14 DAY TRIAL // The Palazzo Versace Hotel, to be opened in Dubai, will be one of the most extravagant in the world and will feature large sunny beaches, to comfort all tourists that will visit it. But while constructing this luxury resort, managers found that the beaches near the building, which are heated in the summer by temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius), are simply too hot for tourists to walk on, let alone sit on. So they hired the Hyder Consulting engineering group to come up with a way of cooling the piping hot sand.
The company, which has extensive experience in the field of sustainable buildings and environment engineering, says that there is no other way to cool the beautiful sand other than to install kilometers of pipes underneath it, to bring down its temperatures even under the hot Sun. Furthermore, they add that they will install gigantic wind blowers on the sides of the beaches, which will generate a steady breeze, to soothe the enormous temperatures even further.
The outside swimming pools will also be heated by the warmth outside, so Hyder representatives say that they will install cooling mechanisms in all of them, so as to make the tourists' experiences as enjoyable as possible. No doubt that the costs for renting a room in Palazzo Versace (Versace Palace) will be enormous, so the managers say that they cannot afford to let anything ruin the comfort and pleasure of the wealthy elite that will visit the hotel once it opens, in late 2009 or early 2010.
Hyder Consulting also offered engineering expertise and consulting to the builders of Emaar's Burj Dubai, the tallest structure in the world, which punches the skyline at 2,320 feet (707 meters), as of September 2008. However, the building is designed to breach the 2625 feet (800 meters) mark.
"We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on," says Palazzo Versace president, Soheil Abedian.