Architecture firm Denton Corker Marshall’s design for a commercial tower/mixed use complex in Dubai has won the Tall Buildings category in the MIPIM Architectural Review Future Projects Awards.

Recognising unbuilt or incomplete projects, the awards take place at MIPIM, the annual international property market.

Denton Corker Marshall’s Cluster Complex scheme is conceived as a striking vertical street in Dubai’s Business Bay district, a micro city to meet the needs of 21st-century creative knowledge workers who characteristically blur their social and working lives.

Rising from a podium, the 75-level office tower is composed of four stacks of individual office buildings clustered vertically up a dramatic 225m atrium.

Below the imposing office tower sit smaller blocks of apartments and a hotel. Retail and recreation uses are accommodated in a linear 5-level podium. A continuous mesh canopy envelopes the podium and grounds the towers in a tapestry of green.

To cope with Dubai’s extreme and challenging climate, the structures look outward as well as inward, and are fully merged with generous landscaping which integrates the building program, public spaces, common areas and circulation patterns.

The judges commented: "The striking and variegated forms would be in marked contrast to the general run of Dubai’s buildings. The complex as a whole embraces the idea of a mixed use neighbourhood into which this tall building seamlessly plugs."

Denton Corker Marshall’s director Peter Williams said: "The Cluster Complex was designed to provide Dubai’s globally mobile and largely expatriate creative professionals with a home close to work and recreation, with easy transition from one to the other, and back again. This demands an environment as complex and diverse as any city.”

The vitality of Middle Eastern culture is meant to be captured in the program of spaces and buildings. Like a bazaar, intense narrow streets of activity are interspersed with courtyards and glimpses of lush green zones. A purposeful contrast to what the firms considered the over-conditioned and over-lit enclosed experience of a typical mall.

"The scheme encourages intense interaction and provides places of solace and respite, both visual and physical," Williams said.

Architecture & Design Team

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