Multi-Family Housing, Makkah, Saudi Arabia
Multifamily Housing with DPZ, Town Planners Makkah, Saudi Arabia 2013
DPZ has developed a master plan for a project that lies on either side of the road from Jeddah to Makkah. They assembled a team of firms to develop housing prototypes for the first phase, on the darker parcels in the site plan, above. The darkest parcels indicate those lots described on the following pages. They are referred to by their development parcel numbers; C-R1, C-R3, C-R4, C-R8, and APP-15.
These are relatively large parcels on large blocks. The buildings need to be four to six stories. Economy requires enough repetition and reasonable enough envelop efficiencies to be cost effective, but not so much repetition that the streets become oppressive; and not such efficient envelopes that rooms are too far from natural light. Privacy needs to be served. This is easier on corner lots but harder on midblock lots. It is easier for apartments facing large streets and harder for apartments facing block interiors.
The parcels need to self-park, and for the taller buildings with commercial ground floors this means subgrade parking accessed off the service alleys. Buildings are larger than what can be served by a single compact core and so care must be taken to prevent hallways from being long or dark.
C-R1, the largest building, has two shorter, unconnected halls—essentially two buildings sharing expensive parking. It has a single large courtyard on the alley. C-R3 is a midblock building. The lot has four-meter side setbacks and so apartments along common property lines have a second exposure to midblock courtyards. C-R4 is a corner parcel with high wings on the street and the largest possible courtyard. APP-15 is a lower, four-story building with minimal two-meter side setbacks, so apartments orient toward a courtyard. Parking is at grade in the back, accessed off the alley.
Top right: A detail of the roofline. Above: The third residential floor plan. It has two cores in order to shorten the double-loaded halls.
Above: A rendered roof plan showing the entire superblock of about 250 by 750 meters. The interior of the block had been cleared of all but three mosques. Existing perimeter buildings of 15 by 20 meters were maintained.
Left: A detail of the site plan.
Opposite page: An aerial view of the block interior, looking east. The existing perimeter buildings were left. The proposal focused on the three-story interior of the block.
Previous page: Middle and bottom, the oasis and Al Jahili fort, both less than a mile from Hai Al Humaira. Top, a satellite photo of Al Ain from about 1968, at a point when a four-thousandyear-old trading crossroads was giving way to the infrastructure of a modern city. You can see some of the traffic circles and one of the large boulevards already in place, even as you can see the small scale of the city being supplanted. The oasis is the large, irregular dark area. The fort is just to the west of it.
