Images: Dubai's skyscraper in motion

Here's a tower design with more rounded edges. But it's not just the look of the towers that is unusual. The construction will be modular, with whole segments being assembled at a factory and then shipped to the skyscraper site. The first such factory, Fisher said, started operations in Italy last week.

The modular method is expected to cut the costs of construction and increase speed in comparison with traditional methods. Where a typical building requires 2,000 workers on site and each floor takes six weeks to build, the dynamic tower would require just 90 workers and a floor would be done in six days, according to Dynamic Architecture. (Fisher did allow that the 90-worker figure doesn't include all the workers at the factory.)

The Dubai tower, Fisher said, would be built in about 20 months, versus the more typical 36 months for a skyscraper, meaning residents should be able to move in by the end of 2010. The overall price tag for the Dubai tower is expected to be about $700 million.