Istanbul is developing and turning very cosmopolitan at a fast rate. A proof of this is the Istanbul Sapphire which is a 261-meter skyscraper. It will be completed in late 2009 and will then be the tallest residential building in all of Europe.

The skyscraper has been under construction for three years and recently reached full height. There will be 174 private residences divided between 64 floors. The other features of this towering building include a shopping center, fitness center and spa, restaurants and includes vertical gardens and a viewing terrace.

The total cost of the project is currently $200 million and around 40 percent of the whole project has been sold.

Above Amsterdam’s new “Marketplace for Furnishings” floats a restaurant designed by London’s Virgile & Stone. The copper restaurant sits on top of concrete columns and is accessed by to two bridges on the second floor.

The municipality of Rødovre, an independent municipality of Copenhagen, Denmark, announced yesterday MVRDV and co-architect ADEPT winner of the design competition of the Rødovre Skyscraper. The 116 meter tall tower accommodates apartments, a hotel, retail and offices. A public park and a plaza are also part of the privately funded scheme.

The new skyscraper with a total surface of 21,688 sq meters will be located at Roskildevej, a major artery East of the centre of Copenhagen. The skyscraper is shaped to reflect Copenhagen’s historical spire and present day high-rise blending in the skyline of the city, it further combines the two distinctive typologies of Rødovre, the single family home and the skyscraper in a vertical village. Consideration of these local characteristics leads to Copenhagen’s first contemporary high-rise.

Responding to unstable markets the design is based on a flexible grid, allowing alteration of the program by re-designating units. These ‘pixels’ are each 60m2 square and arranged around the central core of the building, which for flexibility consists of three bundled cores allowing separate access to the different program segments.

On the lower floors the volume is slim to create space for the surrounding public plaza with retail and restaurants; the lower part of the high rise consists of offices, the middle part leans north in order to create a variety of sky gardens that are terraced along the south side. This creates a stacked neighbourhood, a Sky Village. From this south orientation the apartments are benefitting. The top of the building will be occupied by a hotel enjoying the view towards Copenhagen city centre. The constellation of the pixels allows flexibility in function; the building can be transformed by market forces, however at this moment it is foreseen to include 970 sq m retail, 15,800 sq m offices, 3,650 sq m housing and 2,000 sq m hotel and a basement of 13,600 sq m containing parking and storage.

Flexibility for adaptation is one of the best sustainable characteristics of a building. Besides this the Sky Village will also integrate the latest technologies according to the progressive Danish environmental standards. Furthermore the plans include a greywater circuit, the use of 40% recycled concrete in the foundation and a variety of energy producing devices on the façade.

Another day, another spectacular tower in Dubai: The Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower, a curvy building “inspired by the geometrical order of a snowflake and the aerodynamics of a Formula 1″, will not only appear in Dubai but in six other cities around the world.

According to the architects who worked in Beijing’s Water Cube, the design will allow for an easy construction process and an efficient use of energy, all while making the building change its look through the day.

The building features an iconic silhouette and a facade characterised by vertical slots with private balconies. A series of reflective fins generates a vertical dynamic and gives the building a constantly changing appearance.

The fins track the sun, control the solar shading and dissolve the rationality of the plan into a continuously evolving building volume. The facade’s continuous surface enables curvature with a lot of repetition and the potential for standardisation in the building process. State-of-theart engineering and innovative materials will be used to achieve a fully sustainable performance. The construction will begin in early 2009 and the tower is scheduled to be completed in June 2011.

Well, it seems like now all you have to do to have a skyscraper named after you is to win seven Formula 1 championships so you better get started, the clock is running.

Grand Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport opened on October 14. Built at a cost of $4.5 billion, it is also the largest terminal in the world.

Catering to passengers for Gulf countries and the US, movement around the airport’s six floors, most of them underground, has been facilitated by 157 lifts, 97 escalators, 82 moving walkways and 27 truck lifts and eight Sky Trains that can handle 47 people each. For a project of this scale, the car park itself is equivalent to 33 football fields, while the departures area at Level 3 is more than 51 hectares in size, the size of 94 football fields !

A sales assistant in the Dubai duty free shop in the arrivals area, said: “It’s a very beautiful terminal compared to the other ones – very spacious and more like a temple than an airport terminal.”

With just six departure flights and nine arrivals at T3, the 1.5 million sqm glass and chrome building was hardly bustling on day one but T3 is opening in phases and will eventually handle 17,000 passengers at any given time. Emirates Airline will move its entire daily schedule of 250 flights over to the new terminal by December.

The Super Sense Spa, designed by architecture and design studio KUU, a 3-level spa in Shanghai completed in late 2007.

An additional floor in steel was added and the staircase leading up lands at several platforms which are for the spa’s complementary purposes such as consultation, beauty treatment, manicure or pedicure.

I am amazed at the way the designer play with the form and function of the wall that creates lighting, niches and even form spaces. Absolutely uplifting and delightful !