Nicknamed The Bride and intended to reach over 1,000 feet higher than Dubai’s towering Burj Khalifa, the soon-to-be tallest skyscraper in the world is coming to none other than the southeastern Iraqi town of Basra. Designed by the London and Iraq-based architecture firm AMBS architects, the proposed structure will call the shores of the Shatt al-Arab River home, and will supposedly run on nothing but solar energy. To get a sense of just how tall The Bride will be upon completion of construction, you could put Paris’ Eiffel Tower on top of the Burj Khalifa and still come up short.
If it’s ever actually built, the entire structure of The Bride will stand roughly 3,780 feet tall and will be comprised of four conjoined towers, each measuring in at a different height. To make the 230-story, heavens-tickling building even taller, AMBS’s design calls for the construction of a roughly 616-foot antenna at the very top. Moreover, the firm describes The Bride as “the first vertical city in the world,” boasting over 5 million square feet of floor space for hotels, residential units, offices, commercial lots, as well as parks and gardens.
“It will be enjoyed by thousands of people in endless ways, within it, on it, or under it,” says AMBS. “From walking in the vast shaded parks and promenades at ground level, to having lunch or shopping in a sky-square hundreds of metres above sea level.”
What makes The Bride particularly compelling is AMBS’s intention of making it a net-zero structure, meaning it will to operate on as much energy as it produces. With temperatures consistently reaching 110+ degrees Fahrenheit during summers in Basra, the surplus of solar energy in the region made it a prime candidate to pull off such a design. Concerning the incredibly high heat, AMBS also plans to build what it’s calling a “veil,” in which it aims to cover the skyscraper’s central tower with a glazed canopy to provide public areas with much-needed shade.
Though AMBS recently announced the design of The Bride, it refrained from offering a specific date for when construction of the tower would begin.
