Designing Within a Masterplanned Context

An architect appointed on a plot in a planned district frequently receives, along with the site boundary, a document that already has views. About the massing. About the materials. About how the building meets the ground, and sometimes about the character of the elevation itself. Part of the design was settled before anyone was appointed, by somebody who was thinking about the district rather than the building.

The instinctive reaction is to read that as a reduction. It is more useful to read it as a brief. Somebody has already answered the question of what this place should be like; what remains is the far more interesting question of what this building should be within it.

What has already been decided

Much of the contemporary development in Abu Dhabi, and in planned districts generally, has taken place inside comprehensively planned areas rather than plot by plot within a loose general envelope. Whole districts were conceived as a piece: their street pattern, their density, their relationship to the water, the way blocks sit against each other.

That produces a different kind of plot. Where a general framework might set height and setback and leave the rest, a planned district is more likely to have a view on massing, on the treatment of the ground plane, on the relationship to adjacent plots, on landscape, and sometimes on the elevation itself.

An architect arriving without that document in hand is not designing freely. They are designing speculatively, and the difference will surface at the point where the two are compared.

Why districts are planned this way

It is worth being fair about the reason, because the case for it is strong and it is easy to caricature.

Walk a well-planned district and the coherence is the point. Buildings designed separately, by different practices, for different clients, that nonetheless agree with each other. The ground plane continues. The scale steps sensibly. The street reads as a street rather than as a row of unrelated objects each competing for attention.

That coherence does not happen by chance and it does not survive being left to goodwill. It is produced by deciding some things at the scale of the district, so that they are not renegotiated one plot at a time. The cost is a measure of individual freedom. The return is a place rather than a collection of buildings.

The alternative is visible in plenty of cities: streets where every building is interesting and the street is not.

The freedom that remains, and where it is

The practical question is not how much freedom is left but where it is, because it is rarely distributed evenly.

Controls tend to be most prescriptive about the things that read collectively: height, the building line, how the ground plane works, the material family. They tend to be least prescriptive about the things a resident experiences and a passer-by does not: how the plan works, where the light falls, how the section handles privacy, how the building is entered and what that arrival feels like.

That distribution is worth reading carefully, because it tells you where design effort will earn a return. A practice that spends its energy fighting the collective constraints usually ends up with a compromised version of its first idea. A practice that accepts them quickly and spends the same energy on the plan, the section and the arrival usually produces a better building and a smoother project.

Individuality against context

This is the real design question the typology poses, and it has no general answer.

A building that ignores its district is conspicuous, and conspicuousness is not the same as quality. A building that merely complies is invisible, and invisibility is not the same as manners. The interesting work sits between the two: a building that clearly belongs to its street and is nonetheless recognisably itself.

Where that distinction usually lives is in the difference between the rules and the intent behind them. A control that specifies a material family is protecting a certain quality of light and weight on the street. There is normally more than one way to honour that, and finding the one nobody has used yet is architecture. Reading the control literally and reaching for the obvious answer is compliance.

The buildings that succeed in these districts tend to be the ones that understood what the framework was protecting, rather than the ones that either fought it or obeyed it without asking.

Constraint as a design instrument

Architects say that constraints improve design often enough that it has become a platitude, which is a shame, because on a planned district it is specifically and demonstrably true.

A fixed building line removes a question that would otherwise absorb weeks and rarely repays them. A prescribed height means the massing conversation starts at proportion rather than at maximisation. A material family narrows a palette that is, in practice, easier to work within than to choose from cold. What is left is the part where judgement actually shows.

This is not an argument that every constraint is welcome. Some are arbitrary, some are inherited from an earlier idea of the district, and some ask for something the plot cannot comfortably give. But the reflex that treats all of them as an imposition tends to produce weaker buildings than the habit of asking what each one is for.

What a building owes the place around it

On a plot within a planned district, a building has an obligation that a standalone site does not impose: it is part of somebody else's view.

Its neighbours were designed on the assumption that it would behave in a certain way. Its side elevations, which on an isolated site might be treated as secondary, are the primary elevation for the building next door. The way it meets the ground continues a public route that begins several plots away. Very little of this appears in a rendering of the building itself, and all of it is what the district will be judged on.

Designing for that is a shift in what you are drawing. The subject is no longer only the building. It is the building and the fifty metres around it.

Coastal and island sites

Much premium development of this kind sits on coastal and island ground, which adds a physical layer to the framework one. Reclaimed or coastal land affects structure, and therefore massing. Shoreline conditions shape building lines and drainage. The environment is a design input long before it is anything else.

These constraints tend to reinforce the same point: they are cheap to design with and expensive to design against, and they are all established before a concept is developed rather than after.

Our own work in the emirate includes four branded residential schemes — Cartier, Missoni and Waldorf Astoria Residences, three of them on Reem Island alone, plus Aston Martin Residence — together with the Museum of Humanity, a civic and cultural building. Three towers answering to the same district framework within a few hundred metres of each other is precisely the discipline this article describes: distinct buildings, one street, one set of decisions already made before any of the three was appointed.

Common misconceptions

"A framework that has already decided the massing removes the architect's role"

It is more useful read as a brief. Somebody has already answered what this place should be like; what remains is the more interesting question of what this building should be within it.

"Every constraint in a design code is worth resisting"

Some controls are arbitrary. But the habit of asking what each one protects tends to produce better buildings than either fighting them or obeying them without asking.

"Side elevations on an isolated-feeling plot are secondary"

Within a planned district, a side elevation is often the primary elevation for the building next door, designed on the assumption it would behave a certain way.

"Compliance and good design are the same thing"

A building that merely complies is invisible, and invisibility is not the same as manners. The interesting work sits between conspicuous and compliant — recognisably itself while belonging to its street.

What to establish before drawing

• Which framework applies to this specific plot — and is it the current version?
• What has already been decided at district scale, and what is genuinely left?
• What is each control protecting, as distinct from what it literally says?
• Which elevations are collective and which are private?
• What will the ground permit, on reclaimed or coastal sites particularly?

These questions are answerable in days at the start of a project. They are considerably more disruptive to answer once a concept has been developed, approved by a client and shown to a market, because by then the answer is not information. It is a revision.

For the design sequence these decisions sit within, see the RIBA stages. For the branded residential typology that dominates much of this development, see what is a branded residence, and for how a plan sustains coherence at the scale above the building, masterplanning in the Gulf. On a plot of this kind, the earlier that conversation happens the more it is worth. Contact the studio.