THE GARDEN OF DELIGHTS

The Garden of Delights
Dubai | United Arab Emirates

The Garden of Earthly Delights is a surreal proposal for a new pedestrian waterfront promenade along Dubai’s creek, aiming to merge the lifestyle by the beach with the lifestyle in the forest, having entertaining facilities typical from shore destinations while being surrounded by leafy and lush nature.

In order to beautify the public realm of this new development in the city, we proposed a dreamy, enchanting and magical forest inspired by The Garden of Earthly Delights, the triptych painting by Bosch.

The project is rendered as a delightful garden of surrealism, where flower beds, shrubs and trees are elevated from the ground by large glowing concrete planters, or where giant artificial flowers appear as eye-catching & colorful shading structures over mini-plazas, gathering spots or playful features for kids.

The combination of natural vegetation and artificial surreal elements generates an enchanting forest on the bank of the creek, providing eye-catching and entertaining functions and activities for kids and adults alike along the pedestrian promenade.

To enhance and elevate that enchanting character of the proposal, magenta lighting features were proposed in all the vertical objects for night time effect, creating a very dreamy atmosphere to walk through, hang out and while away.

The landscape design is based on the circle as basic geometry to reveal the different features, as a design strategy to subdivide the space into multiple smaller functional pockets, turning that section of the promenade into a multifunctional space to be enjoyed by kids & adults alike.

CREDITS:

Project Name: The Garden of Delights
Design: 100architects (Shanghai)
Design Team: Marcial Jesús, Javier González, Lara Broglio, Mónica Páez, Keith Gong, Cosima Jiang.
Client: EMAAR Properties
Area: 12,500 m2
Status: Concept Design
Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Product definition

It is an inhabitable architectural object inserted on top of an existing urban environment, but alienated from its surroundings.

This architectural object intervenes in the space by touching the ground and acting as an accessible and multifunctional platform, allowing people to stand on top of it and interact directly.

The main objective of this conceptual prototype is to trigger a massive public interest to the place, encouraging the rise of high public affluence, becoming a remarkable virtual landmark that attracts customers and cultivates important human dynamics and commercial activity.