The city of Jubail, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, is in the midst of a substantial economic and residential expansion. A critical outcome of this growth is the generation of an additional 180,000 cubic meters of treated waste water per day. In the development of the comprehensive masterplan, Landworks Studio, working closely with CBT+FAEC, turned the desert and water constraints into an opportunity to not only devise an elegant solution to this singular problem, but also to establish a new landscape typology: a desert ecology park that encourages the people of Jubail to engage the landscape in a radically different way.

The site for Regional Park is 4,000 hectares of a continuously shifting dunescape. As a comparison, twelve of New York City’s Central Park would fit within its confines. Its significant topographical features are a centralized valley, three prominent bluffs overlooking the valley, and a series of parallel erosion-formed ridges. To design at this scale, Landworks Studio set up a sequence of creative water use strategies and conceptual frameworks—treatment wetlands, desert agriculture, and irrigation for shelterbelts—as guiding principles for the overall site design.

The effective management of large volumes of treated waste water is integral in determining the success of Regional Park. The first phase of landscape phasing, therefore, would be the construction of the primary water network consisting of Lakes, Wadis, and a sequence of cleansing wetlands. This network was designed to accommodate potential surges in the volume of water diverted to the park, with a maximum projection of approximately one hundred thousand additional cubic meters of water per day. This new water network would be planted with native trees, shrubs, grasses, and reeds, and the resulting oasis has the capacity to be a migratory stopover for birds and other fauna in the region.

While the site of Regional Park is currently separated from the city center, it is projected that by 2030 the residential sector of the city will reach the eastern boundary of the park. This projected change to the surrounding context of the site was critical in the development of the program sequence and the site phasing. The program—a luxury resort, recreational lake, family adventure hub, cultural hub, green hub, outback hub, and visitor center—is interwoven into this linked network of topography and hydrology. Throughout the design process, the masterplan evolved to show the future potential of the site, its relationship to the residential parts of the city, as well as strategies for phasing the growth of both park and city. Numerous iterations of the program were devised in order to frame solutions as flexible and changeable as the surrounding desert and urban landscape.

By approaching the site design through the dual filters of topography, and dune- and water-based frameworks, Landworks Studio formed an iconic park that utilizes the excess water ecologically—by filtering and cleaning industrial wastewater—and programmatically—by encouraging interactions between the visitors and the local culture, hydrology, and geology.

PROJECT CREDITS

Client: Royal Comission for Jubail
Architect: CBT+FAEC (Architects/Engineers)
Project Location: Jubail, Saudi Arabia
Project Type: Urban Master Plan
Project Size: 4,000 hectares
Status: On the boards

This past March, Landworks Studio won a Merit Award from the Boston Society of Architects for its work on the Vertical Slice Garden project. Located in the west central Taiwanese city of Taichung, the Vertical Slice Garden sits at the base of two 41-story towers situated in Taichung’s dense West District, and is located in a place of daily interaction adjacent to the ground floor lobby and common spaces for the tower. The narrow sliver of landscape allocated to the garden necessitates a design that mediates the scale and density of the city while innately promoting both human comfort and cultural sensitivity.

As it rapidly develops, Taichung, as other East Asian tower cities, is increasingly defined by “canyons”, formed by both the city’s soaring high-rises and by its mountainous backdrop. These urban and natural canyons and the sense of enclosure they provide were the inspirations for the Vertical Slice Garden. Here, high-rise towers embrace a thin sliver of landscape that evokes—both materially and spatially—a dark and misty canyon. Simple elements—walls of stone, cascading water, and verdant plants—compose the layered planes of a vertical garden that provides a sparkling, peaceful oasis for residents of the surrounding buildings.

The tactility of the faceted stone modules that compose the garden’s walls, the sound and spray of water cascading across the stones, and the subtle scent of the lush green planting provoke all five senses and provide relief from an otherwise dim setting at the base of high-rise buildings exacerbated by northern exposure. The modulated design of the waterwall—realized through flipping, rotating, aggregating, and modulating the depth of five stone modules of three different sizes (10cm x 10cm, 10cm x 20cm, and 20cm x 20cm) arranged in geometric combinations— subtly reflects and refracts natural light. An ingenious living wall system developed by local consultant Ele-Garden, a mix of subtly scented tropical rock-dwelling plants—Asplenium, Nephrolepis, Anthurium—and strategically placed planters of Philodendron bipinnatifidum, provides moments of visual refuge and interstitially continue the patterns and movements of the waterwall.

The Vertical Slice Garden is the result of close collaboration between designer and builder harkening to times when such relationships were common and reliance on the skill of those builders was more important than the level of detail achieved through drawing. Highly skilled craftsmen worked directly from the designer’s full-scale foam mock-ups and very few drawings to quickly build full-scale mock-ups of stone and plants on site. Stone was quarried immediately after thorough design reviews in the field by the landscape architect leading to the rapid completion of the project.

This small yet vibrant garden of stone, water, and plants transformed an otherwise narrow, dark, and unpleasant space into a glistening gem that evokes urban and mountainous canyons to provide a healthy, carefully-scaled, and sensorial respite from the environmental and psychological stressors of city life. In both its unique, contextual concept and its innovative, collaborative design and construction process, the Vertical Slice Garden is truly a contemporary landscape.

