Egypt’s Forbes Tower has designs on Burj Khalifa records

Designworks

• Forbes Tower will be 50 storeys
• 240m tall with world’s fastest elevator
• ‘Beacon of hope’ for Egypt

Egypt’s 50-storey Forbes Tower is a self-consciously Dubai-esque development. It will have the world’s tallest central atrium, the fastest elevator, and is due to be the first net-zero tower in the Middle East and North Africa. 

Magnom Properties, the Egyptian-Saudi-owned developer, plans to spend $1 billion building the 240m tall tower, and has embraced comparisons with glitzy Gulf projects such as the 828m Burj Khalifa.

“We do reference Burj Khalifa a lot,” said Ahmed Kassem, chief investment officer at Magnom, “because Burj Khalifa was a landmark of the emergence of the UAE. We want the Forbes International Tower to be that same kind of beacon of hope and progression for Egypt.” 

Magnom hopes that the tower, which is named after a 20-year partnership between the developers and Forbes magazine, can obtain a similar status within Egypt.

It is being built in the as yet unnamed new administrative capital in the desert east of Cairo. Since the city was announced by President Abdel Fattah El Sisi shortly after he took office it has invited its own comparisons to Gulf conurbations, with its wide highways and infrastructure projects of enormous dimensions. 

It hosts a ministry of defence building bigger than the Pentagon, a cathedral bigger than Notre Dame, and was originally supposed to have an airport bigger than London’s Heathrow.

The Forbes Tower itself sits opposite the tallest tower in Africa, the 394-metre Iconic Tower, and will be accessible via what will be the longest monorail in the world.

Magnom

Yet the capital remains something of a black box. While construction has continued through a period of economic turbulence, information on how much has been spent, what the total cost will be, or even where the money is coming from, is a mystery.

Updates on its progress are limited to sporadic press statements. The only estimate for the project’s total cost comes from comments made by Ahmed Zaki Abdeen, the former chairman of the Administrative Capital for Urban Development, to Reuters in 2019 when he put the final price tag at $58 billion.

There is also the bigger question of whether people and businesses will be enticed to move there.

Kassem said that Magnom’s billion-dollar investment is a declaration of faith in the city project. “Government ministries have already moved there,” he said. “So you have real occupancy. You have real utility, there’s real usage.”

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In addition to the bulk of government offices, tentative plans are also under way to move foreign embassies, chambers of commerce, energy companies and financial services to the new capital.

The management of Forbes Tower aims to attract them as clients and has begun informal discussions. The project is still in the detailed design phase, and Kassem hopes that tenants will begin moving in 2030.

The tower was developed with the Chicago-based architects Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, the team behind Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and Jeddah’s 1000m tower. Grade A office space takes up 85 percent of the tower, with the remainder restaurants and commerce in its shopping centre. 

The adjacent plot of land will become the Forbes Park, with access to a high-speed internet cloud. The tower has also received approval for a helipad, and could be the first commercial building in the new capital to offer one. A six-floor underground car park has space for 2,200 vehicles, plus “lounges and other luxurious elements”, Magnom says. 

Another ambition is for Forbes Tower to become the first net-zero skyscraper in the region. Current designs show it getting 25 percent of its electricity from solar PV panels and the remainder from green hydrogen. 

Magnom is still deciding if this means the tower will use green hydrogen brought in from elsewhere or if it will attempt the ambitious task of creating green hydrogen on-site. 

The tower will also be covered in “dynamic shading” reflectors that tilt with the sun to minimise or maximise solar heating as appropriate.

The long-term ownership of the building remains unclear. Magnom told Reuters in August that financing for the project would be done through debt equity instruments, and the company is still debating whether or not to retain full ownership. 

Sign of hope

It has been a difficult few years for the Egyptian economy. The country is still struggling to shake off the effects of a pervasive foreign currency crisis that concluded with a slump in the Egyptian pound in March.

Despite notable improvements since then, inflation increased to 26.2 percent in August, though Central Bank of Egypt interest rates held fast at 28.25 percent for seven months.

“Bear in mind, Burj Khalifa opened in the wake of the global financial crisis,” said Kassem.  

In the same vein, he hopes that Magnom’s project can “bring a little bit of hope to people that might have lost that over the last decade and a half, to bring the promise of potentially something better”.