Recently the United Arab Emirates launched its first communications satellite into orbit and announced the construction of the first spaceport in the world. The Yahsat Satellite Tracking Ground Station is a result of those technology developments and represents a point of national pride.
The key building on the site is for public visitors and school groups to learn about the new technology. The landscape will assist to form the public face of the development, and needed to be carefully crafted.
Located approximately 20 kilometres inland from Abu Dhabi on a site surrounded by desert on all sides, the challenge was to create a landscape that belonged to its desert context while being contemporary and functional. The answer was to ground the landscape in the two key areas of the inner courtyard and arrival area; the surrounding 'poetry' of desert dunes was used to form an abstract series of sculptured dunes and islands in the sea of desert sands.
Environmentally the planting scheme embraces the desert natives and the complimentary dry landscapes of the Arabian wadi to minimise irrigation consumption. This was a significant issue as the site has no supply of irrigation water and would be forced to use potable water. To resolve this issue, Woods Bagot has also proposed the installation of a carbon-negative reed bed system to reprocess black and grey water on-site and to use the treated sewage effluent for irrigating the landscape sustainably. Both in cost terms and environmentally this has represented a significant saving in the operational costs for the client as it removes the need to remove sewage by tanker truck. Woods Bagot is responsible for design and supervision of the project which is now under construction.