storms and ‘shimal’ breezes) – surely this is one environmentally unquantifiable nightmare.
I’m sure our wonderful French construction architects used heaps of software to produce the design for this building, but I also think that there’s a cut off point between what software can help us to create in the physical world when the manifestation of our designs is something that faces nature in such a direct form.
Pepé le Pew, n'est-ce pas?
PreviousComments on this post
There's no mention of a real-life proto-type, but the fact that they've announced it means they have the confidence that it'll work.
If they manage to pull it off though, they'll solve common problem; people will nolonger scrumble for the flat with the view, they can all share the view, depending on how fast the building rotates, some will get it at night some at a desirable time!
It s not just the weather you d need to worry about, you d also hope that the voice doing the commanding belonged to someone nice and stable!!
Sounds more like a French operation to extract some of the oil money out of Dubai. Wonder how they're going to deal with all the sand in all those bearing chases they will need to have to enable all the rotating joints? Also sounds like a electrical and plumbing nightmare in a near-hell environment.
Of course oil money can solve a lot of engineering issues. I think its Dubai that has the indoor snow skiing slope.
Some of our guys that come back from service calls there tell me that they put their tools in a bucket of water with ice to keep them cool enough to use on the rigs. Otherwise they can't hold them in their hands when working outside the AC-cooled areas.
That all sounds plausible for sure.
When I lived there the poor guys building the new skyline aren't allowed to drink water during daytime hours in Ramadan, which moves every year so it will pass through summer time.
They are allowed to come in off the sites if the temperature rises over 50 degrees Celsius. But, even if your thermometer reads 51 - official government measurements of temperature show that this never happens.
Some of that may be urban myth - but it's also pretty close to the reality of daily life there.