To see more process and construction photos on your Flash-based web browser at http://www.landworks-studio.com/courtyards/the-park-pao-huei-tower/

PROJECT CREDITS

Client: Pao Huei Construction Co. Ltd.
Architect: CBT Architects
Project Location: Taichung, Taiwan
Project Type: Courtyard, Urban Park
Project Size: 236 m2 (2,544 ft2)
Status: Completed 2010

07 May 2012

Jubail Regional Park Masterplan, Saudi Arabia

The city of Jubail, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, is in the midst of a substantial economic and residential expansion. A critical outcome of this growth is the generation of an additional 180,000 cubic meters of treated waste water per day. In the development of the comprehensive masterplan, Landworks Studio, working closely with CBT+FAEC, turned the desert and water constraints into an opportunity to not only devise an elegant solution to this singular problem, but also to establish a new landscape typology: a desert ecology park that encourages the people of Jubail to engage the landscape in a radically different way.

The site for Regional Park is 4,000 hectares of a continuously shifting dunescape. As a comparison, twelve of New York City’s Central Park would fit within its confines. Its significant topographical features are a centralized valley, three prominent bluffs overlooking the valley, and a series of parallel erosion-formed ridges. To design at this scale, Landworks Studio set up a sequence of creative water use strategies and conceptual frameworks—treatment wetlands, desert agriculture, and irrigation for shelterbelts—as guiding principles for the overall site design.

The effective management of large volumes of treated waste water is integral in determining the success of Regional Park. The first phase of landscape phasing, therefore, would be the construction of the primary water network consisting of Lakes, Wadis, and a sequence of cleansing wetlands. This network was designed to accommodate potential surges in the volume of water diverted to the park, with a maximum projection of approximately one hundred thousand additional cubic meters of water per day. This new water network would be planted with native trees, shrubs, grasses, and reeds, and the resulting oasis has the capacity to be a migratory stopover for birds and other fauna in the region.

While the site of Regional Park is currently separated from the city center, it is projected that by 2030 the residential sector of the city will reach the eastern boundary of the park. This projected change to the surrounding context of the site was critical in the development of the program sequence and the site phasing. The program—a luxury resort, recreational lake, family adventure hub, cultural hub, green hub, outback hub, and visitor center—is interwoven into this linked network of topography and hydrology. Throughout the design process, the masterplan evolved to show the future potential of the site, its relationship to the residential parts of the city, as well as strategies for phasing the growth of both park and city. Numerous iterations of the program were devised in order to frame solutions as flexible and changeable as the surrounding desert and urban landscape.

By approaching the site design through the dual filters of topography, and dune- and water-based frameworks, Landworks Studio formed an iconic park that utilizes the excess water ecologically—by filtering and cleaning industrial wastewater—and programmatically—by encouraging interactions between the visitors and the local culture, hydrology, and geology.

PROJECT CREDITS

Client: Royal Comission for Jubail
Architect: CBT+FAEC (Architects/Engineers)
Project Location: Jubail, Saudi Arabia
Project Type: Urban Master Plan
Project Size: 4,000 hectares
Status: On the boards

Suning International IT Headquarters
Location: Nanjing, China
Size: 85,000m2(8.5 hectares)
Team: Santos Prescott and Associates (Architects), Atelier Ten (Sustainability Consultants)
Status: Concept Design

Square 673
Location: Washington, DC, USA
Team: DCS Architecture (Architect), Studios Architecture (Architects), CAPCO (Bench Fabricators)
Status: Construction Observation

Jubail Highway
Location: Jubail, Saudi Arabia
Size: 44km
Team: CBT+FAEC (Architects/Engineers)
Status: Design Development

Jubail Regional Park
Location: Jubail, Saudi Arabia
Size: 40,000,000m2 (4,000 hectares)
Team: CBT+FAEC (Architects/Engineers)
Status: Schematic Design

Urban Design for Taichung Opera House Cultural District
Location: Taichung, Taiwan
Size: 3,100m2 (4 Urban Blocks)
Status: Construction Observation

Taichung Public Art Project
Location: Taichung, Taiwan
Team: CBT Architects (Architects), Lighting Design Alliance (Lighting Consultants)
Status: Construction Observation

Landworks Studio is proud to announce that designer Suzanne Mathew has won an American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award for Baltimore Water Works: Adaptive Hydrology in the Jones Falls Corridor. The project, done in collaboration with Maggie Hansen while studying at the University of Virginia, “utilizes the unique resilience of river delta ecosystems to create a hybridized landscape infrastructure that unites ecological health with urban vitality.”

Adjunct Principal Tim Baird, an Associate Professor at Penn State, also figured among the award winners as faculty advisor to Dylan Salmons on Urban Arboriculture. According to the Awards website, the project “functions as a hybrid set of spaces bridging the performance of productive landscapes with parkland program.  The resultant parks aim to assist the city by cultivating nursery and wetland stock for greening projects, while serving as learning and recreation centers for adjacent neighborhoods.”

Urban Arboriculture was part of a studio that Tim taught as a continuation of his research on materiality and technology in performative landscapes.

Congratulations Suzanne and Tim!