Rotating Skyscraper To Be Built In Dubai By 2020

A city already known for some amazing architecture, but may soon get even more interesting.

An 80-story, 1,273-foot rotating tower is being built in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, and, if all goes as planned, it will be complete by 2020. Sound wild? It is. It will be the first rotating skyscraper the world has ever seen.

Dreamed up by David Fisher of Dynamic Architecture, the building will house luxury apartments, and residents on each floor will have the ability to rotate their abode by 360 degrees whenever the mood strikes. In fact, they’ll be able to control the rotation speed and direction of their apartment by using voice activation technology.

Sun in your eyes? Turn the apartment in the other direction. Want to let some light in? Turn it toward the sun.

More than 70 wind turbines will be placed horizontally between the floors, and solar panels on the roof will produce the tower’s energy. And as if that weren’t amazing enough, an elevator inside the building will give residents the ability to move their cars to their floor so that they’re parked literally next to their apartment.

Fisher said he got the idea for the building while looking at the Olympic Tower in New York.

“I noticed that from a certain spot you could see the East River and the Hudson River, both sides of Manhattan,” he explains on the Dynamic Architecture’s website. “That is when I thought to myself:  “Why don’t we rotate the entire floor?  That way, everybody can see both the East River and the Hudson River, as well as Saint Patrick’s Cathedral!”

He first proposed the idea, which he called the Dynamic Tower, in 2008, and projected that it would be complete by 2010. When it is finally complete, it will be one of Dubai’s tallest buildings.

“When I grew up and became an architect I understood that an architect should design buildings that adjust to life,” Fisher writes on the architecture firm’s website. “They should adapt to our space, our functionalities and our needs that change continuously—and even to our sense of beauty, itself in continuous motion.”

He also writes that rotating buildings are the first to have a fourth dimension—time.

“This is the new philosophy of dynamic buildings, adjusting to sunrise and sunset, to the wind and to the view—thus becoming part of nature,” he said.

There is no price tag for the project yet, but Dynamic Architecture says the cost per apartment could range from $4 – $40 million.