by Kemila Velan

American businesses are dropping dollars on emerging markets in the spirit
of the old-fashioned notion that money makes the world go ’round.
Everyone understands the language of cold hard cash, especially the royal
family of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – one of the U.S. government’s
closest allies.

The nation just opened its doors to foreign investment last year.
Miami-based architects Arquitectonica immediately pounced on the opportunity
to design and build a massive, eight-tower project at the entrance to the
82-million-square-foot Al Reem Island Shams project. Al Reem is an island
off the coast of the UAE capital city of Abu Dhabi. The massive undertaking
to be done in three phases will encompass 22,000 residences, office space,
luxury hotels, hospitals, schools, mosques and commercial and entertainment
complexes.

Sorouh Real Estate, one of the leading property developers in the UAE, has
hired Arquitectonica to design the first phase of the Al Reem Island Shams
project. The $2.7 billion first phase is called The Gate and will feature
the 83-story Sky Tower as its signature component.
With its expansive beachfront and active nightlife, United Arab Emirates,
which supplies 87 percent of the world’s oil, is experiencing a real estate
boom.

Combined, the projects planned and underway across the Middle East region
topped $1 trillion in April, according to figures from MEED projects, a
Middle East economic development researcher. MEED data showed the value of
projects jumped more than $250 billion in the first three months of 2006
alone.

The UAE is one of the Middle East’s busiest construction markets.
Promising to be the 15th tallest building in the world, “the Sky Tower will
be the most architecturally exciting project for us to date,” said Bernardo
Fort-Brescia, managing director of Arquitectonica, whose design
sensibilities are spiraling out to Singapore, Shanghai, Seoul, Hong Kong,
Japan, Indonesia and other booming international cities.

Sky Tower will be almost equally divided into residential apartments on the
top floors and commercial space on the lower floors. There will be a mix of
one to four- bedroom units with luxury duplex apartments on the higher
floors. Residential and commercial entrances will be on opposite sides of
the building.

A LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Certified building,
the Sky Tower will employ the latest in energy conserving technologies, like
a green roof for protection from the sun, and natural ventilation and light.
Abu Dhabi is described by travel website Welcome-to.com as “a modern garden
city graced with wide, tree-lined boulevards, lush, green parks, and cool,
bubbling fountains.” It borders Saudi Arabia to the west and south, and the
better-known UAE city of Dubai to the east.

Arquitectonica’s Fort-Brescia said the UAE offers amazing restaurants,
vegetation, mangroves and humid, non-desert-like weather, which remind him
of South Florida.

“Just like Miami is the financial center for Latin America, Dubai is that
for the Middle East,” he said, adding that “our firms [in Miami] would fit
in; we would understand them well.”

While New Yorkers and South Americans vacation in Miami, the British and
Europeans form the considerably large expatriate population in the United
Arab Emirates. Their investment habits mirror each other as well, where the
demand to rent both residential and commercial units is driving the building
boom.

The largest and wealthiest state within the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi
is roughly twice the size of Belgium. At 800,000, its population is
relatively small for a major city, which poses a slight obstacle for
Fort-Brescia as he breaks ground on the new project.

“Always the challenge in the Emirates is finding the contractors and having
enough workers for us,” Fort-Brescia said. Workers travel from India, China
and Korea to enlist with the few contractors building up the UAE, such as
American contractor Turner Construction Co. and Parsons Corp., one of the
world’s largest engineering firms.

A Japanese contractor, however, is building Sky Tower.
The project is schedule to rise from the man-made island by 2009.
British architecture firm Aedas has been appointed as the lead design
architects for The Upper Village, the second development phase in the Shams
Abu Dhabi project. Perkins + Will, which has one of its 18 North American
offices in Coral Gables, has been appointed as the lead designers of the
third phase.

Abu Dhabi may be an entire culture and a 14-hour plane ride away, but there
are many lifestyle similarities, Fort-Brescia said.

“The perception in America is that all of the Arab world is dangerous,”
Fort-Brescia remarked. “But obviously, that is not the case.”