Posted Nov 21, 2015, 7:12 PM
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The world's tallest building planned – in ex-warzone Basra
The world's tallest building planned – in ex-warzone Basra
20 November 2015
By Steve Rose
Read More: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddes...one-basra-iraq
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It is called The Bride of the Gulf, and it will be 230 storeys – 1,152 metres – high. That’s roughly the Burj Khalifa with the Shard on top of it. You’ll probably be able to see it from the Burj Khalifa.
- But height is not the goal, according to its designers, British-Iraqi architecture firm AMBS. Instead, they want to create a “vertical city”, with four interlinked towers of varying heights, containing not just offices and hotels and the usual stuff, but also “its own transport systems, schools, clinics and neighbourhoods”. --- There’s also a vast canopy over a public area at the base of the towers, called “The Veil”. Bride, veil – see what they did there? There’s a security aspect to their plan, too, architect Marcos De Andres explains: 9/11 exposed the weakness of the standalone skyscraper when it came to escape routes, so a cluster of interconnected towers is far safer.
- Basra is a prosperous and relatively peaceful city these days, “more like Kuwait than Baghdad”. The tentacles of the Islamic State are at least 600km away. There’s oil money sloshing around. There are new cars on all the new roads. Five-star hotels and a new sports stadium recently opened (Basra is football-crazy, apparently). The government is working on a new masterplan for the growing city, of which the publicly funded Bride would be the centrepiece. --- The Bride of the Gulf is actually a local nickname for the city. Basra was once considered one of the most beautiful and cosmopolitan places in the Gulf – before Saddam Hussein punished its mostly Shia population, then the Iraq war further scarred it. It was also the supposed location of the Garden of Eden.
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