Bahrain World Trade Center

The Bahrain World Trade Center stands in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, completed in 2008 to a design by the British firm Atkins. Its twin sail-shaped towers, tapering as they rise, are linked by three horizontal sky-bridges, each mounting a large wind turbine roughly 29 meters in diameter, making the complex one of the first tall buildings in the world designed from the outset to generate a meaningful share of its own electricity from integrated wind power. The towers' aerodynamic, elliptical cross-section was engineered specifically to accelerate and funnel the near-constant onshore breeze from the Persian Gulf directly through the turbines mounted on the connecting bridges, rather than simply cladding a conventional tower with an incidental turbine. Since completion the three turbines have periodically been taken offline for maintenance, and independent assessments have found their real-world power output well below the complex's original projections, though the building remains widely cited as an early example of large-scale wind power built directly into a skyscraper's structure.