Sea view - architectural firm W.S. Atkins & Partners Overseas' Jumeirah Beach Hotel project in Dubai

Architectural Review, The, March, 1998

A huge project in the Middle East takes its cue from waves and dhows: at least there are no ogee arches.

On the seashore at Jumeirah, a short distance south of Dubai, a huge new structure looks westwards over the sea. Its 26 stories can be seen for miles about, for they are 93 metres tall and the whole is some 275 metres long. From a distance, it is difficult to make out quite what is going on, for the shape of the building is, to say the least, unusual. It curves in both plan and silhouette in a shape intended, the designers say, to represent 'a breaking wave'. Whether or not it is wise to try to emulate a dynamic natural form in a much magnified static version is not made clear as you get nearer, for the Jumeirah Beach Hotel is revealed to be a very large object indeed, dominating all its neighbours, and making a wall between them and the sea. Close up the wave analogue (if you ever got it to start with) is difficult to grasp.

The size and design make the building almost geological in scale - not the sort of place from where you can send a postcard to mother with a cross on it marking the room you're staying in behind the glass wall (unless it happens to be one of the really grand ones at the ends of the plan).

The parti is logical and is used by thousands of good beach hotels throughout the world. Each upper floor is a strip of rooms all of which look out to sea; the sinuous plan gives each room a slightly different view from its neighbours, and all rooms are linked by single-banked corridors. The wall is entered roughly in the middle of the ground floor through a lobby which leads to a staggeringly tall atrium decorated with a satellite view of the earth in relation to the moon and a red sun at the top of the 90m high space.

Beyond this excitement is a grand palm court which opens to the right to a long colonnaded single-sided arcade of shops enclosed by an undulating glass wall. Outside is the open terrace overlooking beach and swimming pools; the fabric awnings over the tables on this outer terrace provide a degree of intimacy and sense of human scale against the immense anonymous glittering swish of the 600 room cli ff. The sinuous wall is only one element of the complex. To the south, detached but cradled by the curve of the plan, is a lozenge-shaped conference centre, with a ballroom and banqueting suite topped by an auditorium and all the works. The designers say that this building is in the form of a dhow. At the other end of the complex is the arc of the sports club which looks out over a marina formed by two elegant new breakwaters.

An adjacent linked development (being built at the moment on an artificial island 280 metres into the sea) will be the tallest hotel tower in the world, with 224 luxury suites stacking 321 metres high, handsomely outdoing the quarter kilometre greatest dimension of the present building, and containing the world's tallest atrium (120 metres high) which will be topped by yet another one 50 metres high. Externally, the designers hope that the form, with two vast triangular accommodation wings will suggest the sails of a dhow attached to a reinforced concrete mast of vertical circulation. Doubtless, this nautical superstructure has been divorced from the metaphorical hull of the conference centre to tease our imaginations further. But even if their surreal analogies do not stimulate, the designers can always be proud of their dimensions: size may not be everything, but in this case, it's awfully impressive.