Fluid lines it will clip the size and opens in Corolla on the sky to carry the flame

Inaugurated on December 1, at the opening of the fifteenth Asian Games, the Tower of the Doha Sports went unnoticed here, as this geographic Olympics declination, ignored in the Western world and its media. It is 300 metres high and beautiful as a torch, its first and momentary function being to carry the Olympic flame above Doha for the duration of the games. The highest point of the capital of the Qatar, it stands at the gates of the desert on the 130 hectares of vested games site and leaves no one indifferent by its slender size and release vapour.

Undoubtedly feminine looking, this construction borrows many sewing with its corsetée silhouette and its draping robe mesh more or less transparent inox. Fluid lines, it will clip the size and opens in Corolla on the sky to carry the flame. Irresistibly charming operates.

Its author is architect Lebanese-American Hadi Simaan, installed in Florida, but it is the Office of French studies SRN who developed the project and the Belgian company Besix which finally built it as a contractor General (contract "design and built") for an amount of EUR 135 million.

Such a-stage rocket

The Europeans are therefore not foreign to this long silver flame which lit up the games in December, achieving the feat of construction completed in thirteen months and study completed in twenty-one months, SRN contracting the first in February 2005. Olympic delays. "Anotre commitment, we do know that the General form by Hadi Simaan and the mandatory date of December 1, 2006, for the lighting of the Olympic flame at the opening of the games, said Etienne Tricaud, Director General of SRN." Input, the form required a rigorous geometric setting, articulating two trunks of cones reverse around a hyperbolic paraboloid in Central.

To be quite honest, it must be noted that only the clos and canopy were completed to this date. The construction should now be complete, after extinction of the fire and the games, with the installation of equipment and the final developments in the coming months. Because such a rocket stage, the Sport City Tower superposed programs in relative functional diversity.

Dress in annular structure

First placed, the hotel, developed over the lobby on the ground floor has rooms of reception and restaurant on the first three floors, and then seven floors of rooms (level 14), a floor of suites and three offices, a swimming pool and fitness club. Above, is Gin cotton sport, the presidential suite, the panoramic rotating restaurant and Museum, at the Summit, the lookout as the corolla. "These programs are many ring structures in metal frame and hung on the vertical circulations degressive section reinforced concrete core," says Etienne Tricaud.

Architect and engineer (X, bridges and roads), this design enthusiast said particularly sensitive to convergence both records on this achievement it considers exemplary of a successful association. "Everywhere visible and very present structure creates strong impressions, he points out, such as the Eiffel Tower, where the visitor is constantly confronted with the large size of the book, the emotion emerging from the confrontation of the individual in the megastructure.".

This report of scale is particularly noticeable in the vacuum between the inhabited levels and the outer casing which gives the tower its form of torch. This structure deployed in perimeter consists of cerces of steel liaisonnées horizontally on the floors and long stems upright beam as a whale of a corset of old. She dresses a stainless steel mesh dress "which more or less dense frame depending on the orientation and altitude to reduce the decision-making in the wind plays the role of sunshades and sieve for light letting air circulate freely".

A sophisticated implementation

This shadows calculated and geometric lace him draws a perfect dress. As a result of beautiful transparency and changing effects relayed the night through a sophisticated light, mixing colored halos and punctuation light over the structure. Day and night, the beautiful does not mystery of its constitution, its elements of program dissociated and storied in its metallic sheath zone.

"This structural stratification provides a subtle reading of the Tower whose effects have been very well apprehended by the digital model," said Etienne Tricaud comparing all fresh photos of the completed work and images synthesis of the beating drum project. If the continuation of work on the interiors there is some fear, there is no doubt that this tower elegantly tour and dressed will absorb the excess decoration as it survives already without damage to the extinction of the Olympic flame. Her slender silhouette fact diversion in the global competition of the towers, dominated by explicitly phallic Shapes Swiss Re London Tower named "Erotic Gurkin" (Foster & Associates, architects) or tower Agbar in Barcelona (Jean Nouvel, architect) to cite that they and will date for posted a femininity unacknowledged but obvious.

As from that of the angels, it has not finished talking about the sex of the towers, a typology expanding around the world.