© Francesco Cuturi WiLL Walking Ideas Live Lab . Pubblicata il 07 Maggio 2009.

The International competition promoted by ThyssenKrupp Elevator, as it can be deduced by the announcement of the competition, has the aim to plan a big structure 170DM tall which can be considered as an emblematical icon for Dubai city promoting recreational, cultural and scientifical activities. The new building has to enrich Dubai’s panorama, with an image of urban recognizability thanks to a design which can give the value of its uniqueness at once, in a way that it can be recognized as the emblem of this place. Above all the important thing is that the building, object of the competition, takes into consideration the urban context in which it is inserted, the existing urban context and its surroundings; as it will be built in the centre of the town, exactly in Zaabeel Park. The hard thing in planning a very tall building lies in adding to the skyline of the town a strong and intense presence which represents a real challenge to the preexisting context. In fact, building in height, mainly implies the resolution of a range of points related to three main problems: the first of them is the one of the symbol. Thinking about planning a high building means to establish a connection between the earth and the sky, materializing a relation between the dark world of the underground forces and the shining or stormy spaces, where the deities live. Somehow the ancestral will to get to the sky means a real challenge to the whole universe, an order that might stay invisible and obscure if it hadn’t revealed just from a building whose top hides in the clouds. The high building, that we might also call skyscraper, with its “head in the clouds and its feet on the ground”, tells in its simplicity what lies in to the planning work, that’s to say the search for a synthesis between the ideal principle and the reality principle. The second problem you have to face while planning and building a high construction is the technical one: subject to wind pressure and to the telluric movements, depending on the nature of the soil, the skyscraper looks like a shelf built-in the soil, a stick in a continuous movement. It is about a structure whose needs to live and last have to own its own intrinsic elasticity that allows it to resist to all the solicitations that may invest it. For sure, there’s something very mysterious and deeply positive in the need of a building, to be a symbol, to have a very accurate technology, till the absoluteness. As a matter of the fact the symbol is not something unspeakable. In order that the symbol lives, it is necessary that it makes true into a perfectly structured physicalness as a perfect as a theorem is. The third problem concerns the relationship between the high building and the city. It is a hard relation, sometimes even marked by conflict. Because it’s always seen as an “anti – urban” element, the high building is not always able to integrate organically into the fabric of the city, remaining as an isolated object. In a contradictory way the building invests its surroundings with its shade, irradiating its presence with a clear will to dominate and assuming a dark shade, which stands out the city. In our proposal the building do wants to stand out as a “symbol” but, because it is built into a less compact urban context, mainly surrounded by green spaces, its congenital aggressiveness decreases, meanwhile its gift for being landscape point of reference increases; it is a territorial pole that can spread its roots creating in its support on the ground, a rich and articulated architectural situation. Building in height doesn’t mean to realize a mono-functional structure, but the essential thing is that the vertical drift starts from the place where the building was born and develops. In fact our proposal goes beyond the single building scale and it projects the intervention in a dimension of a more general environmental sustainability, in order that the structure may represent an emblem also for its ability of interacting with the environment. In fact the planning intervention is aimed at an architectural sustainability which considers the equilibrium between the harmonically planned architecture in the respect for the nature and the level of nature quality. The plan aims at combining the technological and the environmental choices; it is not conceived as an isolated, lonely identity, but as a mainstay and the higher point of a broad natural space. This is the preamble to the creation of a new plan, that we might call “the green island”, which merges the architecture with the characteristic and regenerating value of a landscape, an architecture that reflects the place in which it is inserted in. It is not a new monument for the surrounding area but an architecture and nature as essential conditions for the new way to build. So, the plan which was born from the need to integrate the architecture with nature, grows up as an organic living system, following a principle of occupation of the space in completion of spaces, as it were a sort of wide open meadow that raises to the sky. A passing way. A soil movement that becomes architecture. The raising of a green façade that turns into a high structure, into a vertical monument. The