2010 · Foster + Partners · Middle East
The chamber score
Taqsim in Maqam Hijaz
Munir Bashir · Iraqi oud
A desert asked to live on almost nothing. The oud answers with one string, carefully.
An original chamber arrangement in the climate of the work. The recording is not a copy. It is the room answering.
You already feel this
You know the bill for comfort in a hot country. Glass towers that freeze the inside and cook the street. Masdar tried the older knowledge: shade, wind, mashrabiya, a city that does not fight the sun so much as arrange it. If you have ever lowered a blind and felt that as an ethic, you are already enrolled.
The original
Foster + Partners' campus for the Masdar Institute, opened 2010 as the first built piece of Masdar City. Low-rise, high-density, shaded streets, wind tower, photovoltaic roof. A laboratory for a desert urbanism that the rest of the city has not yet become.
The rebuild · A laboratory of less
We rebuilt the institute as pale lattices in hard sun, a campus that treats shade as structure. Sustainability here is not a gadget on a roof. It is the street section.
01
The street as a cooling device
Narrow, oriented, roofed with light. The rebuild insists you feel the difference between a canyon of glass and a lane that knows the latitude. Most 'green' towers skip this chapter. It is the only chapter that matters at noon.
02
A city that is still a model
Masdar City did not arrive all at once. Models rarely do. The campus remains a proof: this is possible. Proof is not the same as a skyline. It is how skylines change.
03
Less as a luxury
In a rich desert, restraint is a choice. That choice is the architecture. The rebuild does not scold. It shows a courtyard and lets the heat argue.
Shift the feeling
What if Masdar Institute was rebuilt as something else?
Ask the architect
