The Dubai Mall | DP Architects
The Dubai Mall is a design and construction project for an entire micro-urbanism. It lies at the base of the world’s tallest building, spreading across 34ha — the identities of both the mall and tower are understood to be symbols projected onto the world representing Dubai as a prosperous global city. But the Dubai Mall is a massive presence that is not legible as a single form like the tower standing analogous to it: the mall’s size must be experienced to be understood.
Targeted to accommodate 30 million shoppers each year, The Dubai Mall is a development of unprecedented scale. It houses the world’s largest indoor aquarium, features an all-weather shopping grove, indoor adventure park, and Olympic-sized ice skating rink. The street frontage is a half kilometer and the gross floor area spreads 550,000sqm over four levels. Immense quantities of material were required, including 190,000sqm of granites, marbles and artificial stones. Upon completion, the mall became the largest in the world — a single, continuous volume housing 1200 shops and parking for 14,000 vehicles supported by a network of roadways. The project opened in 2008 as part of the $20 billion Burj Khalifa complex in Dubai’s new downtown, a 180ha master plan for office spaces, hotels, residential apartments and shopping centres.
Designers worked across scales to doubly awe visitors with vast spaces and welcome them with measures of nearness. In following, coherence and hierarchy were critical to the mall’s planning. The mall is structured at the scale of a city, with internal pedestrian streets, nodes and landmarks; way-finding and urban identifiers are integrated into the design and organized by wide, straight boulevards terminating at well-defined atria and connecting the many realms of shopping. Entrances perform as circulation focal points — the Media Drum Entrance, the Grand Entrance, the Gold Souk Pavilion and the Carnival Street ‘Red Box’ Entrance. Shops are grouped into families to form islands of specialization, as eight regions with distinct characters.
At smaller scales, architectural details provide a visual dynamism that extends through each of the mall’s spaces. These take cues from a spectrum of Arabic motifs and symbols — facade articulation patterns, skylight designs, and the fabricated patterns of interior finishes, for instance. Meanwhile, water features inject life into this desert city in the form of cascading falls and a public aquarium.
The Dubai Mall project was an exploration in typology informed by techniques of retail design and urban planning. Its architects worked to conceive a mall of unprecedented scale, and the solution has perhaps further evolved experiential retail design.
Available in: http://www.dpa.com.sg/projects/the-dubai-mall/. Accessed in: 09/29/2017.
