The slabs of the se buildings are shaped in a way that they touch each other, to give direct access from one slab to the next without any additional element like a ramp. The Parking in Bahrain consists of 4 buildings with a total surface of 45’000 m2 following the same principles of design in different ways on 4 different plots in the old city center of Muharraq. They create wide open public spaces stacked on top of each other in a densely inhabited his toric town and the largest infrastructural elements of the Pearling Path project.
The surfaces are curved in two directions. All slabs are different from one another creating an endless diversity of spaces in between them. The formwork is based on conventional industrial products as scaffolding towers. Only a very small part of the sculptural formwork is customized. The constantly changing surfaces made it necessary to design 75’000 sections in the scale 1:20, which was done by scripting. All elements could be therefore reused throughout the entire building process.
High temperatures between 35 to 45 Celsius degrees during the daytime made it necessary to cast mainly during the nights. The casts up to 1500 m2 in one pour required a precise definition of the workflow of 150 people on site working simultaneously in 4 different shifts. The large number of craftsmen which are usually working on a construction site in the Middle East were necessary as
much as the contemporary possibilities of computing to create this endless variation of geometry. The project was only possible by bringing both together.
Plot A
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Plot C