doha gardens

CITYSCAPE / ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW AWARDS 2005

WINNER BEST FUTURE RESIDENTIAL PROJECT

D O H A

G A R D E N S

contemporary islamic living in saudi arabia

MIPIM / ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW FUTURE PROJECTS AWARDS 2006

OVERALL WINNER + WINNER BEST MASTERPLANNED COMMUNITY PROJECT

Doha Gardens Residential Complex Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia | Jan 2005 70,000m2 construction + 26,000m2 landscaped areas Urbatecture: Ayssar Arida / Q-DAR UK Client: Nabil Gholam Architecture & Planning Developer: Rikaz

The client, a rising Saudi development company with a strong social agenda, asked us to find an “Islamic architecture with a contemporary style that would become part of the brand recognition of all their projects”. Additionally, they wanted to introduce a new model to a real estate market dominated by basic gated compounds and individual villa developments. This project needed to provide a new breed of inhabitants with a unique environment combining the best of both worlds.

After careful analysis of the requirements of Islamic domestic lifestyle and architecture, we conceived a solution that is both unmistakably modern and perfectly adapted to the social requirements of the Saudi culture: both familiar and highly distinctive.

The programme consists of 188 apartment units ranging from 268m2 to 480m2 in 6 general typologies, served by communal amenities: Ground-level Garden flats, affordable Simplexes, Maisonette-style duplexes, Luxurious Courtyard and Penthouse Duplexes are distributed into 47 buildings on a 40,000m2 plot of land subdivided into 4 garden blocks.

The project adopts the required “Islamic” identity through subtle re-interpretations of cultural specificities of the urban, architectural, and functional realms.

On the urban level, the project plugs into the existing street fabric, but recreates the traditional territorial communities of the Arab and Islamic city, the “Hayy”, or neighbourhoods, as four semi-open, elongated, introverted perimeter blocks each enclosing a lush garden at its heart with seating areas and children playgrounds. A distinct theme is given to each of these blocks, through the landscaping and flora that grows within it and over its buildings. It provides each quarter's inhabitants with unique vistas and allows them to develop differentiated communal identities while preserving their individual privacy.

The blocks are separated by pedestrianpriority, private-access paved streets,

which are also interspersed with plants and hardscape elements. These are treated as mineral parks and feel more like linear pedestrian courtyards than streets.

The gardens and “street courtyards” are in turn linked through a promenade/network of secondary rectangular piazzas that overlap transversally with the main spaces and create urban gateways spatially and symbolically reminiscent of traditional neighbourhood “Bab” or gateway.

In terms of architectural expression, we have opted for a simple palette of white stucco or precast white concrete volumes of room scale and dark wood or metal louvered planes and screens protecting patios and terraces. These are staggered and permutated as to create a clustering effect which dilutes the linear rationality of the master plan (organised around an infrastructure of equally spaced streets and vertical circulation cores) into a familiar volumetric evocative of middleeastern cities.

The actual permutation rules that regulate the composition are based on a simple yet sophisticated modular system of apartment units. Each unit typology is designed in a way to allow its floor plan to be flipped, rotated, or replaced without affecting the infrastructural requirements: four basic apartment types thus compose each building, but their permutability allows the creation of an almost infinite number of different buildings from a finite genetic pool. The viable buildings are those that respond to strict requirements of lighting and privacy (no space overlooks a neighbour's private space and vis-à-vis apartment entrances are to be avoided).

In a way not dissimilar to the organic growth of traditional cities, here an accelerated, computer-aided evolution has allowed the selection of an overall composition pattern that respects the implicit privacy requirements of this highdensity residential development.

The judicious system of apartment planning and duplex-unit composition allows us to reduce the total number of vertical circulation cores to 31 for the 47

buildings. The regular repetition of the vertical volume of the cores appearing among the clusters of rooms and patios is used judiciously to evoke traditional windtowers.

On the functional level, each single apartment unit is designed around the lifestyle requirements of contemporary Islamic families: each apartment has a separate Family and Guest entrance, and in spite of the high-density and shared vertical circulation cores, less than 10% of the total number of apartments actually shares their floor entrance lobby with a neighbour.

Each flat is composed of internal and external spaces organised in a diagram that permits the flat privacy zones to be modulated according to the presence or absence of non-family members in the house. This is achieved for example through moving panels and doors carefully positioned as to channel circulation and reduce undesirable lines of sight…

Each typology has at least one major semienclosed patio or terrace of at least 15m2 that acts as an “external room” useable during the mild season. This important social space is shielded from the sun by canopies and stretched fabric, and from the gaze by wood or metal louvered screens and carefully placed planting and high parapets. A third of the units of the project is a duplex penthouse organised around a central open-to-the-sky courtyard with perimeter galleries, terraces and majlis men's seating areas, a typology which is a modern reinterpretation of the traditional courtyard houses of the peninsula.

The project succeeds in creating a model for a sustainable, socio-culturally, climactically and historically contextual development, exportable and adaptable to many other sites across the Islamic gulf. It sets an example for other commercial and even public projects to follow.

By going back to the essence of what makes a place or an architecture “Islamic”, it manages to do so without any formal concessions to pastiche or protracted stylistic gestures.

- Ayssar Arida, June 2005