Masdar City by LAVA

When the British propose new sustainable towns – encouraged, not inconsequentially, by the Prince of Wales – they’re called “villages”, and they’re framed as a return to community, simplicity, and thrift. When the United Arab Emirates builds a sustainable town, it’s called “an oasis of the future”, a vast technological fantasy. Masdar City, a seven-year, US$20 billion project on the eastern fringe of Abu Dhabi, is conservation-as-spectacle. It will boast giant shade structures that open and close like sunflowers; materials and features that adapt to pedestrian volumes and environmental conditions; a magnetic public transport system with individual pods that drive you to your destination using solar power; buildings sheared away as if by erosion, and a plaza that doubles as a multimedia screen. But there is a very serious side to Masdar, and a lot of smart architectural, engineering and scientific minds – including Australians – have jumped aboard.

The Masdar design team, chosen by an international jury, centres around the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, or LAVA, founded in 2007 by Chris Bosse and Tobias Wallisser. Bosse is the German-born, Sydney-based architect responsible for the Watercube in Beijing; Wallisser was instrumental in designing the Stuttgart Mercedes-Benz Museum, a true new-millennium masterpiece. Also part of the LAVA team is Alexander Rieck, a senior researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart. They’re joined by former AIA president Bob Nation, engineering firm Arup (who also worked with Bosse on the Watercube), Transsolar, the world’s leading energy consultancy, and a team of international experts. Masdar has further ties with the tentative new political machinery currently working towards global emissions reductions, such as the World Future Energy Summit, the Australian Government’s Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, and the International Renewable Energy Agency, which will be headquartered in Masdar’s central plaza.

Masdar is the high-tech road to environmental salvation, the road that includes brand new energy forms, hyper-intelligent buildings, and burying emissions underground, rather than energy conservation and tree conservation and the mellowing of our consumption culture. It’s the road we’d probably all instinctively prefer – appealing to our imaginations rather than a dour sense of environmental duty – but its solutions are spotty, imperfect, or don’t as yet exist. Masdar aims to will this future into existence. The so-called “Masdar Initiative” is really a clean-tech investment fund, renewable-energy start-up and property development rolled into one. It will hothouse emerging technologies, and deploy them with the kind of brio and confidence that makes the mass media take notice and the people who matter start to believe in them. As a symbol of this vanguard approach, the construction of the Masdar headquarters building is being powered by a vast PV array on its roof, built ahead of the remaining structure – a world first.    

The LAVA team also hopes, with its detailed consideration of public transport, pedestrian flows, and the integration of interior and exterior space, to provide a model for urban design, especially in harsh conditions like the Arabian Desert that surrounds Abu Dhabi. The desert setting of Masdar City really makes it seem both utopian and dystopian – a vision of life continuing on as the world turns to sand. But LAVA intend to make Masdar not only “liveable”, to use an old architectural cliché, but to “seduce” the residents out into the alleyways and into public spaces. At the centre of this is the plaza, part European piazza and part Arabian “oasis”, with its huge white umbrellas that open, provide shade, and capture energy during daylight hours, and fold down at night to release the stored heat. They can adjust the angle of shade based on the position of the sun.

LAVA describes its plaza as a canyon surrounded by gorges, the building façades falling away like crumbling cliffs. The gorges pull inhabitants into a narrow, cool and shaded landscape of shopping and leisure facilities, misted by radiating water features that adjust their intensity based on ground temperatures. And on cool nights and cooler months of the year, the plaza will lure them back out again. Interactive light poles, inspired by oasis fires, transform the plaza into a three-dimensional interactive media installation.

While Abu Dhabi itself is defined and boxed in by its own road system, Masdar City will be entirely car free. Its compact network of streets will, as much as possible, make it a pleasant experience to walk around town. Amenities and public transport are always within a two hundred-metre walk. Masdar’s individualist, fantasy transport system – anyone would love a ride in a private magnetic pod – supplements more standard forms of transit. There will also be direct rail links running to Abu Dhabi and the international airport.

One suspects that not all the technology that will go into Masdar City has been invented yet; much that’s already planned is highly advanced. There are adaptive building façades with angles that can be altered to offset or optimise solar glare, surface materials that respond to changing temperatures, and heat sensitive technology that activates lighting in response to pedestrian traffic and mobile phone usage. Adaptive cooling will provide the central hotel, restaurant, retail, leisure, and conference facilities with an extended energy utility during peak heat loads. But there are old solutions too: like roof gardens that integrate food production, energy generation, water efficiency and the reuse of organic food waste.

LAVA’s engineering specialists analysed each component of potential energy expenditure and investigated individual efficiencies in order to reduce the carbon footprint. Even the façade of the buildings surrounding the plaza will incorporate long-life, loose-fit structural design to enable flexible future planning and reconfiguration opportunities. The design exceeds the targets set down in the original masterplan, and is benchmarked against Estidama and LEED (Platinum).

The delicate task of the architectural, engineering and scientific team behind Masdar City is to balance hyper-efficiency with practically, a “vision of the future” with “scientific fact and availability” – the pleasure principle with the reality principle. It may well be yet another of the Emirates’ great architectural fantasies, but it is a useful fantasy, one that might deliver us some real-world solutions, and help us to out-run the future we currently seem doomed to suffer. +

1. Sunflower-like umbrellas stand in the middle of the plaza which will be covered in an unprecedented square-footage of photovoltaic calls and rooftop gardens. 2. Inside, a narrow protected gorge will house retail and leisure facilities. 3. As in the case of an oasis, the plaza is the social epicentre of Masdar, opening 24-hour access to all public facilities. Interactive, heat sensitive technology activates low intensity lighting in response to pedestrian traffic and mobile phone usage. The plaza is able to change into an outdoor cinema for international events and national celebrations. 4. A view of the plaza and the green park at night. 5. The 5 Star hotel is organised efficiently around a canyon-like atrium. It offers guests an immediate view out onto the plaza in one direction and the green of the park in another. 6. Currently a large, empty square of land on the eastern fringe of Abu Dhabi, Masdar City will be bisected by green ribbons and a rail line that runs to the international airport and to central Abu Dhabi.

IMAGES Courtesy of LAVA