Dubai may have an “aerial district” 500 meters above the ground

By Stevão Júnior

Architecture firm ZNera has proposed to erect a circular building 500 meters (m) off the ground, like an “aerial neighborhood”, around the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (830 m) in Dubai.

Named Downtown Circle, the project has five floors and was first presented in August 2022.

According to ZNera, the goal of Downtown Circle is to solve the dilemma of building densely in Dubai and maintaining livability for the population.

“The proposed 550-meter tall mega-structure offers an alternative to the singular, disconnected skyscrapers found in most metropolitan areas,” the company wrote on its Instagram.

For now, the construction is just a project. In an interview with CNN, the architects responsible for the suspended circle, Najmus Chowdry and Nils Remess, said that Downtown Circle is seeking funding to be viable.

WHAT THE AERIAL DISTRICT WOULD LOOK LIKE

The project has housing, commercial and corporate areas, and cultural spaces with a circumference measuring 3 kilometers.

The construction has as its central area the Skypark, a green area that connects the five floors of the structure with marshes, waterfalls, tropical vegetation, and various floras.

The neighborhood would have areas for rainwater catchment, solar energy, and a system for carbon storage and filtration of air pollutants as part of the urban ecosystem.

Downtown Circle has “external louvers” with a planned performance to adapt according to solar orientation and the building’s shading due to its geometry.

For internal displacement, the building would have several suspended vessels, like capsules on a rail network attached to the underside of the building, that would carry passengers from one end to the other.

With information from Revista Oeste

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