Cool ideas to beat the heat

Cool ideas to beat the heat
Bradley Hope for THE NATIONAL

In recent history, property developers have had a pretty basic strategy for dealing with summer heat which can reach 50°C with 97 per cent humidity – air conditioning.

Buildings have blasted out an arctic-style chill to such a degree that some people need a sweater. But as the city evolves into a year-round destination for tourists and business travellers, and a permanent home for an increasing population, developers have been busy working on a slew of new technologies and techniques to mitigate the climate.

Not only have they been trying to create more energy-efficient indoor cooling systems, but they are also working to reduce the outside temperature as well. It is a far cry from the days when Emiratis just evacuated the city by camel to Al Ain in the summer.

The strategies range from the elementary – canopies, building layout, cool-water misters — to the complex, like mechanical roofs that respond to the temperature, or seawater circulating under pavements.

The latest project to go head-to-head with the heat has been planned for a 1.4 million square metre plot of parched desert near Zayed Sport City Stadium. The developer is Capitala, a partnership involving one of the Government’s local investment arms, Mubadala, and a Singapore developer, CapitaLand. Details of the project are expected to be announced next week during the three-day Cityscape Abu Dhabi conference at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre, but the head of Mubadala’s property division, John Thomas, has released a few tantalising early details.

Mr Thomas said the project near the Zayed Sport City Stadium was partially inspired by Clarke Quay in Singapore: once a humid, nearly uninhabitable industrial quarter on the water. CapitaLand transformed Clarke Quay into a trendy shopping and nightlife district while the British firm, Alsop Architects, designed a system of canopies and umbrellas to shade the streets, placing misters and giant fans at different locations to create a cool, artificial breeze.

“It was an eye-opener,” said Mr Thomas. “It’s four or five degrees cooler. They know how to work with a climate similar to ours.”

What is more, if Capitala can make those technologies work in Abu Dhabi, it bodes well for what could become an entire industry devoted to weather mitigation. Developers and architects here could market their designs around the world, and even in nearby GCC countries, which are also undergoing a building boom thanks to an influx of money from high oil prices.

Some of the most dramatic solutions have been devised by the Abu Dhabi development company, Sorouh, and Arup, a UK-based design and architecture firm, on Shams Abu Dhabi. At the centrepiece of the island, which is an 84,500-square-metre green space with amphitheatres and activity areas called Central Park, the developer has planned to circulate seawater underground to cool the pavements and benches and hide misters in nooks and crannies on the exterior of buildings. Everything in the project will be crafted to take advantage of breezes and natural shading. Arup estimates that it can lower the temperature by at least 6°C.

Another firm at the forefront of this innovation is Foster & Partners, which has been designing the new Central Market, a residential development at Al Raha Beach, as well as Masdar, the zero-emissions project.

Gerard Evenden, a senior partner at the company, said that climate control starts with simple things like materials used in construction and the orientation of the building.

“It’s extremely important to consider the relationship of the building to the sun and the wind, and for Abu Dhabi, you have to think about the water supply and the dust,” Mr Evenden said.

For instance, in contrast to the wide avenues and tall buildings in Abu Dhabi, narrower spaces between buildings are shaded for longer periods of the day, which can prevent heat from generating in the walls.

“It’s called solar build-up,” Mr Evenden said, adding that heavy concrete walls should be in the shade because they absorb heat. But if kept cooler “the wall itself will radiate cooling”, he said. The effect can be felt in cathedrals, which are cold in the winter, cool during a summer’s day and warm at night.

At Central Market, Foster & Partners had designed a mechanical roof that can respond to weather and the time of day. In the summer, it can close to retain the air-conditioning, but in cooler months be opened to pull in a breeze.

“It’s about giving people choices in the way space changes throughout the year,” Mr Evenden said.

Building design itself can create a more energy efficient type of cooling. At Auto Mall, a development of three buildings in Dubai’s Business Park MotorCity, Union Properties has been using state-of-the-art architecture to reduce heat.

Adib Moubadder, the company’s director of facilities, said hot air was less likely to penetrate the Auto Mall because its design “reduces the cooling load by creating positive pressure on the whole building”.

Still, developers need to be wary of too many technological solutions, which can reduce the energy efficiency of a building, said Alan Paterson, Aldar’s head of planning. Air conditioning is inherently a wasteful way to cool a space, but cool water misters are not particularly efficient either, especially in a desert environment where water is scarce.

“Supplying the water to allow the misters and under-pavement supply may produce cooling locally but may be unsustainable generally,” he said.

Mr Paterson added that a major driver of smart cooling techniques was the increasing trend among developers, including Aldar, to use environmental standards like Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) when making their plans.

“Although LEED covers all issues related to sustainability, this necessarily includes natural cooling and the reduction of energy requirements across the board,” Mr Paterson said. “All options are considered for each of our projects, but this has to be balanced against realistic and cost-effective proposals.”

bhope@thenational.ae