The United Arab Emirates is gearing up to build one of the most ambitious hotel projects to date. With a unique helical structure, Leeser Architecture has won the race to be the contractors for a new world class five star hotel like the world has never seen.

The building, named the Helix Hotel will be home base for five star luxury hotel rooms, a-class business offices, and a slew of condominiums and retail stores. But, the unique architecture and high class shopping aren’t the only things that are turning heads.

The Helix Hotel hopes to break new ground in the realm of green energy solutions by deploying a multifaceted approach to meeting the building’s energy demands; it utilizes an indoor waterfall supplied by the Persian Gulf for climate and humidity control and something called Solar Ivy.

Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology, or more commonly known as SMIT, a solar and wind energy start-up company out of Brooklyn, NY, has been contracted to install the Solar Ivy, or SMIT GROW, to the exterior of the structure.

Designed to look and behave like naturally growing vines of ivy, Solar Ivy is a network of leaf like solar panels that are able to harness solar energy on vertical surfaces. Generating about 85 Watts for every 4x7 foot strip, Solar Ivy is made of a light weight photovoltaic film on top of recycled polyethylene. Because of the light weight design, the leaf like panels are also able to harness kinetic energy from the wind, a two-tiered method of capturing energy from naturally occurring renewable and sustainable phenomena.

“Solar Ivy, a biomimetic form of ivy, is an extremely versatile system of modular components, which allows solar to go places that were previously inaccessible.” said Samuel and Teresita Cochran, the creators of the GROW system, in a statement to goodcleantech.com.