Rolex Tower

Evoking a shimmering desert mirage, the 61-story, mixed-use Rolex Tower in Dubai is one of the next-generation of high-rises on Dubai’s Sheikh Zayed Road. The Rolex Tower is designed in response to the street’s exuberance with a quiet urbanity to set the standard for new high-end development in Dubai and beyond.

The first Rolex Tower in the Middle East was unveiled in Dubai, in the presence of numerous guests and  journalists. The complex, with a spectacular glass facade reflecting the city’s countless lights, was designed  by architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. The Dubai tower has 25 storeys of flats, including two  penthouses, as well as 31 storeys of commercial spaces. The extremely simple parallelepiped shape seems  to be covered with a veil thanks to the use of glass with a milky effect. In contrast, the upper part of the  building loses its opaqueness, turning transparent with an effect similar to that of the pixels of digital  images. The architects and the Lighting designer wanted to recreate the same type of pixelated effect at  night.

Therefore since the building was first lit up in February 2010, 800 special LED luminaires with a  diversified switch, have been managed by a control system (storey by storey) set up by iGuzzini. The control  system has been recreating the tower’s daytime milky effect which gradually turns more and more  transparent the further upwards it goes. The night-time appearance also includes more intense lighting at  the top of the building, with a kind of torch effect, as if the building were crowned to resemble the Rolex  logo. The final lighting was achieved after a process in which three different iGuzzini branches each  developed a part of the complex project.