What do you think of Qatar's Rotating Skyscraper?  

Ignoring asethetics for the time being, and focussing on building technology...
this rotating skyscraper in Qatar is onto something, but has it completely bass-ackwards.
The whole building should NOT rotate; only the building's skin should rotate.
There should also be an exoskin one quarter of the diameter of the building. It should be covered with solar cells. That quarter round exoskin should revolve around the building's rotating skin. The quarter round exo skin should follow the sun.
By rotating the inner skin, you spread the heat around the building and never let any surface get too hot.
By rotating the quarter round exo skin, as I said, you keep the solar cells directed at the sun.
Another neat idea to pursue would be adding a second quarter round exo-skin that also rotates and stays on the side opposite the sun. A heat pump could be created that worked off the difference in temperatures between the exo skin facing the sun and the exoskin opposite the sun. In a place like Qatar you could probably expect a 30 degree temperature difference, which would be sufficient to trigger a heat pump dynamic.

so against passive solar design
so against passive solar design you'd call this active solar design? Would still be a net energy loss in rotaing the screen? Perhaps if each occupant had an entire floor there could be seperately rotating rings, manually controlled, but what if there is a balcony, could it only work for cylindrical buildings, which are inherantly difficult? Its a very complex project.

Of feasibility and net benefits...
I can only say that it has to be a lot cheaper rotating a skin than rotating the entire structure and skin, so...if rotating the entire structure can be deemed feasible in some esoteric way in Qatar, then my idea would be far more so, but again, perhaps only in Qatar.
Now in the real world of a somewhat rationally functioning urban land economy of the kind one finds in major and medium sized cities in much of the world, neither the actual approach, nor my proposed one might prove feasible in terms of net benefits of attaining first solvency, then minimum yield and finally profit maximization.
But I suspect that Qatar is one of those places, and this is one of those buildings, where the super wealthy largely build monuments with some utility rather than buildings producing net benefits in a rational investment time frame.
In Qatar, the rotating building (the actual, or my proposed alternative) is probably as rationally feasible as any other design would be. In Qatar, I suspect a building could be made entirely of gold and be Qatar-feasible, though it would have some load bearing hurdles to overcome because of the softness of that most mythic of metals. 🙂
In Qatar, I suspect there is currently an unholy nexus of currency, oil, drugs, arms and digital security money that has little to do with rational rates of return and rational cost-benefit structures. In Qatar, I suspect that there is a fairly healthy cross section of players from the world's kleptomony driving real estate development, pricing and net benefits, but I have never visited, so I cannot say so with authority.
But to continue this line of speculation, in Qatar, presently, I suspect there are any number of persons who could, if they wished, build a skyscraper made of synthetic diamonds that sat on a magnetic levitation plate and spun like a merry go round.
Finally, to conclude this line of speculation, there seems always a place like Qatar somewhere on earth at any given time. One day the nexus of silver spooned entrepreneurs and their agent hustlers in the various black economic arts will move on to another place and then Qatar will go through a long slow process of transformation to a rational urban land economy with all the inherent dullness and modest rates of return that implies. Until that time, however, buildings built there should probably be thought of as technical experiments, rather than as indications of what might work elsewhere as investment grade real estate.
My apologies to Qatarians, if there is in fact a highly rational urban land economy at work there and only the usual census of the unsavory at play in the high rises of the lord.