Dubai sovereign wealth fund skyscraper has double-decker lifts

Builder ALEC Engineering and Contracting has just finished the main construction works of Tower A on Ithra Dubai’s One Za’abeel project.

“One Za’abeel was designed as a floating gateway to Dubai’s financial district," said Fadi Jabri, executive officer at Nikken Sekkei, the lead architects and engineers on the project.

Standing 304 meters tall, it is connected to neighboring Tower B via a 225 meter sky bridge known as ‘The Link’.

Elevated at just over 100 meters above ground, ‘The Link’ will place the project in the record books as the world’s longest occupied building cantilever, the contractor said.

But perhaps an equally interesting feature for people working in the building will be its double-decker lifts serving two adjacent floors simultaneously.

Designing tall buildings with enough lift capacity has been a perennial problem for architects working on the emirate's famously tall buildings since the earliest days of the construction boom years.

Some of the city's buildings have gained a reputation for congestion during peak hours such as lunchtime when lobbies can quickly become crammed with workers.

That has put elevator technology at the center of many of Dubai's super-tall buildings, with designers adding increasingly intricate features designed to get more people up and down buildings more quickly, with mixed success.

The new Tower A building will have three lifts dedicated to serving the ground and first floors to the 24th and 25th and two lifts traveling from basement one and ground floor to the 61st and 62nd floors.

It will give passengers express access to ‘The Link’ and ICD offices respectively at a speed of eight meters per second, meaning a transit time of just forty seconds from the basement and ground floor to the top, ALEC said.