Al Bahr Towers: The Abu Dhabi Investment Council Headquarters

By Peter Oborn

This publication is entirely centered on the design and delivery of Al Bahr Towers. With 300-colour images, it is highly visual with specially commissioned photography by Christian Richters. An illustrated introduction by the architectural correspondent of The Financial Times, Edwin Heathcote provides an engaging account of the background behind the building: the client, the circumstances behind the commission and its most significant architectural precedents. Expert insight is provided into the history and philosophy of Islamic architecture by Professor Eric Ormsby of The Institute of Ismaili Studies. A unique description of the design and procurement of these ground-breaking structures is provided by architectural author Edward Denison.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Dec 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781118793336

Book preview

Preface

Peter Oborn

Former Deputy Chairman, Aedas Architects Ltd

This is a book that just had to be written and a story that just had to be told for it demonstrates what can be achieved when preparation meets opportunity and when creativity is encouraged by ambition.

The idea of creating this book came about towards the end of 2010 and it was originally intended as a means of celebrating completion of the new headquarters building for the Abu Dhabi Investment Council. It had been clear from the outset that this was going to be a very special project and that it would provide an opportunity for us to apply the lessons from Aedas’ Research and Development group in the fields of advanced modelling, sustainable architecture and computational design.

The project had been won at the beginning of 2008 on the basis of an invited international competition. The timing of the competition coincided with the establishment of the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council and the publication of its ‘Abu Dhabi 2030 Urban Structure Framework Plan’. The Plan sets out a vision for a sustainable community that preserves the Emirate’s unique heritage and its publication also heralded a complementary environmental framework known as ‘Estidama’, which recognises that the unique cultural, climatic and economic development needs of the region require a more localised definition of sustainability.

The Council’s brief for its new headquarters reflected the ambitions of the Plan and it was clear to us from the outset that our challenge would be to generate a design concept for a thoroughly modern building that was derived from the traditional architectural language of the region, enabling us to establish a connection with the past while demonstrating the Plan’s vision for the future of the Emirate.

Working closely with our in-house Research and Development team, together with our colleagues at Arup and Davis Langdon, we developed a design in which the form of the building was generated from a pre-rationalised geometry derived from Islamic principles of design. The most heavily exposed elevations were protected by a dynamic facade in the form of a modern mashrabiya that would open and close in response to the movement of the sun, reducing solar gain by over 50 per cent. The narrative was compelling and the design was innovative. We lodged our submission and were delighted when we learnt of our success.

This book tells the story of the design and construction of the building that has since become known as ‘Al Bahr Towers’, and celebrates the contribution of those involved. It tells the story of a global collaboration to create a pioneering building and in particular its dynamic facade, the design of which was conceived in London, the development of which was undertaken in Basel, the manufacture of which was carried out in Shenyang and the assembly of which was completed in Abu Dhabi. It celebrates the creative process and illustrates how a single idea can be developed and communicated across an entire supply chain, combining the most modern technologies with traditional manufacturing techniques.

I am most grateful to each of the contributing authors who have engaged so energetically with the project. In the first chapter, Edwin Heathcote, Architectural Correspondent of the Financial Times, describes the socio-economic context in which the building has been delivered while also considering it in relation to current architectural trends throughout the region. In the second chapter, Eric Ormsby, Deputy Head of Academic Research and Publications at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, considers aspects of the building in the context of the Islamic architectural tradition; while in the third and fourth chapters, Edward Denison, architectural writer, describes the process of design and construction. Christian Richters has not only provided photography of the finished building but has also created an evocative record of the various manufacturing processes associated with the making of the mashrabiya in China. Thanks are also due to the team at Wiley for their support with the production of this book.

I am particularly grateful to the principal members of the client’s team for their unwavering commitment to the project and was delighted for all involved when the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) awarded the project its inaugural Innovation Award in 2012 and included it as one of the ‘Innovative 20’ tall buildings that ‘challenge the typology of tall buildings in the 21st century’.

Al Bahr Towers on the north shore of Abu Dhabi island.

The towers overlook the Eastern Mangroves with views out towards Saadiyat Island and the Arabian Gulf.

Al Bahr Towers

Edwin Heathcote

Al Bahr Towers are emblematic of Abu Dhabi’s aspirations as a new-generation city in the Gulf that is socially cohesive, environmentally sustainable, economically diverse and culturally rich. Edwin Heathcote, Architecture Critic of the Financial Times, highlights the towers’ specific urban and cultural context. Part of a significant lineage of modern enlightened Islamic architecture, the towers are also technologically innovative, introducing a new level of complexity and responsiveness.

Al Bahr Towers, a landmark for the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

The towers form a gateway from the airport to the city’s central business district.

The Corniche, Abu Dhabi.

The city’s main beach pictured at dusk, with the backdrop of the downtown Abu Dhabi skyline.

Abu Dhabi is the serious, urbane, metropolitan heart of the Persian Gulf. Self-assured, wealthy, a bustling commercial nexus of banks, oil and luxury, it is the old world of the new Emirates. Amid the spiky skylines, the extraordinary crucible of architectural experimentation which the whole region has rapidly become – a catwalk of fashionable form – the centre of Abu Dhabi can seem to stand out as a moment of considered urbanism. Its sensible attitude to city-making embracing everything from its rigorous, New York-style grid to its (relatively) restrained skyscrapers has differentiated it from some of its neighbours, where extravagant architecture and a thirst for superlatives, for the tallest, the biggest, the most expensive has consciously defined the fast-changing cityscapes.

