An Urban Oasis in the Desert

LAVA was invited to compete for the Masdar Hotel and Conference Center (MHCC), a central hotel and conference center within Masdar City. Masdar, meaning ‘source’ in Arabic, was the first attempt to create a carbon-emission-free city. “We opted against the conventional approach of creating another iconic building vying for attention among countless similar projects in the Emirates,” says Tobias Wallisser, LAVA Partner. “Instead, we conceptualized a plaza that could become the city’s nucleus. That enabled us to approach completely different topics than what the brief intended, such as how to design an outdoor public space in a hot climate.”

Rome, Athens, and Florence—most great historical cities have had a plaza, forum, or square at their epicenter, where the population’s life, values, ideals, and vision evolved. LAVA chose to integrate the Arab significance of the oasis with the Western notion of a civic forum. Inspired by nature, this ‘Oasis of the Future’ would form a link between the ancient past and the contemporary era, a community and commercial epicenter—generating and guiding human interaction through natural flow by exercising control of ambient temperatures, using light, heat, and cooling, and controlling water.

Areas for slow activities, characterized by their long duration, were positioned around the plaza’s edges while leaving the central part as a transitory space. Despite the extensive size of the plaza, which was as big as St. Peter’s Square in Rome, the differentiation of activities and surface treatment would always relate to a human scale and human activity.

Inspired by the philosophy of integrating natural principles into the built environment, technology was seamlessly incorporated into the 'Sunflower Umbrella' concept, offering a comfortable and intuitive user experience. The umbrellas cover 22,700 m², which is equivalent to 85% of the plaza surface. They capture the sun’s rays during the day, limiting the solar gain on the plaza to only ten percent of the level obtained without shading. To achieve this, they would have been coated with a low-E (low-emissivity) coating.

At night, they would fold up and release the heat retained during the day, a cycle they would reopen each day at dawn: “Like a field of sunflowers, the canopy has a certain elegance. It is not just a technical device; these flowers open and close in slow motion like living organisms. The design learns from nature not just as an organism but in a performative sense; the sunflowers provide comfort, yet they also provide experience,” says Wallisser.

Following the zoning of different activities on the plaza, LAVA identified areas with active conditioning and areas without. Cooling was done by applying two different means: a floor cooling system using water chilled by ammoniac and a soft conditioning system that released cool air from the umbrella masts and the arcades of the surrounding buildings.

At night, Masdar Plaza would be lit by hundreds of light posts, which would trace the movement of passersby. The light posts could be activated using mobile phones. It would become an interactive light installation, allowing for direct interaction between the inhabitants of Masdar and the transmission of information from Masdar to the world.

“Masdar Plaza was a technical utopia that was ahead of its time, yet what was successful was that we learned how to connect private to public development in the UAE, how to create a shady, lively, and comfortable place that combines technology with ancient wisdom amidst a low rise, high-density quarter, rather than designing high-rise towers and a shopping mall with a glass roof,” reflects Wallisser.

With annual global temperatures reaching unprecedented highs in our cities worldwide, the urgency to innovate urban planning for the upcoming decades intensifies. Climate change, resource depletion, and the need for resilient infrastructure underscore the necessity for envisioning climate-robust, post-carbon cities with alternative climate-conditioning approaches.

In this context, Masdar Plaza was conceived as a technological breakthrough, making the conditioning of public space a feature of the Masdar urban development. It was also conceived as an impact on society in the Emirates through the way people interact with each other within the urban space of the city. Most importantly, it was conceived to become a blueprint for integrating public space and urban development in hot climates worldwide.

Our book What If (2022, Birkhäuser) features this project.