The wealthy prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the crown prince of Dubai has gifted the already rich former F1 racer his own piece of “The World”.

Situated off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, “The World” is a grouping of man-made islands developed to look like a map of the Earth.

Valued at roughly $7 million, Schumacher’s island will be located in the southern hemisphere, part of the “Antarctica” island cluster, when completed in a few years, presumably before the Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower in Abu Dhabi is completed.

The Atlantis Hotel on the Palm Jumeirah in Dubai opened last Thursday with a multimillion-dollar star-spangled party, and a spectacular display of lighting and pyrotechnics.

Having spent $1.5 billion, the owners of the Atlantis hotel, which they hope will become the new symbol of excess in a region already replete with towering statements of wealth, splashed out $20 million on its opening.

In the lobby of the Atlantis about 2,000 guests sipped Dom Pérignon. Outside, A-list celebrities from Robert De Niro to Lindsay Lohan walked the red carpet.

Even though the economy is grim, big malls are opening around the world. We recently mentioned the opening of the Westfield Mall in London and now the Dubai Mall has officially opened boasting the largest number of retailers in the world.

As we mentioned earlier this year, the mall boasts a gold souk, a 10-million litre (2.2 million gallon) aquarium and an Olympic-size ice rink in addition to rows and rows of stores.

The mall is situated at the foot of Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower), already the tallest building on earth at around 700 meters (2,300 feet) and still under construction.
The mall is scheduled to house branches of some of the world’s best known retail chains, such as Marks and Spencer, Galeries Lafayette and even Bloomingdales, which has never before had stores outside the United States.

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.

Here we go again with an amazingly original project of towers in Dubai. The dramatic “Dubai Towers – Dubai” have been announced as the centerpiece for “The Lagoons” development.

The four towers, designed by TVS (Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback and Associates), ranging from 54 to 97 floors, are clustered to form a choreographed sculpture, representing the movement of candlelight.

The Towers will combine in form to represent the evolutionary and innovative achievements of Dubai. They will be characterized by a range of additional facilities including retail, entertainment, and residential which merge to create a vibrant, dynamic community.

I love the structure of the building though. It looks so complex! I love the curves of the towers and how they look like they are just slightly twisting. The estimated completion date is mid 2010.

source