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Super orb that lives, breathes and thinks Dubai’s Technosphere to be the world’s largest spherical building Technology, architecture and greens create self-breathing environment
When it comes to Cybertecture, thinking out-of-the-box means more than just thinking beyond it. It could mean no box at all, as in the case of the spherical Technosphere in Dubai, which looks to our home planet Earth as the ultimate model of a sustainable habitat. Technosphere, the globe-shaped winner of the CNBC Architectural Award Dubai 2009, was designed to be a super building that lives, breathes and thinks for and with the people that inhabit it. It will house offices, a hotel and an exhibition hall. While construction is progressing slowly because of the economic crisis in Dubai, the base has been completed and work is now proceeding on the second floor. “Cybertecture attempts to innovate green buildings with the philosophy that a green building is not just green or a building, but much more; it is a comprehensive device that carries new technologies and possibilities of a better life within the building for its inhabitants,” says James Law, chairman and chief cybertect of James Law Cybertecture International, Hong Kong, and also the designer of Technosphere. “This requires the use of materials that go beyond the concrete, steel and glass, and into the new materials of the silicon chip, the electrons, the internet, and the intelligence of systems to be amalgamated seamlessly into the fabric of the building,” he says. Law explains that the shape of Technosphere comes from three factors – first, purity of form; second, its impressive size; and third, the essential nature of a sphere, which, in Law’s own words, “alludes to the even smallest elements of our world, the atomic particles and molecules that bind our universe.” He adds, “The Technosphere is a symbol of how man has become technologist with the ability to create; building with science and tech •
nology at all scales for a better world.” Thus the Technosphere will use technology and architecture to create a “self-breathing environment” as well as to generate electricity from the sun, supplementing its energy needs. An intelligently-distributed array of sky
Awarded the CNBC Architectural Award Dubai, 2009 and World Architectural Award from 300 entries worldwide, Technosphere will be an iconic masterpiece for Dubai and the Techno Park
gardens for the offices and hotel not only offers outdoor terraces for work and relaxation but also provides a passive solar shield from the sun while contributing oxygen sustainably. Recycling minimises the use and wastage of water in this vast building.