With New Year’s Eve upon us, venues across the UAE are decked to the nines ready to celebrate. But one Dubai hotel in particular has gone all out to create a truly unique installation.
Atlantis, The Palm and Moet & Chandon partnered with Dutch events company Luuk Broos to build the world’s largest drinking glass pyramid.
The towering structure features 54,740 flutes and is 8.23 metres tall, breaking the previous Guinness World Record of 50,116 glasses, set in Madrid in 2017. It was unveiled in the resort’s Asateer Tent on Thursday.
Dubai hotel breaks Guinness World Record for largest drinking glass pyramid
Lotte Broos, event manager of Luuk Broos, tells The National that it took five days of non-stop work to create the structure.
“On December 29, we stayed until 3am to complete it,” she says. “For this tower, the stems of the glasses are actually a little higher than we’re used to and this made building it a lot harder to complete.”
So what does it take to build a tower of this magnitude? Broos says the success is about perfecting the base. “The measurements need to be perfect and from there, the only way is up. The hard part is the last few metres.”
It certainly helps that the family events management company includes three surgeons – “the only people with a steady enough hand to be able to complete the top of a tower this high”.
“Their skills are highly valuable as they have the focus and attention levels that are required for lengthy periods of time,” explains Broos. “At that height every millimetre counts.”
The glass tower will remain in place until Saturday, and will be on show at the resort’s annual New Year’s Eve gala which features a guest performance by singer Robbie Williams.
Following this, it will be meticulously dismantled.
“We built the tower using scaffolding, so we will put this back up and take each glass off one by one until they are all back in the box,” says Broos. “This usually takes about a day.”
In line with the hotel’s sustainability initiative, the 54,740 glasses will then be recycled by a local glassblower and transformed into glassware for Atlantis, The Palm’s rooms and suites.
