Live from Dubai: here are some images of Jebel Al Jais Mountain Resort - a tourist village on a mountain in the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah designed by Rem Koolhaas of Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
The project, which consists of elements including an inhabited dam, an inhabited bridge and a vertical village built into a cliff, is one of a string of schemes OMA are working on in the United Arab Emirates - including the RAK Convention Centre at Ras Al Khaimah - and which Koolhaas presented at the International Design Forum in Dubai this weekend.
Images courtesy of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).
There are more images of this project on OMA's website.
>> see more architectural project in the Persian Gulf on our Google map.
A statement from OMA follows:
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Jebel al Jais Mountain Resort
Location: Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates
Client: Rakeen Development
Site: Gateway City, Ras Al Khaimah, UAE
Program: Mixed Use: Covention and Exhibition Centre, Hotels, Offices, Residential, Shopping, Restaurants
Status: Concept Phase
Once the idea of the resort was to provide a momentary escape from everyday hardships; an earthly preview of paradise for temporary consumption...but now in the UAE, where the resort has become the ubiquitous condition, everywhere and ever present, it is the resort itself that is beginning to inspire escape.
The mountain resort of Ras Al Kaimah present a spectacular natural setting. To enter the rugged landscape of these mountains still feels like breaking new ground.
The surge of a new tourism in the form of survival trips, discovery tours and eco-expeditions signals a renewed hunger for long lost dangers; a re-appreciation of some of the more unpredicatible, now necessarily welcoming aspects of nature.
Rather than domesticating these barren slopes into the standard environment of the traditional resort, this project aims to create a resort that exploits their true natural conditions.
The proposed resort consists of a number of different individual parts, linked like a string of pearls by the new Jebel al Jais road.
These include the terraced resort, modern villas, the wedge building, outcrop, pixel villas, vertical city, the dam, the bridge, the cantilever building and the cliff villas.
Each part represents a different urban solution to inhabiting the mountains, providing various degrees of concentration and density. Each part also offers its own specific way of preserving the integrity of the landscape.