NAKHEEL WATER TERMINALS
Location: Dubai, UAE
Design Director: Raya Ani
Company Name: EEK Architects
Category: Transit Hub
Three distinct forms create the components of the transportation hub: a falcon’s wing, a palm frond, and a hexagon. The components are culturally inspired, and evoke important motifs and symbols in Dubai and the region at large. Each element of the transportation program employs a different component. Through a method of multiplying, combining and recombining these distinct individual components, different spatial forms for each element can be generated for every new transportation terminal. The result is a group of terminals for the Palms that are all unique variations on a common theme.
The terminals will serve to bring people together, providing people with an inviting and dramatic resting place offering shelter and shade. Therefore the central public space invokes the abstract image of a nest, a resting place or haven loosely woven from different strands of material. This interstitial, central space will become a temporary haven in a traveler’s migratory journey from one point in the city to another.
Three modes of transportation – ferry, helicopter, and monorail – intersect. Different elements of transportation converge at different levels, creating a sense of verticality within the central structure. Each transportation element inserted into the hub possesses its own distinctive shape.
