Chris Bosse explains how LAVA is helping Abu Dhabi become a model sustainable city.
Masdar City is a planned city being built 17 km from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. A government initiative, the city is being con structed over seven phases and is due to be completed by 2016.
Following the ambitious plan of the government of Abu Dhabi to look beyond the oil society into a renewable future, the city will rely entirely on solar energy and other renewable sources, with a sustainable, zero-carbon, zero-waste ecolo gy and zero cars.
Masdar City will be built over seven years at an investment in excess of US$20 billion. The Masdar headquarters building under construction receives its power for construction from a PV array on its roof built ahead of the remaining structure — a world-first.
As Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi says: one day all cities will be built like this.
LAVA participated in the international competition to design the centre of Masdar in 2008. We thought, it can’t hurt to find out more about it, and almost fainted when we received the 900-page brief document, with research by Norman Foster and Transsolar about the past, present and future of sustainable urbanism.
It dawned on us that by even reading the brief we had gained something, let alone actually becoming part of this adventure.
We put together a team of world leading experts and pro posed a true centre of the city, following examples like Venice, Paris and New York and pro posed a public open plaza.
We moved the egg-shaped convention centre of the mas terplan and moulded a 5 star hotel, conference, cinema and retail around an open and pub lic space, referencing to the greatest piazzas around the world and merging them with their Arabic counterpart: the oasis of the future.
In order to shade the plaza we had to overcome sun, tem perature and humidity and found a principle in nature that solved our problems. Gigantic sunflower umbrellas cool and shelter the plaza during the day and fold up at night to release the heat and turn into a sea of interactive lighting poles.
The Plaza is the social epi centre of Masdar, opening 24- hour access to all public facili ties. Interactive, heat sensitive technology activates low intensity lighting in response to pedestrian traffic and mobile phone usage.
Design concepts to minimise energy consumption include radiant surfaces; air movement that supplements natural wind patterns; evaporating cooling mist; thermal mass and PCM; slab cooling and luna panels; and shading external façades surrounding the Plaza, incorpo rating a long-life, loose-fit struc tural design to enable flexible future planning and reconfigu ration opportunities.
Engineering specialists analysed each component of potential energy expenditure and investigated individual effi ciencies in order to reduce the carbon footprint. Switching and sensors will activate and deacti vate features and functions in correlation with usage and pedestrian flow.
Materials on wall surfaces respond to changing tempera tures and contain minimal embedded energy, while water features are stored under ground during the day and at night trickle or flow strongly, triggered by passersbys. Roof gardens also integrate food production, energy generation, water efficiency and the reuse of organic food waste.
The rest is history. We won the competition against some of the best architectural firms in the world.
Masdar's chief architect, Gerard Evenden from Foster and Partners, loves the concen tration of expertise: “What Abu Dhabi is beginning to generate is the Silicon Valley of renew able energy.”
The true benefit from Masdar is that in the future, all the knowledge gathered in this project can be applied in sus tainable developments around the world.
Public transport, renewable energy, carbon neutrality — a sustainable future is really the only way forward. We all can only imagine what happens if China will adopt western stan dards, such as the two-car household in its rapid and con tinuous urbanisation process.
Australia’s climate, in particu lar, is perfect for the use of solar energy and the moderate cli mate ideal for natural ventila tion and passive environmental strategies. Wouldn’t we love to see the ideas of public trans port and a car-free city centre being applied to Sydney, Melbourne and Perth?
Chris Bosse is director at LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architecture). Whilst associate architect at PTW Architects, he worked on the Watercube for the Beijing Olympics and was recognised in the 2007 AR Awards for Emerging Architecture, RIBA London.
