The Royal Atlantis / KPF / Dubai

The Royal Atlantis

• Architects:  Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, PC
• Location:  Dubai, United Arab Emirates
• Client:  Kerzner International (KID); Investment Corporation of Dubai (ICD)  
• Architect of Record:  Dynamic Engineering Consultants  Dynamic Engineering Consultants 
• Interior Designer:  GA Design, SM Design
• Project Size:  193,600 m2 / 2,083,600 ft2  
• Units:  794 Rooms / 231 Residences  
• Project Type:  Civic + Cultural, Hospitality, Mixed-Use, Residential 
• Main Contractor:  Ssangyong Engineering & Construction
• Landscape Consultant:  WET
• Project Dates:  2014-2019
• Structural Material:  Concrete
• Building Height:  193 m / 43 stories
• Structural Engineer:  ARUP / WSP (Building Phases)
• MEP Engineer:  ARUP / WSP (Building Phases)

The Royal Atlantis innovates on typical high-rise hotel and residential design by introducing substantial areas of true open space into all areas of the tower - redefining the concept of urban indoor - outdoor living, vertically. The project's iconicity is a departure from typical form-driven, sculptural high-rises built in rapidly emerging global "alpha-cities," as its striking profile results entirely from moves designed to create truly unique guest and resident experiences. Residents, hotel guests, and visitors are each given spaces that seamlessly blend interior and exterior, tempering Dubai's extreme climate and creating moments where it is possible to see the skyline of the city, while swimming underwater 10 to 40 stories in the sky.

The Royal Atlantis Dubai is the first project of the new "Royal Atlantis" brand: updating the original Atlantis theme concept with the contemporary sophistication of the One & Only Brand while creating an entirely new and innovative hotel concept.

The winning result of a design competition which stated an explicit goal of creating the "most memorable building in the city" for Dubai's next phase of urban expansion (and in time for the 2020 Expo), the design of the Royal Atlantis rethinks the conventional concept of the "iconic" tower and its role in the skyline of rapidly growing cities. Rather than an exercise in sculptural form making, the scheme's unique appearance emerges by extending the idea of indoor-outdoor living - traditionally created through open-plan houses in warm, low density urban contexts - vertically into the tower. The Royal Atlantis is a 600 meter long, 178 meter tall mega-structure, operating as permeable screen, porous to people, light and air.

"The Stepped profile of the tower allows for substantially larger terraces for the units highest in the building, and creates a large deck at the tower's mid-point, where additional publicly-accessible pools, restaurants, and event spaces are located."

Program, Circulation + Structure -

Integrated as a singular 312,000 square meter structure, the Royal Atlantis is, in reality, two buildings, with their own entries, that work together to define a common identity and form. The 43 storey west tower contains a 795 room hotel, with rooms ranging from singles to expansive multi-floor suites, while the 38 storey tall east tower houses over 230 apartments ranging from three bedroom in-line units to multi-storey penthouses. The distribution of sky courts/terraces throughout the hotel and residential towers ensures that all duplex and penthouse apartments, special feature suites. and most regular suites open onto the terraces, fostering the unique indoor-outdoor lifestyle the developer seeks to create.

The staggered blocks forming the two towers (and their sky courts/terraces) consistently overlap at three locations in each tower, resulting in six cores divided evenly between the residences and hotel.

Landscape + Water -

The arrangement of both podium and tower accentuate the landscape of the resort. The project simultaneously operates both as a set of towers emerging from the garden - integrating elements of nature into the programs above, and as a device to frame the landscape at all levels.

The sky courts, terraces, main arch, and portals found through the podium simultaneously reframe the landscape beyond the building. All the plunge pools are acrylic-fronted; as a result, it will be possible for residents to swim within the pools, up to 43 stories in the air, while simultaneously looking out to see the skyline of Dubai beyond. The surprising experience of being both beneath and over, in water and on air, intimately enclosed and expansively situated, will be uplifting and truly unique.

Scale -

The sky courts are the largest spaces in a sequence of otherwise intimate, smaller-scale experiences leading from arrival to residence and out to the terraces. In contrast to the large size of the project, the building appears to emerge as an assemblage of smaller elements that visually breaks down its mass. As a result, the project feels surprisingly human-scaled even intimate.

Experimentally, the planning and massing strategy also ensures that the complex feels scaled more to the size of the dwelling than the tower. Each of the blocks/sky courts ranges from two to four stories tall, and the project curves dramatically across its length, so that visitors typically only perceive a small portion of the building at once. At the podium, the volumes are broken down even further, so that the building feels like an amalgam of significantly smaller elements that are more approachable and inviting. The arrangement of the podium elements creates a series of small lower-level courts, to encourage communal gathering, dining, and socializing.

Craft + Texture -

The facade articulation of both tower and podium also diminish their scale, making them feel tactile and intricate. The primary, long facade of the tower are constructed as a series of simple glass-fiber-reinforced-concrete (GFRC) brises-soleil integrated into continuous terraces, refining the massing into series of smaller spaces sized to the individual room. This arrangement ensures privacy and intimacy and serves an environmental function. Due to the presence of the sunshades, and the depth of the terraces, most of the tower glass is fully shaded during the summer, and for much of the day during the spring and fall. This allows the project to use clearer glass and yet achieve greater energy efficiency compared to similar hotel towers in Dubai, which typically use flat curtain walls exclusively.

"All-glass apertures were deeply recessed within stone frames to ensure that the glass was fully shaded for much of the year, allowing the podium facade to have extra-transparent, low reflectivity, low-iron glass, a rarity among glazed facades in Dubai."

Conclusion - 

The Royal Atlantis re-thinks the design of the mixed-use, high-rise residential and hotel tower through the pursuit of creating iconic experiences, rather than creating an iconic form. The project synthesizes interior and exterior living in an unconventional way for the contemporary high-rise, creating moments of surprise and transquility unique for the typology. It is one of several projects positing strategies for integrating nature and open space with high-density built form, in ways usually found in much lower-density forms of urbanism. This focus on the visitor, resident, and guest has led equally to one of the world's most unique building forms, one of its most unusual sets of experiences, and to a focused study of the craft and art of building such a complex project. Without the integration of sophisticated structural, mechanical and facade systems, what began as an idea could never has emerged as an imminent reality. 

 Construction Photographs -