Reinventing the wheel

Suite Vollard

There’s been a lot of hype in Dubai this year about building the world’s first rotating tower with two front runners vying for the title due to start construction in the coming months.
But apparently it’s already been done. The 11-storey Suite Vollard was built in 2004 in the Brazilian city of Curitiba and lays claim to being the world’s first tower to have independently rotating apartments.

The tower was designed by Brazilian architect Bruno de Franco and mechanical engineer Alan Holzman with the assistance of several American architects, including Dennis Mitchell.
“There’s all these people in Dubai talking about rotating this and that – we’ve done it, I’ve been there, I’ve got a T-shirt,” said Mitchell. “After we started marketing our product in Dubai that’s when everybody began talking about rotating this and that, but I don’t think anybody else can do it.”

Mitchell said the Suite Vollard was built as a prototype and research vehicle to test their patented rotating technology and ensure their engineering concept worked in practice.

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Exceeding expectations
Four years after construction, Mitchell said the rotating mechanism has far exceeded their expectations and there has not been a single mechanical failure.
The marketing arm of the venture, Carrousel Buildings Technology, is now seeking developers to back a more adventurous rotating tower in several locations around the world, particularly Dubai.

While they may not yet have succeeded in securing an investor, they do have one distinct advantage over the competition; they can point to the Suite Vollard and say – look it works.
Mitchell said there is nothing unique about the structure of the Suite Vollard and that it uses standard building technology.

“We have a static concrete core of a large diameter and from that we have a concrete frame that comes out and counter-levers the floors and provides as a platform,” he said. “On that platform we’ve devised an extremely simple mechanism that allows us to rotate the floor, walls and ceiling around the core.”

Each level of the tower is similar to that of a revolving restaurant, which has the plumbing in the core and is surrounded by a turning floor.

The difference is that the Suite Vollard also rotates the walls and ceiling, but more significantly, the floor support and rotating mechanism only takes up 45cm.

“Standard mechanisms in (revolving) restaurants such as the space needle in Seattle – they have a fairly deep structure of several feet to just rotate one single floor – we can do it in 18 inches,” said Mitchell. “That’s the beauty of the technology is that you can have very normal spacing between the floors.