Sustainable by Creative Collaboration: Developing the Blueprint for a Zero-carbon Community in the Desert

In November 2008, I invited a group of architects, town planners, designers and engineers from Germany, the UK, France, Brazil and Japan to collaborate for one week on the blueprint for a zero-carbon community in the desert. To enable a highly focused collaboration in a very short timeframe, I developed a "shared space" process, based on one expressive medium which has to be shared by the participants. The shared space is a shared image or model which can enable a shared understanding and create a frame of reference for the instant prototyping of complex design projects. In this instance, the shared space was the projected building site, printed out on a large canvas to be the common background for the architecture scale models.  

Within one very intensive week, we came up with an advanced concept for a zero-carbon, pedestrian-friendly environment. This "creative resort" or village was envisioned to provide an inspiring working and living space for creative people and locals.

The secret to success for creative workshops such as this is in the people and in the process. Good building designers mostly work alone or in small studios and therefore mostly don't have the capacity for more complex projects. Large architectural firms, on the other hand, are primarily focused on commercial aspects, a focus which tends to take attention away from design quality. "Starchitects", finally, are under pressure to replicate their own signature style in every project worldwide, an approach not adequate for designing a varied, inspiring and human-scale community.

The workshop participants here have been prize-winning international architects and designers with smaller practices who showed extraordinary attention to design quality in previous projects. The shared space was the process to create a shared understanding. It transforms the standard mode of creative competition into collaboration. The shared space focuses efforts on enhancing each others contribution through collaboration while maintaining everybody's individual approach. 

The output is a visionary blueprint for a community which, in the harsh environment of the desert of Qatar, works only on the sun and the sea, entirely eliminating the need for polluting energy sources such as oil and gas. The system, designed as a blueprint for desert climates with only saltwater access, is powered by a solar tower and produces its own drinking water, electricity, cooking gas and vegetables through an integrated system of wetlands, saltwater greenhouses, biodigesters and greywater channels. The system is scaleable for populations of up to several thousand. All technical conditions have been calculated to ensure that the system works. See a photo gallery of the design process here (click on the images to see a large version).


The sustainable energy concept: The community runs only on the sun and the sea