Reinventing the Non-place
Community Hub
Project Name: Reinventing the Non-place
Location: al Barsha 1, Dubai, UAE
Function: Community Center
Project Size: 27,260 sqm
Project Theme
Dubai’s road infrastructure has grown over the years enhancing the connectivity at the automobile scale yet dismantling the urban fabric at the human scale. Aside to the social and environmental drawbacks of the overwhelming roads, elevated highways create under them ill-shaped non-places. They’re isolated, underutilized, and often noisy and polluted. The project aims to counteract the impact of the highway; stitching the urban fabric to connect the community while introducing a system to block the noise and air pollution.
Site Potential and Location
The site is located in al Barsha 1, Dubai. The project occupies the non-place under al Thowima elevated highway, and extends out to the empty adjacent plots. The non-place represents a segregating island between two viable sides on site. Therefore, the site provides a great potential to stitch the fragmented fabric. The surrounding land use is mainly residential which inspired the function of the project to become a community hub.
Project Design
The contrasting identity of elevated highway inspired the concept of this project. Being connectors at the automobile scale and dis-connectors at the human scale required a counteracting typology that envisions the meaning of a connector and a barrier simultaneously but inversely to serve the human scale. The barrier is essential to eliminate the noise and air pollution and make the non-place inhabitable. The concluded typology folds in different ways corresponding to the surrounding, possible access points, type of function, and need to block the pollution. There are 12 folding units that extend from the lowest accessible point under the highway till the non-place across Sheikh Zayed rd., integrating an overpass within the project making it address road mitigation in multiple ways.
Site Location
Site Analysis
Concept
The concept counteracts the connection-disconnection relationship imposed by the highway through introducing a typology that stitches the urban fabric while mitigating the road pollution.
Design Process
As shown above, the sections dynamically adapt based on the surroundings. The barrier is also added or removed according to the context.
Aerial View
Vertical + Horizontal Circulation
Space Planning
Site Plan
Sustainability
The pollution filtering technology uses the Prosolve 370e technology. It is a Titanium Dioxide material that gets activated through ambient daylight and then neutralizes air pollutants. The PVC layer is responsible for Acoustic Insulation.
Floor Plans
Sections
Elevations
“We can find ways to immerse ourselves in these oddities…Even the most obstructive, no-man’s-land generating from urban infrastructure can be incorporated into metropolitan nature”
- Caroline Bauer
For more information, kindly check: https://issuu.com/ayarashwan/docs/disjuncture_thesis
