The Landmark Building

The landmark building will sit in Karachi Port as one of the anchor schemes of attempts by the owners, the Karachi Port Trust, to construct a landmark commercial building that can act as a central anchor for future urban development.Within will be 102,000 square metres of office space taking up almost 60 of the bottom floors of the 81 floor tower. The top 21 storeys will be a new five star hotel that includes 30 serviced apartments and swimming pool.With their design Aedas have played on that increasingly modern skyscraper cliché of a torqueing tower. The Karachi Port Tower is effectively helical in shape but the use of difference façade treatments ranging from totally smooth skinned to horizontal rings every few floors marking the progression in height. Smooth glass curls around the building terminating in a pointed semi-transparent façade overrun at the top pushing the height over 300 metres tall.The sharp-eyed will notice that in addition to the main tower there is a staggered and substantially smaller building of a similar design included that also has glazed skin and a similar curving shape.This will accommodate a further 280 serviced apartments, 70 bog-standard ones and a 10,000 square metre shopping mall at ground level. In addition there will be parking for 2500 cars and conference facilities for 1200 delegates.Other firms involved in the massive project are Mott Macdonald and MM Pakistan who will all be teaming up to get work on site underway for April 2007, a very quick lead-in time for a decision announced only a matter of weeks before.