Muraba Veil

The question most Dubai towers invite is: how tall? Muraba Veil inverts it. At 380 metres and 22.5 metres wide, one apartment across, every floor, the question becomes how little can a building be? RCR Arquitectes, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2017 for buildings that are precise rather than spectacular, designed a tower that contradicts Dubai's typical logic of maximising floor plate. Here, there is no floor plate to maximise; each of the 131 residences spans the entire width of the tower, east face to west face, 73 storeys above the Dubai Water Canal. The gold stainless steel mesh that wraps the facade is not ornament. It is a contemporary mashrabiya, the perforated screen that has modulated light and air in Arabian domestic architecture for centuries, reinterpreted at building scale. It shades without blocking. It ventilates without mechanical systems. It changes colour with the sky. Inside, dual-aspect terraces on both faces allow the prevailing wind to pass through each apartment: passive cross-ventilation in a climate that demands full air conditioning from June through September. The engineering required to make a 17:1 slenderness ratio structurally sound involved both WSP and Arup. Muraba and RCR have worked together for a decade. This is the statement of that partnership.