Brad Pitt, the star of Fight Club and Ocean's 11 who professes a passion for architecture, will be a design consultant for an 800-room hotel and resort Zabeel Properties plans to build in Dubai, the developer said.
Zabeel, based in Dubai, hired architecture firm Graft LLC to design an US-themed hotel in the United Arab Emirates city, the closely held developer said yesterday in a statement.
Los Angeles-based Graft, which has worked with Pitt on rebuilding efforts in New Orleans, will include the 44-year-old actor on its Dubai design team, Zabeel said.
“Acting is my career, architecture is my passion,” Pitt said in the statement.
As “my first major construction project,” the Dubai hotel will feature “environmentally friendly architecture, but also embrace my career in entertainment,” he said.
Detailed plans for the hotel and resort will be made public in the next few months, Zabeel said, without giving the project’s exact location or cost.
Zabeel’s properties comprise about US$5 billion of residential, commercial and hotel projects, including Tiara Residence and Tiara Hotel, which are part of the Palm Jumeirah artificial-island development.
Graft is one of the architecture firms Pitt began working with last year to rebuild New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Pitt’s New Orleans-based Make It Right organization is working to build affordable homes in the area.
Pitt has long been an admirer of Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie MacKintosh and US architect Frank Lloyd Wright, BusinessWeek magazine said in a 2005 profile of the actor.
He studied computer-aided design at Frank Gehry’s Los Angeles offices, the magazine said.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
BEIJING’S ‘PAWN’: ‘We, as Chinese, should never forget our roots, history, culture,’ Want Want Holdings general manager Tsai Wang-ting said at a summit in China The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday condemned Want Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時媒體集團) for making comments at the Cross-Strait Chinese Culture Summit that it said have damaged Taiwan’s sovereignty, adding that it would investigate if the group had colluded with China in the matter and contravened cross-strait regulations. The council issued a statement after Want Want Holdings (旺旺集團有限公司) general manager Tsai Wang-ting (蔡旺庭), the third son of the group’s founder, Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), said at the summit last week that the group originated in “Chinese Taiwan,” and has developed and prospered in “the motherland.” “We, as Chinese, should never
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
RSS