The Tornado Tower

Soaring over the West Bay district, Doha’s Tornado Tower rises high, overlooking the Bay and most of its high rise neighbors. With its simple form and gentle curves, the tower offers a memorable, elegant silhouette that is recognizable from all vanishing points. Sitting strongly on a pristine plaza, Tornado Tower tapers gently inwards towards its slender mid-height point, then outwards again towards its summit.

The name Tornado was developed by the design team to describe the distinctive, hyperbolic shape of the building. This form is enhanced by a unique lighting system, designed especially for the tower by renowned light artist Thomas Emde. His kinetic light sculpture, by its movement of light, suggests the torsion of a tornado. The lighting system is programmable and is capable of producing over 35,000 variations of lighting patterns to create a stunning visual effect at night.

The building itself makes a positive impact to the whole West Bay area of Doha. As an instantly recognizable focal point it brings context and positional sense to the streetscape, with the building situated in a wide, open plaza rather than mounted on a podium. The surrounding areas are left relatively uncluttered with the provision of car parking hidden away below ground, leaving only visitor parking at street level. Detailed traffic impact assessments were carried out to ensure the infrastructure in place was sufficient to cope with the additional vehicular movements anticipated to be generated by the fully occupied building.