Dubai Experiments with Sustainable Development

Karim Elgendy

Throughout the last three decades, the city of Dubai has not been known for its emphasis on sustainability as guiding principles for its development. Not only did it adopt an unnatural rate of growth by middle eastern and global standards, it has also long disregarded the environmental and social consequences of its rapid urbanization. Dubai’s growth relied on -and was economically fueled by- a development model which imported inappropriate and inefficient building forms and planted them in its extreme climate. The result was a 1,500 square miles city (3,885 square kilometers) with isolated island buildings that are not only divorced from their environments, but which also require a great amount of fossil fuel energy to remain habitable.

Image 1. Aerial View of Xeritown showing massing and landscaping. Copyrights: X-Architects and SMAQ

The city of Dubai also has one of the highest carbon footprints per capita in the world, and even though this footprint is partially a result of energy intensive water desalination processes on which the city relies for its potable water, Dubai’s carbon footprint remains higher than that of other gulf cities including Saudi cities which also rely greatly on desalination.

In many ways, it is fair to argue that the Dubai’s model of development has been, in essence, the antithesis of sustainable development over the last three decades. In other words, Dubai has come to represent the climax of an obsolete development model in which humans attempted to subjugate their environment rather than coexist with it.

In contrast to this un-sustainable development pattern, Dubai’s neighboring city of Abu Dhabi has long adopted a measured and less extravagant development model. Over the same three decades, Abu Dhabi’s development model was generally characterized with a more sustainable pace of development. In the last few years, Abu Dhabi has been attempting to champion sustainable development in the Middle East by establishing a sustainability oriented framework for its development over the next 20 years, and by establishing the Masdar initiative which includes the world’s most progressive sustainable city project at its outskirts with ambitious zero-energy and zero-waste targets.

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The American University in Beirut Combines Innovation and Traditional design

Karim Elgendy

In 2009, the American University in Beirut’s new student center was recognized as one of the American Institute of Architects’ Top Ten Green Buildings, the most prestigious profesional award for sustainability in the United States and one that is rarely awarded to international projects in the Middle East. The new student center is situated within the 73-acre campus of the American University in Beirut (AUB) and is named after Charles Hostler, the former US Ambassador and an AUB Alum. The student center is sited at the foot of a steep hill overlooking the Mediterranean sea and extends down to the Beirut Corniche, the capital’s grand waterfront boulevard (Image 1). The $30 million project was designed by the Minneapolis based VJAA together with the Lebanon based Samir Khairallah & Partners. The Stuttgart based Transsolar and the San Francisco based Hargreaves were part of the design team as environmental consultants, and Landscape designers, respectively.

Image 1. View of Charles Hostler Student Center as seen from the Hill above. Copyrights: Paul Crosby

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A California Building Revives Traditional Middle Eastern Designs

Karim Elgendy

The Carnegie Center for Global Ecology in Stanford is a research facility that combines Laboratories and office spaces. The 1100 Sqm building was built on a previously developed plot of 7.4 acres. The client’s main concerns were lowering the carbon  emissions tied to the building’s energy use as well as the embodied carbon emissions of building materials. Flexibility over the short and long term was also of utmost importance to the client who wanted to allow for the expansion and contraction of research teams.Like Many of the Climates of the Middle East, Stanford has an arid climate with a long dry summer season, and benefits from northwest breezes.


Image 1. View of the Eastern facade of the Carnegie Center showing the wind tower and the naturally ventilated entrance lobby. Copyright: Peter Aaron / Esto

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The First Low Energy House in Jordan

Aqaba House, Copyrights Joseph Zakarian, Jo Magazine

UPDATED – Jordan’s first low energy house in Aqaba is a residential project designed with the intention of creating a prototypical low-cost energy efficient building that achieves substantial energy use reductions without incurring additional construction costs.

After launching a design competition for a prototypical energy efficient house the house owner – a Jordanian environmental researcher- in collaboration with the Jordanian Center for the Study of the Built Environment, chose to proceed with a practical low energy design with an architecture that resonates with local aesthetics.

The competition’s winning scheme by the Dutch architect Florentine Visser, was based on a 3-floor design that included the many spaces required by the owner’s brief (including 6 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a car garage, and a basement) in a house with a total area of approximately 420 sqm.

In her approach to designing an energy efficient house, the  house’s architect used a combination of passive low energy design strategies and efficient active systems. Passive strategies are strategies that use design to reduce the need for heating and cooling. In the context of the Middle East passive design mostly refers to passive cooling strategies since the cooling requirements of middle eastern buildings far exceed their heating requirements.

Active systems, on the other hand, are mechanical systems such as heating, ventilation, and Air conditioning units (HVAC) efficient active systems use less energy to heat, ventilate, or cool buildings.

Most successful low energy buildings use a combination of passive strategies, active systems, and renewable energy generation to reduce their energy use ,with some buildings achieving the ultimate target of net zero energy, which essentially means that a building -or a  development- generates all the energy that it consumes.

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