Old Dubai was characterized by architecture that was constructed of gypsum from the salt marshes at the end of the creek and coral stone harvested from the deposits at its many inlets. Used for its thermal properties, availability and strength, coral structures exploited ventilation and evaporation to maintain manageable temperatures in the summer months.

As Dubai is often thought singularly as a destination of sorts for vacationing Eastern Europeans, it is easy to overlook its need for intersection of ideas and relationships as the city continues to evolve…

At this meeting place, a canopy is formally synchronized to a provisional landscape that affords both high and low-level seating, evaporative pools, and flexible space to accommodate a range of activities as needs and interests change. The canopy, whose patterning is adapted to strategically allow shading and sunlight, has an underlying diagram of the natural growth of coral polyps.

With coral, the calices of the skeleton are the depressions which house the polyp “flower”. They are the cups that define and support the shape and distribution of the vast array of colors and species within colonies, and essentially that which we hold to be beautiful.

In that spirit, this project aims to seize the opportunity and proven strategies of its place to define a meeting point that fuses form and utility to provide an interchange of cultural significance.