Masdar Plaza

An adaptive village environment, an oasis of the future with weather sensitive fearures and a five star hotel.

“There is always this perception that if you build in the Middle East you can build whatever you want at whatever cost. And that is entirely untrue. You’re under the same constraints in terms of time and budget. Plus, in this case, everything had to be 100 per cent sustainable. But sometimes the more constraints you have the more creative you have to be and that leads to better solutions,” Bosse told Architecture & Design.

LAVA’s winning design incorporated a public plaza, inspired by those in traditional European cities, which could withstand the blistering heat of the Middle East.

“One of the problems in the Middle East is that the public spaces are pretty much the shopping malls – completely air conditioned and hermetically enclosed. We wanted to create an open plaza where you can see the sky, breathe fresh air and have real human interaction,” Bosse said.

So LAVA came up with the idea of covering the plaza with “solar umbrellas” modeled on the idea of sunflowers. The umbrellas open during the day to provide shade and capture energy and close at night, releasing the heat up into the sky to cool the plaza naturally.

“Sustainability doesn’t have to look funny, or ‘sustainable’ or cheap or ‘eco’. We’re not all walking around in Birkenstocks with batik t-shirts. We think sustainability has to be deeply ingrained in the design and it can be incredibly sexy,” Bosse said.

The plan also includes adaptive building façades with angles that can be altered to offset or optimise solar glare, materials on wall surfaces that respond to changing temperatures and contain minimal embedded energy, underground water storage, interactive light poles, interactive and heat sensitive technology, as well as roof gardens for food production, energy generation, water efficiency and the reuse of organic food waste.
International competitions such as the city of Masdar, which is a government initiative due to be completed by 2016, are “incredibly” important both to young architectural practices and the broader profession, Bosse said.

“Commissioning the same five architecture firms over and over again is a guarantee for getting the same results over and over again … There is an incredible knowledge being produced within that city. The city is not aesthetically driven, it is a knowledge-based society and the aesthetics emerge out of that. There is an incredible cross-fertilization between the different various architects,” Bosse said.