Master Builder's Update: UAE's 'Organic Cities' By Luca Curci; Wired Looks At Masdar City
/UAE’s ‘Organic Cities’
Italy’s Luca Curci architects have designed a landmark project for the United Arab Emirates skyline based on the concept of “Organic Cities’.
The project is organized in 2 groups: organic building on the earth, and ‘moons’ on the sea. The ‘moons’ are divided into 3 kinds: the smaller are private residences with a private approach from the sea and also by air. The middle ‘moons’ are hotels also accessible by sea and air. The largest ‘moons’ are residences, hotels and private apartments.
Plans will host more than 150,000 inhabitants, with 50% of total space dedicated to green and connections, open areas, common grounds and places. The tallest building will reach 470 meters with surrounding structures getting smaller.
Luca Curci architects believe that the quality of our life is strongly influenced by the architectural spaces in which we live. Their design is based on the core relationship between humans and their environment, and “it’s represented by an architecture in which individual well-being and environmental sustainability are closely related.”
Per capita, the UAE has one of the highest energy consumption levels in the world. With development has come air conditioning to cool the unbearably fierce heat. Desalination plants are required to provide drinking water. Coupled with a large oil and gas industry, these developments have doubled the UAE’s carbon dioxide levels in the last 30 years.
Masdar City in the UAE doesn’t carry the name ‘Organic Cities’. But it’s considered to be one of the world’s best examples of a city built with green principles. Masdar City has its ardent critics, however. The December issue of Wired Magazine profiles and updates Masdar’s evolution with an in-depth feature.
What urban planners challenge is the concept of building an eco-city here, from scratch, in the first place. Masdar has no affordable housing, meaning that many of the city’s workforce must drive to their jobs. “What good is a car-free city,” asks Brent Toderian, the former chief planner of Vancouver, a Canadian city that promotes sustainability, “if everyone’s commuting from somewhere else?”
French Roast News
Anne is reading …
On New Year’s Eve, Dubai will attempt to break the Guiness World Record for the world’s larest fireework display. The six-minute display utilizing over 200 expert pyro technicians, 400 firing locations and 100 computers will be choreographed across the whole of The Palm Jumeirah and The World Islands.
Fireworks will also be launched from the seven continents on The World Islands as an invitation to the global community to come to Dubai “during the journey to World Expo 2020”. Read on Emirates 24/7.
(Below) Dubai’s Enormous ‘The World’ Artificial Archipelago Amusing Planet
Photo taken by the crew of the International Space Station shows The World Islands on top right. The Palm island, another artificial archipelago, is also visible on the bottom left.
The project debuted nearly 10 years ago, but work has been stalled periodically ever since due to the global recession. Two years ago, the entire project came very near to derailment when Penguine Marine, the company contracted to provide ferrying services to and from the shore, alleged that the islands were sinking into the shallow sea. Nakheel Properties Group, the property’s developer, denied these reports.
Zaha Hadid’s Largess
Zaha Hadid: Master Builder, Architecture’s Mistress Of Female Vision AOC 11/12/2009
Like her Middle Eastern Iraqi roots, the astonishing experience of Zaha Hadid’s structures come inside. Inside an often modest exterior. one is overcome not with spectacle but sensation. If a person can exist “as one” with a building, the structure is probably the womanly blueprint of Zaha Hadid.
While many women reflect on the possibilities of life and put a toe in the pond of self-expression, Zaha Hadid builds new civilizations. Diving into her design world like a mermaid, I rejoice for being a good swimmer, because one can drown in the breath of this woman.
Hadid is a Henry Moore sculpture or an Irving Penn “Earthly Body”. Her face and body make monumental impressions on our unconscious minds.
Let us not Photoshop her to death, telling women that no woman aspires to be like her, because Hadid is too large for Karl Lagerfeld’s vision of womanly beauty and aspiration. I think Hadid is too important, influential and masterful to succumb to that fashion claptrap, advising women of an unusually narrow version of desirable identity.
Icarus & Master Builders
Can Architecture Conquer Man’s Love for Icarus with New Dreams? AOC 9/3/2010
The owners of Dubai’s Burg Khalifa say that the entire skyscraper is inspired by female principles, found in the hymen flower. I called the assertion ‘phallic fiction’ — a bit like the current financial balance sheet for Dubai World — but a reader correctly pointed out that what matters are the building’s green credentials.
Female principles bring curves and a meandering disorder to architecture, along with a dose of playful, irrational exhuberance (OK, that could be boys’ play, too). Biomimicry is feminine with its emphasis of design inspired by nature.
Man’s domination of nature is ending, with the future demanding a collaboration between modern master builders and their natural environments, if we are to advance as a civilization having any quality of life. There’s still plenty of macho-think in the world; consider Cambodia’s new tower.
I cringe now reading that impoverished Cambodia wants to build the largest tower in Asia, a 1,820-foot skyscraper that’s taller than the Taipei 101 in Taiwan, rising 1,667 feet into the sky.
Read and watch: Biomimicry: 3.8 Billion Years of Natural R&D
The observation deck at the Burj Khalifa—the tallest building in the world at 2,716.5 feet—offers a panoramic view of the flat desert shores of sea-level Dubai. The building took seven years to build and holds a number of other records, including most number of stories, highest outdoor observation deck, and tallest service elevator. See more stunning snapshots of life on Earth from National Geographic Travel’s best photos of 2013.
