Designed by London-based Heatherwick Studio, the 20m-high shaded Al Fayah Park will offer visitors cafes, play spaces, a library, pools and streams as well as date palms and community vegetable gardens.
According to Heatherwick, the studio was asked to "re-conceive" a major piece of public land in Abu Dhabi. Following the rapid pace of the city’s recent development there was a desire to provide a local park as a public space devoted to the well-being of the people of the city.
Heatherwick said that by creating partial shades for plants, the canopy aims to reduce the amount of water lost to evaporation and so will improve the park’s energy efficiency and sustainability.
The British daily ‘The Telegraph’ said the construction of the Al Fayah Park is likely to begin in 2015 and due to be completed in 2017.
The London-based designer Thomas Heatherwick has previously designed a great number of landmarks including London Bus, Olympic Cauldron, London’s Garden Bridge among others.
Heatherwick said designing a park in the desert presented the studio with a series of challenges, the most serious of which was how to provide protection from the heat for visitors as well as vegetation. Offering a place for relaxation and leisure for those using it, the park also needed to be energy efficient and sustainable in its use of water to irrigate vegetation.
It said the existing public space evoked the style of a European park by covering the desert with a blanket of grass. However, counteracting evaporation caused by the intensity of the sun required a significant amount of purified water to irrigate it, produced industrially from salty sea water using a costly and high energy consuming desalination process.
Heatherwick Studio is recognised for its work in architecture, urban infrastructure, sculpture, design and strategic thinking.
