Project of "underground" park in the desert

The UAE has experienced a boom in super-expensive and extravagant projects in the past decade, including the Palm Islands and Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Now, a 125,000-square-metre park in Abu Dhabi will be added, but it’s not as simple a project as you might imagine.

Designer Thomas Heatherwick suggests using the characteristic texture of the dry and cracked desert as a facade for the “baldachin” that will cover the entire park.

This nominee for the 2017 architectural competition, Al Fayah Park will feature a huge network of canopies that will also play the role of terraces to walk through. Under them will be numerous cafes, public gardens, a public library, recreation areas, as well as public pools and saunas. “These upper sites will create cellular canopies with partial shadow, under which abundant gardens can grow, protected from the hot desert sun,” writes Heatherwick.

Originally working on the park, Heatherwick quickly abandoned the traditional design, as it relied too heavily on complex irrigation to power the park’s countless lawns. Instead, he decided to resort to a natural solution that would reduce the evaporation of water from the gardens by reducing the intensity of the desert sun.

The resulting design is not only beautiful but also highly functional as it absorbs the natural landscape of the place into a self-sustaining system. “Instead of denying the presence of the desert on the sands of which this city is built, we set ourselves the task of making a park out of this desert itself, thereby preserving the integrity of its most natural resource – its beauty,” writes Heatherwick.

Source: brainswork.ru