A building to immortalise a much-loved salute

 A signature salute — known to every resident of the UAE — could well become immortalised in stone.

A consultancy has designed a mixed-use tower project built around the three-fingered salute popularised by His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice-President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai. The salute signifies win-victory-love.

Shaikh Mohammed started using the salute during the 2003 Dubai Government Summit.

He explained at the time that it stands for win, victory and love because these were the three English letters that the hand forms when the salute is flashed.

London-based Shouly Enterprises Ltd. has come up with the design for what is being named the WVL Tower. The firm expects to rope in a developer in Dubai transforming the design into a full-fledged structure.

The project, with a planned built-up area of 500,000 square feet, will consist of two towers, which are the middle and index finger, as well as a smaller building representing the thumb. The project will have a multi-storey car park in the podium underneath the building.

“We have not started marketing the concept as yet... so this is the first time we are revealing it in public,” said Ehab Shouly, Managing Director.

“We are confident that once built the project will be another iconic landmark on the Dubai skyline.” (Shouly had earlier held senior positions at Omniyat and Damac before venturing out on his own.)

In its present design format, the WVL Tower will house a 5-star hotel in the tallest structure within it, while the index finger tower will house furnished and serviced apartments managed by the hotel. The smallest building, the thumb, will consist of unfurnished apartments. There will also be space for restaurants and boutiques.

Shouly hopes to start work on the project this year itself because it would “mark 10 years since Shaikh Mohammed announced the Dubai Strategic Plan 2015, which has since been completed and the objectives achieved”.

Based on a construction start date in the last quarter of this year, the WVL Tower project can be completed in the last quarter of 2020, when Dubai hosts the World Expo 2020. “Our ambition is to have the project ready in time for the Expo,” Shouly said.

Expected to cost Dh1.5 billion to develop, it could be the “first building in the world to have a horizontal elevator system”, allowing the lifts to go up and down as well as move left and right. “This is required due to the leaning nature of one of the towers in the project which creates the shape of the hand gesture,” Shouly added.

“To get the proper shape of the salute, one of the towers had to be leaning. You can’t use a normal elevator in this as the shaft for normal elevators has to be straight.”

The WVL Tower is the first concept to be developed by his company’s new subsidiary, Creative Property Ideas Ltd

source : gulfnews