office development, abu dhabi

construction costs: undisclosed     project stage: design

worldwide... the brief for this project was to provide 96,000 sq. ft. of development over twelve floors, including 70,000 sq. ft. of open plan office space that could be let as one building or divided up for individual lettings. once the cores had been resolved the we began to focus on the external skin of the building and conceived the idea of a second skin suspended the frame to provide shading to the office spaces.

as this idea developed we decided to incoporate photovoltaics in with the mashrabiyas  to provide power as well as shading for the building; this also helped to improve the language of the facade. by using the second skin to provide both shading and power the overall running costs of the building will be reduced as the electricity produced can power the internal lighting systems and the shading prevents the building overheating which means air conditioning units can run at lower operating speeds to further reduce the laod requirements.