PHASE 4 - Expat Dormitories

Focus Area - Expat Dormitories

Create a concentration of dormitories to facilitate the three primary needs of expat workers: living space, social community, and proximity to work opportunities. 

The proposal for this focus area is to improve the distressed neighborhood with new condensed modular dormitory units that are nested in the steep topography of the North-East hillside.

The existing housing in this area is highly distressed, lacking basic amenities, and connectivity to the greater urban diagram.  Because of the area’s location to the nearby central business core of Al-Hamriya, it is the perfect location for the workers to live and have proximity to work and social outlets.

Socially: this proposal creates opportunities for interaction at two different scales.  As a neighborhood, the large park leading into the housing unit provides space for expats to gather, easing pressures on the Northern street edge and the limited open spaces in the business district.  At the house scale, each unit has a courtyard providing an intimate community for small groups of expats, and also a habitable roof space that captures one of the greatest amenities of this area, the view.

Outdoor Movie - Residents may watch the movies from their rooftops.

Economically:  The neighborhood being developed is grounded in the premise of being a high density, low income, sustainable model for urban living.  This model depends on workers having close access to work, opportunities to grow their own crops, and jobs creation.  The prefab units, housing the workers, are developed, marketed and built at the vocational school in the business district. 

Perspective of Courtyard

Functionally:  The urban plan for this area is based on improving the health and well-being of workers and their relationship to the greater community.  The clustering of units is based on a centralized improved infrastructure that is housed in a series of unifying walls that organizes the community.  

Environmentally:  Each unit is designed to be highly efficient, utilizing strategic shading strategies and passive cooling strategies to regulate human comfort.  Water harvesting strategies are also being developed for use in urban agriculture.

Area Plan Version I - Working with topography, smaller plazas with amphitheater steps are created upon entry to the different clusters of dormitories. Potentially, the bigger central plaza in this focus area can be an outdoor informal amphitheater.

Area Plan Version II- Working with the same concepts, but altering the original entry to the southeast urban agriculture to be less formal. And also in the process of developing the clusters of housing to work with solar orientation.

Initial Perspective of Courtyard