“How do you take the historically horizontal nature of Arabic architecture and create a vertical interpretation of it?”

There is little history of vertical structures in Arabic architecture, but it appears the future will be dominated by them. Our question is relevant and obvious, yet strangely unexplored in current construction development.

Our design derives from challenging ourselves to the question - ‘What is a vertical Arabic village?’. Culturally, we set out the goal to create a building that is derived from ‘Arabic’ built forms and feels inherently Arabic even though confronting the contemporary condition of being a ‘vertical’ village. That is, the innate demands of ‘going vertical’ are used to push the development of a contemporary Arabic architecture.