A captured beam of light solidified in the park-- this mixed-use tower, designed for a prime site in the UAE, blurs distinctions between park, sky and water. Conceived as a totemic response to programmatic desires, the building emerges elementally, from the circular footprint of the site as a stacked assemblage of program floating within a diaphanous membrane. From these first principles, response to the geometry of the site, each ring of program within the stack is organized around a system of telescoping cores that allows direct and independent access to each of the functions.
Each ascending ring of program has been floated within the diaphanous membrane, buoyed at each transition by verdant rings of leisure. As a result of the telescoping cores, the gardens are allowed to expand into a vast atrium, creating a continuous column of gardens and light, above the office functions. This extends throughout the hotel and residential program. Topping off the stacked program is a ring of renewable energy generators that aim to exploit the wind and the solar incidence, as a response to the ever-growing imperatives for sustainability.
Access has been organized into four functional quadrants corresponding to pedestrian and retail, office, hotel, and residential programs. Each quadrant in turn relates to the correspondingly divided entry lobbies. Luxury retail program has been located below the entry level, wrapped with garden walls and bathed with direct natural light and water which pours in through generously placed openings in the ground. Beneath this oasis, all the parking and requisite services have been concealed taking full advantage of much of the area beneath the park. Pertinent to the open-ended nature of the programming requirements, the thickness of each programmed disc can be varied, increasing or decreasing the amount of program based on the changing economic imperatives as the project evolves. For instance, the amount of residential program can be increased and the hotel program decreased based on economic dictates and the retail program can be reduced or removed, without affecting in the least the form of the initial proposition. Similarly if the municipal dictates disallow use of subterranean areas beyond the property lines the parking and retail program could be reconfigured accordingly. An integral aspect of this orchestration has been our focus on self sustainability and an embrace of the natural resources. Herein we have deployed our only apparatus of exploitation. The building form itself becomes a device for luring cool breezes to spaces shielded from the sun, referencing the regional time-tested tradition of wind catchers. Inconspicuously and opportunistically the structure incorporates solar and wind arrays for the generation of some of this building’s required energy. Other integral systems deployed towards complete self sustenance, include various methods for the reuse of the vast amounts of water flowing through the site. The orchestration of all these imperatives has generated an elegance derived from simplicity that addresses all of the needs of development without any of the proliferating exuberance.
