IaaC blog

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The geographical location of the mega-structure is in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Mecca is one of the most important cities of the world because of it’s religious importance to the Islamic religion. Every Muslim is obligated at least once in his lifetime to visit Mecca. That leads to a huge number of pilgrims every year that need accommodation for the period of time that they stay in town. The mega-structure proposed in a site near the Masjid Al-Haram (the Sacred Mosque) will accommodate these pilgrims and provide all the facilities needed.

As primary renewable energy source the structure will use geothermal energy. According to researches Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most suitable geographical locations for the use of geothermal energy. The grey water of the building will be treated and pumped into the ground where it will be heated. This water will be pumped up and used to power up the geothermal energy plant providing electricity for the building. Geothermal energy will also be used for heating and cooling the building. Hot air will be gathered from the building and transfered underground where it will be cooled and released into the structure. This system can also work the other way around, gathering cold air and releasing hot air. The infrastructure of the building will follow the structure and the organization of the spaces. In this way some nodes will be shared and other parts of the building will be independent in a way sharing only one node; water. These volumes will be able to treat water and reuse it; therefore they need two more nodes.

The building’s structure is based on the plant cactus. Cactus has the ability to survive in extreme environmental conditions with long periods of drought and high temperatures. The geographical location of the building is actually in a desert; a suitable environment for cactus. Studying the anatomy of the plant one can notice the cells that have the ability to transfer water from one cell to another and are able to contract and expand depending on the amount of water that they store and transfer. These cells are the key to the surviving of the plant in periods of drought. Based on these cells a structural element derived. It’s a surface analyzed in vertical and horizontal columns and beams that follow the form of the surface. Because the structure is totally symmetrical it is self-sustained and is able to be multiplied and combined in various ways forming constantly different formations.

There are four components that organize the space; the component of circulation, the component of commercial spaces, open spaces and services, the component of the residential spaces and the component of religious spaces. The circulation is placed in the centre of the building, around it the commercial, the open spaces, and the services area is organized in a circular formation. The residential and religious areas branch out of this core of public activities being detached but at the same time connected with the public spaces. In the panels below you can see in plan, section and perspective how the structure is organized in detail.

A project which took the assumption that “no-place” is a local quality of Dubai and wondered about what sustainability means in terms of prosumers ended up as a strategy for reshaping existing ubran sprawls (no-places around the world) into sustainable, distributed networks.

Scenarion of joining the iiD (internet of instances of desires)

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This is the final presentation of the project and here you can find the A4 panels.

This is the section developed during Max Sanjulián workshop:

design-studio-ii-rafa-gtz.ppt

Here there is the pdf of the last correction.

revision.pdf

tutto.pdf

Here there is one pdf file.

exagonal.pdf