LANDFORM BUILDING
Jebel Al Jais Mountain Resort (Rosamond Mengdi Zhou)
David Gissen, “The Architectural Reconstruction of Nature”, Afterword for Landform Building, May 25th, 2011.
David Gissen, a theorist mainly focusing on the historical projects of architecture and urbanism, wrote this essay as the afterword for Stan Allen and Marc McQuade’s book “Landform Building”, which is widely concerned as one of the most significant writings regarding to landform architecture after being published. In his essay, Gissen tried to explain how architecture developed in bringing nature into cities as a form of reconstruction. According to Gissen, “nature” used to be commonly regarded as an opposite concept to “urban” in the past. However, through the reconstruction work for post-industrial cities, architects started to be aware of the importance and necessity of resurrecting and rebuilding lost nature with architecture. Therefore, as the times required, architecture’s been positioned to give the above-mentioned operation a form in the way of landform building. Though may be criticized of being merely of temporal worth, Gissen opinions can actually be supported by Fischer von Erlach’s work Plan of Civil and Historical Architecture in 1737, one of the few early architecture works trying to reconstruct a reconstruction of nature. From this essay, the readers come to realize the backgrounds of how landform building emerged as well as the significance of it, whereas not being able to construct a more concrete and comprehensive idea of what landform building is due to the theorization and abstractness of the essay.
OMA, “Jebel Al Jais Mountain Resort”, OMA’s official website, 2006
OMA, led by six partners - Rem Koolhaas, Ellen van Loon, Reinier de Graaf, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, and David Gianotten, is a leading international partnership practicing architecture, urbanism, and cultural analysis. As OMA are the designers of Jebel Al Jais Mountain Resort, the passage is a relatively detailed description of the project. Defined within the category of landform building, the resort is claimed to be self-organized within its natural assets and developed in the new way to preserve the natural integrality of the mountains, instead of the traditional way of “demonstrating” the local environment. Even so, as a massive-scaled project conducted in the extreme environment as dessert, it meant to be controversial and to raise a lot of public’s concerns that if a resort with so many luxurious villas, gardens, etc. can really live up to the designers’ expectations and minimize its impact on the local environment.
Bridgette Meinhold, “Rak Jebel Al Jais Mountain Resort Defies Nature”, Inhabitat, May 30th, 2009.
Bridgette Meinhold is a sustainability consultant who helps individuals and businesses to reduce their environmental impact, as well as an architecture editor on Inhabitat and a contributing writer for Inhabitots.com and Ecouterre.com. In this passage, Meinhold briefly introduced the current situation of the project Jebel Al Jais Mountain Resort as well as the future development of it. She didn’t deny the spectacularity of this masterpiece. However, in the end of the passage, Meinhold brought out her thoughts to the audience that located in a region with limited water, whether it’s responsible to develop such a massive resort. She criticized heavily of its lack of sustainability, regarded the resort as reeking havoc on the local environment. Interesting indeed, according to OMA, the designer of the resort, they’ve actually been trying to develop the resort in a unique way to preserve the natural integrity of the mountain. Meinhold’s concerns are very necessary in helping us evaluate massive projects in extreme environments. However, does magastructure necessarily mean mass destruction to local environments? Taking landform architecture into consideration, the association may not be as simple as Meinhold’s been concerned so far.
Stan Allen, “The Megaform Revisited”, Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, 2011.
Stan Allen, an American architect and theorist, is the author of the book Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain. In one of the passages of his book, Allen “revisited” the concept of megaform. Megaform in nowadays, according to Stan Allen, is not merely a matter of size, but rather a kind of form able to intergrade the building, the landscape and the urban context. In other words, what really matters is the compatibility goes multi directions. Here OMA’s project Jebel Al Jais Mountain Resort has been used as an example to help elaborate the idea, since OMA built the architecture in intension of integrating the form and function of a resort, the perilous terrain of mountain and dessert, and the urban context of tourism in the city Ras Al Khaimah. Allen cited Frampton, a British architect, heavily in this passage. And Frampton’s idea is the further development from Fumihiko Maki’s argument, where the concept of “megaform” first emerged.
Jebel Al Jais Mountain Resort by OMA, Dezeen Magazine, May 28th 2007. The passage is a quite straightforward introduction of OMA’s project Jebel Al Jais Mountain. It briefly showed the audience the bold and creative design from OMA for this mass-scaled project. It put emphasize on the eye-catching dam. The dam’s been designed to imitate a huge waferfall running in the valley. Containing much of the original words from OMA’s official website, the passage is of no critical values except for role of introduction