$272mn Schumacher Tower

ACI Real Estate, an affiliate of Alternative Capital Investments, launched the US $272 million (AED 1 billion) Michael Schumacher Business Avenue on February, a 29-storey business tower located in Dubai’s Business Bay. Michael Schumacher Business Avenue marks Phase 2 of ACI’s sports-branded real estate project.

The tower designers represent a new generation of architects. Being responsible as associate architects for world recognised structures such as the Water cube in Beijing and the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Germany. Just one year ago, they founded LAVA, the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, a worldwide architectural network, together with architect Alexander Rieck, innovation expert at the Fraunhofer institute in Stuttgart.

“The project brings together our previous experiences, the Mercedes-Benz Museum, a brand-owned museum with an extraordinary spatial concept exploring the latest digital design and fabrication technologies with the Water cube Beijing, an example of the highest performance of both the building and the athletes, creating by a stunning atmosphere developed through the deliberate morphing of molecular science, architecture and phenomenology”, says Chris Bosse.

Inspired by the geometrical order of a snowflake and the aerodynamics of a Formula 1 racing car, the tower encapsulates speed, fluid dynamics, future technology and natural patterns of organisation. Rather than purely mimicking shapes in nature for their elegance and unpredictability, the architects learned from nature’s own geometrical orders creating highly efficient structures and intriguing spaces.