Expression
15 February 2024
The Greening Story
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Despite its cool creative atmosphere, Alserkal Avenue as a physical space is subject to relentless sun and unforgiving elements. The Yard is the epicentre of this environmental onslaught. Yet it is also the Avenue’s spatial centre of gravity, where most visitors wander, meet, and dwell.
How can we make the Yard more hospitable? This question preoccupied our internal teams and external collaborators for a few years, actually. We commissioned a study that unearthed some surprising data about heat, people flows, and air circulation. The recommendation we followed was to cool the common spaces, adding multiple enclaves of greenery, while softening the regimented linearity of the lanes.
We then started to think through this ‘greening’ exercise conceptually…and creatively.
In late 2023, the current Yard was born, abounding with Grove Corners, Wadi Pools, and hosting a veritable botanical encyclopaedia of indigenous plants.
Over the past years, as our built environment expanded, the original species that once thrived in the Avenue’s nooks and crannies were banished from their habitat. In re-imagining the Yard, we wanted not only to reinstate the primacy of vanished plants as a necessary gesture of horticultural de-colonisation, but also to humanise our spaces of congregation as a sincere act of hospitality.
About T SAKHI
T SAKHI is a multidisciplinary architecture and design studio co-founded in 2016 by Lebanese-Polish sisters Tara and Tessa Sakhi.
About Zain Masud
Studio Zain Masud is a landscape design practice based in Dubai with an emphasis on native and desert species, sustainable and water conscious approaches.
“The grove, a grouping of trees, intentionally cultivated or found growing wild, has a long diverse history entwined with human settlement, rural practices and the culture and politics of cities.
A grove can be a memorial, a place of learning, a site of poetic retreat and philosophy or political encampment, a public park or theatre, a place of hidden pleasures, a symbol of a vanished forest ecology, or a place of gods or other spirits. Groves are both literal and metaphorical manifestations, ways of defining spaces and ecologies in our cultural life. They can add meaning to urban forms and ecologies and contribute meaningfully to the significance of place.”
Jan Woudstra A History of Groves 2017
Sketch by Studio Zain
Rendering sketch by T SAKHI
Sketch by Studio Zain
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