World’s tallest tower to have ‘gravity-free’ terrace

The world’s tallest tower is to have a terrace on the highest floor where guests can enjoy greatly reduced levels of gravity.

The Foster + Partners-designed Durj al-Fulsdi, currently under construction in Dubai, will stretch more than 5km into the air, and the engineers behind the scheme hope to build an outdoor terrace on the 887th floor.

At that altitude the pull of gravity is noticeably reduced, meaning visitors can experience several seconds of weightlessness.

Visitors – or astronauts as the backers of the scheme hope to label them – will need to wear special protective suits and harnesses to prevent them floating into the stratosphere.

Due to the extreme altitude of the tower, visitors to the summit will be required to spend up to two hours in a hyperbaric chamber to recover from the experience.

May Dupp, director of atmospheric conditions at Arup, said that the ‘Skywalk’ experience would be “frighteningly unique”.

She said: “The Earth’s gravitational pull is just another set of rules and boundaries for the Middle Eastern construction industry to overcome. With the support of Al-Fusdi Construction, we’ll quite literally be dancing on air.”

Workers on the 5780m tower will be trained at NASA to undergo the huge extremes of pressure during its construction.

Construction on the £25bn project will begin in earnest next month, with completion scheduled for May 2009.