Park Parking

Abstract

The book containing this project, presents the outcomes of the 1st International Workshop “Dubai Pop-Up: Architecture in a Transient City” organized in March 2017 at d3-Dubai Design District by Al Ghurair University in collaboration with other international academic partners. Local students of architecture worked together with students coming from an international background, in order to foster a shared design vision through a collective cultural growth and reciprocal awareness. The participants had the opportunity to visit both recent accomplished buildings and projects under construction, confronting themselves with the local context in a dynamic and stimulating environment. The workshop fostered collaboration among international partners, increasing reciprocal cultural exchanges, and benefiting of lectures and contributions by some of the most prominent figures of the international scene of architectural design, based or active in the Gulf region. The participating academic institutions led by the College of Architecture and Design of Al Ghurair University in Dubai included the University of Palermo, the University of Cagliari, the University of Valladolid, the University of Zaragoza, the University of Burgos, and the University of Seville. This project, which ranks as iterable model for other similar places, transforms the parking constraint into an opportunity to create urban spaces of quality. In them, the spatial threshold identified in the silos for private vehicles, regaining an effective pedestrian mobility, reconfigures the actual uncanny vacuum in a cozy urban park and freely accessible, where water, greenery, places to stop, to rest and to meet each other, may be distributed and intertwined, interacting one with one another.