Abu Dhabi’s long-term strategy, its desire to create a new type of Gulf city based on culture, on research and on a considered attitude to the urban fabric, has made it into an extraordinary confluence of architecture and urbanism, of invention and ambition. Western starchitects, big commercial players and ambitious international practices have all been pulled in by the mesmeric opportunity to build at a huge scale, to try unprecedented things, to realise extravagant dreams.

The whole of the Gulf also finds itself at the heart of an unprecedented and arresting collision of ideas and aesthetics, of cultures not so much clashing but rubbing against each other to generate sparks of static which occasionally produce architectural explosions of both the most inspirational and, occasionally, the most shocking kind. The speed at which the new Gulf capitals have grown and the ambition of those who have built them to compete on equal terms with those historically established island centres of trade, wealth and the dense urban modernity to match, from Manhattan to Hong Kong, have led inevitably to some mistaken experiments, abandoned plans and to an undistinguished morass of built mediocrity; but the same factors have also generated a clutch of compelling structures and, more importantly, the notion of the Gulf as a place of potential, a place of dreams and experiments in which the most fantastic and counterintuitive of ideas becomes achievable.

Of course the massed architects of the West are here because of the scale of the commercial opportunity, but they are also, significantly, being increasingly drawn to a vision of Abu Dhabi which proposes a culturally responsive, intelligent and specific city, an antidote to the proliferation of non-places in the desert which have become the local norm. This is a place with a plan. The vast, glinting white model representing the Abu Dhabi 2030 Urban Structure Framework Plan is a rare and stunning glimpse of a convincingly urban place. The programme for a new-generation city aims for a blend of social cohesion, economic and environmental sustainability, business diversification and cultural wealth. It embodies a kind of holistic vision which is almost unprecedented in the region, a patient, considered emergent urbanity. The plan also fully embraces the development of the Estidama standards, an ambitious new framework of regulations which builds on a rigorous blend of the US LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and the UK BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) standards for sustainable building (the word ‘Estidama’ is derived from the Arabic for ‘sustainability’). This new regulatory system is important because it acknowledges the unique challenges of building sustainably in a desert, in the harshest possible climate. It is a genuine attempt to address a set of very particular issues and a regional culture of huge oil wealth and conspicuous consumption in which sustainability has historically – and understandably given the source of Abu Dhabi’s wealth – come low on the list of priorities.

Eschewing the conspicuous architectural consumption of the early 2000s boom, downtown Abu Dhabi stood calmly by, a solid, occasionally even stolid city, wary of architectural inflation. The Emirate continued its steady transformation into a major international centre of commerce and tourism but its more cautious, more urbane approach has made it a place more welcoming of experimentation for long-term gain and a place in which the avant-garde is welcome not only for its commercial appeal but also for the benefits it might bring in real innovation and the potential for change for the better.

Wimberly Allison Tong and Goo, Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi, 2005.

The hotel is situated at the western end of the Corniche facing onto the Arabian Gulf.

The current crop of construction in Abu Dhabi can be seen as an assertion of the seriousness of its intent to become a world city in a post-fossil-fuel age. Saadiyat Island, most notably, has proved an irresistible draw for the world’s media, blinded by the light of its starry constituents. Gehry, Nouvel, Foster, Hadid, a constellation of superstarchitects, will create probably the greatest concentration of big-spending cultural infrastructure the world has ever seen. The model is daring, optimistic, risky – build it and they will come. Abu Dhabi boasts fewer than a million residents yet this is a cultural quarter big enough, rich enough and ambitious enough for a country of a hundred million. At Masdar, beside Abu Dhabi’s international airport, Foster + Partners have – against all expectations – built the beginnings of a radical zero-carbon city, while downtown the same practice’s Central Market has successfully blended the tower forms of city-centre commercial development and a genuinely elegant response to commingling of the traditional and wildly diverging typologies of the souk and the mall. At the same time monuments like the lavish Emirates Palace hotel and the Grand Mosque indicate a nagging insecurity and a noticeable lack of comfort with modernity, as if when it comes to a religious structure or the language of super-luxury or of the State, the architectural expression somehow defaults to an Islamic ‘style’.

Wimberly Allison Tong and Goo, Emirates Palace, interior of the dome, Abu Dhabi, 2005.

The Emirates Palace is one of the most luxurious hotels in the world.

That reversion to an aesthetic idea of Islam reduced to a pastiche, an amalgam of historical elements – albeit highly crafted and considered – is the sign of a consistently troubled relationship with the contemporary, even in the seemingly neophiliac Gulf states.

Various notions have converged to create a series of parallel streams in the architecture of the contemporary Islamic world, ranging from theme-park pastiche to serious critical regionalism, and from reappraisals of historic motifs as an expression of function to consideration of the Islamic city as a response to local and climatic conditions. Masdar in Abu Dhabi and the Heart of Doha (Msheireb) in