Vol :37 Issue No.1 2012 - Open House International

Figure 7 a&b. The sky bridges as public activity zones (Source: www.archdaily.com).
munity-relevant problems in conventional high-rise
residential buildings.
Actually, in the attempt to achieve communityresponsive
design for high-rise housing buildings in
the UAE and in light of the specific social and cultural
traits and values of the UAE natives, one cannot
rely direly on the previous global initiatives in a
cut-and-paste manner. This, with no doubt, would
mislead the whole process and would presumably
end up with contradictory results. Rather, fruitful
lessons can be learnt, not from the specific forms of
these design initiatives, but from the notions and
concepts behind them, which can pave the way
towards establishing a theoretical framework for
the aimed design. This can only happen when taking
the locality of the UAE society into consideration.
The following section examines a recent
design approach tailored for Middle Eastern cities,
including the UAE ones and thus discusses its relevancy
and sufficiency for the UAE case.
SEAR CHING FOR A L OC AL FORMUL A:
C AN THE NOR R GROUP’S APPR OAC H
“THE HAB ITAT MODEL” ANSWER THE
QUESTION OF RELEV ANCY FOR THE
U AE?
The 2009 Habitat Model is about 30 floors high
complex and proposes a mixed-use development
that includes residential, office, hotel and retail
spaces. The residential component occupies two
corners of the complex and consists mainly of floating
elements embedding landscape and public
spaces. The office components and the hotel component
are occupying the other corners interweaving
with each other and with the residential one
(Figs. 8 and 9) (Jan and Norr Group 2009).
The project, as claimed by its designers (Jan
and Norr Group 2009), came as a response to
what they called the need to develop a new model
for dense living and the need to create a sense of
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open house international Vol.37 No.1, March 2012 A ‘Fareej-in-the-Sky’: Towards a Community-oriented Design... Khaled Galal Ahmed