presence of the new body is not so much manifested for evident volumetric choices, as rather for the physiognomy that the building finds into a wise game with the surrounding space. We have tried to find a compromise between nature and development giving the building the shape in which one can enjoy even the utopian idea of living into a completely hybrid place. The will to connect the building with its surroundings is very clear: the building is characterized by the verticality, which is peculiar to skyscrapers, but on the ground the building forms a landscape, integrating with the existing open spaces, which becomes an incentive to get to the more suitable solution. A thin structure, high, soaring, larger at the bottom and thinner at the top, with a slender and smart profile will be erected in the middle of the interested area which is object of the competition, together with open spaces that, integrated with the volume, become themselves passing spaces. We have decided to put beside “the main vertical tower” a smaller body made up of intersecting storeys of different heights, placed according to a composition that allows to see the green terraces. The different blocks realized by a refined use of the colors host a children library, conference halls and a cafeteria. The entry to the building is got by “the raising of the ground” which leaves a space for a smaller square. You can even choice to enter the building through the outside circulation spiral that becomes a platform for the landscape’s observation. This circulation system takes a space of the external façade. Creating a path that wraps the two structures. Because soil and the structure are a totality this system holds a dialogue with a neutral context. The idea of the plan, in fact, consists of creating some “increased soils”, paths that developing as earth dunes, give shape to an artificial geography not so different from the natural one. The earth soil and the path form an inextricable tangle, becoming interchangeable parts. We could speak about “reconfigured landscape”, “handled soil”, “increased soil”, “natural increased landscape soil”, “rebuilt landscape”, “artificial extension”, “garden building”. The architecture plan follows the concept of surface’s folding: the soil becomes a geologist’s report in the anxious search for the carrying out that metaphysical and surreal osmosis between nature and artifice. Talking about “shaping the earth”, means to claim that digging out, carving and driving into the ground is to explore those conditions in which the building becomes soil and the last one becomes the building. Where the traditional opposition between shape background is been transcended: passive site/active building. Everything is active, a neutral earth doesn’t exist any longer: the structure and the earth become interchangeable in a manipulated soil. So the building and the earth and artifice and nature merge together. Architecture and landscape are involved in a sole design. They become a unique ecosystem made of mutual and complex relations in which things interact one with the other and what happens to a single part of this system draws on all the others. You can’t tell the difference between the natural sphere and the artificial one, because both of them own one the characteristics of the other: so that we can talk about artificial nature, natural artifice. We can properly call our project a Landform Architecture, that’s to say the architecture shape of the territory. In fact, in our proposal the building does not lay on the ground but it is generated by the soil dynamics. A strategy meant to found the plan into its place, taking into consideration mainly the relationship between the architecture and the landscape’s aspects. The geometry of the building is the result of a design concept that wants to increase the value of the panorama of the park, making architecture and nature live together. Besides our aim was to create a building which can be a stable and lasting entity well integrated in the nature hiding the building volume with its “bright coverings”. The façade of the main tower is covered with a perforated aluminium sheet which allows the lightning system to produce a sort of kaleidoscope effect. In the morning the reflecting properties of the aluminium panels lights heighten the metal simple shape of the tower. During the night they produce a game of reflected lights, each with its intensity. The façade for the tower stopping up is made of two layers as it were a skin that we might call an inner covering, which accomplishes the task of the all functions (thermic function, energy, weather, sound); meanwhile the outer covering, made of perforated steel cuts the continuity of the façade off and thanks to its lightening system makes the façades vibrating and airy. In this way the aluminium artifice is used to tell the lightness of the building and its transitoriness and to allude to the dissolution of the building.

© Francesco Cuturi WiLL Walking Ideas Live Lab . Pubblicata il 07 Maggio 2009.

© Francesco Cuturi WiLL Walking Ideas Live Lab . Pubblicata il 07 Maggio 2009.

© Francesco Cuturi WiLL Walking Ideas Live Lab . Pubblicata il 07 Maggio 2009.

© Francesco Cuturi WiLL Walking Ideas Live Lab . Pubblicata il 07 Maggio 2009.