Kuwait Towers
Interesting facts
- The towers were the sixth and last group of Kuwait's water tower scheme; the earlier five groups are concrete 'mushroom' towers by Sune Lindström.
- Kuwait commissioned the Swedish firm VBB in 1965 to plan a modern water supply for the city, which led to more than thirty water towers.
- Emir Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah asked for a more spectacular design for the final site than the standard mushroom towers built elsewhere.
- Designer Malene Bjørn was married to Sune Lindström, the chief architect behind the rest of Kuwait's water towers.
- The towers were built by a construction company from Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, under contract to the Swedish engineers.
- According to the architect, the group expresses ideals of humanity and technology, symbolised by the globe and the rocket.
- The thousands of enamelled discs on the spheres are not scattered at random but laid out in spiral patterns around each globe.
- The restaurant in the lower sphere of the main tower seats about 90 diners, directly above the water tank in the same sphere.
Why it is worth it
The Kuwait Towers are three slender needles on the shore of Kuwait City, two of them threaded with spheres covered in blue, green and grey discs, and they have become the most recognisable image of the country. They are also working water towers, which is what makes them unusual among national landmarks. The towers grew out of a water distribution scheme developed for Kuwait by the Swedish engineering firm VBB under the chief architect Sune Lindström; the Danish architect Malene Bjørn designed this group, and of ten proposals three were put to the Amir, who chose the one that was built.
The tallest tower rises 187 metres and carries two spheres. The lower one holds a water tank of about 4,500 cubic metres together with a restaurant, café, lounge and reception hall; the upper one, at 123 metres, is an observation sphere with a café that makes a full turn every 30 minutes, so the view sweeps slowly across the city and the Gulf. The second tower, 147 metres high, is a water tower with a single sphere, and between them the two hold about 9,000 cubic metres of water. The third, a bare pin without a sphere, carries equipment that lights the group at night.
The finish is what lifts the towers out of engineering. Some 41,000 enamelled steel discs in eight shades of blue, green and grey are fixed to the spheres, a pattern meant to recall the tiled domes of historic mosques, and in sunlight they shimmer like sequins or fish scales against the sky. Built between 1971 and 1976 by the construction company Union Inženjering and officially inaugurated in March 1979, the towers received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1980.
They were heavily damaged during the Iraqi occupation of 1990–1991 and later repaired, and after a thorough renovation they opened again to visitors on 8 March 2016.
Getting there
The towers stand in the Dasman area of Kuwait City, about 3 km from the neighbourhood centre of Ad Dasmah. Kuwait International Airport (KWI) is about 19 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Kuwait Towers are a group of three thin towers in Kuwait City, standing on a promontory into the Persian Gulf. They were the sixth, and last, group in the larger Kuwait Water Towers system of 34 towers, and were built in a style considerably different from the other five groups. The Kuwait Towers were officially inaugurated in March 1979 and are regarded as a landmark and symbol of modern Kuwait. The towers were closed for maintenance from March 2012 to 8 March 2016, with a massive fireworks festival commemorating the re-opening. Kuwait Towers facility is operated and managed by the state-owned Touristic Enterprises Company. The Main Tower served as the venue for TEDxKuwaitCity event in 2018 and 2019.
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