An ‘avant-garde’ home for du

The du Tower resembles a flip-open mobile phone  (supplied)

Telecom operator du has commissioned avant-garde architects to design the company’s offices in the capital – and early blueprints include interior walls that change colour to indicate incoming phone calls.

James Law Cybertecture, a Hong Kong-based firm that has designed several high-tech developments around the world including the iPad tower in Dubai, has been tasked with creating the du buildings.

Artists’ impressions obtained by Business 24|7 show a high-rise with a bend in its middle, reminiscent of a flip-open mobile phone. It will have 38 storeys with a height of 115 metres.

Other designs suggest the shape of a laptop computer and a digital music player. The cost of the project for Abu Dhabi – seen as the first of du’s offices to be located in cities around the UAE – has not been disclosed. A design firm spokesman said: “The design of the du Tower in Abu Dhabi aims to create a piece of ‘cybertecture’ that symbolises the high-tech and young telecom company.”

The design will allow workers to change the office mood by programming different background music and ring tones. The construction of du Tower, scheduled for completion in 2010 at an undisclosed location, will allow the telecom firm to occupy it in stages.

“Within the building, flexible tenancy as well as corporate space demarcation for du is done by the use of controllable and mechanical partitions,” said the spokesman.

James Law has used cybertecture – a merger of technology and architecture – to create the world’s first artificial intelligence media laboratory in Hong Kong, and the first “morphable” house, along with IBM, in Denmark.