JAMEEL ARTS CENTRE DUBAI

The Jameel Arts Centre (JAC) will be a place for discovery, creativity and meeting. The vision for the Jameel Arts Centre is to be a leading institution for the contemporary art and creative economy, promoting performances, artists and creative start-ups from the Middle East & North Africa regions.

The mission is to create a thriving contemporary arts centre that is home to the Jameel Art Collection, presenting the Jameel Prize Gallery and temporary exhibitions, supporting local creative economy, encouraging cooperation between young artists and creative entrepreneurs, offering professional training and providing a platform for creative ideas and encounters.

In an urban context like Dubai, where everything seems to be designed in order to impress, we are now proposing a change of paradigm: instead of competing with size and shape, we have chosen to work with the scale of landscape. In this context, our design strategy is “Simple Multiplicity”: we overlap different gradients of density forming a single cube, through the fractal aggregation of square modules, per self-reproduction and self-similarity, generating the geometry of the building.

JAC is the place to exchange creative experiences and ideas, a new urban polarity where people meet by day and by night: a place for the people by the people, promoting a sense of community, sharing common values connected to art and creativity, while enhancing the different cultural identities of each person.

Client:
Abdul Latif Jameel Community Initiatives

Project team:
OBR
Buro Happold
Carlotta de Bevilacqua
Aubry & Guiguet Programmation
Ground
MIC Mobility in Chain

OBR Design team:
Paolo Brescia and Tommaso Principi,
Viola Bentivogli, Dario Cavallaro,
Massimiliano Giberti, Ipsita Mahajan,
Lucia Nadalin, Roberta Pari,
Mattia Santambrogio, Elisa Siffredi

Location:
Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Dimensions:
site area 25,000 sqm
built surface 18,000 sqm

Chronology:
2014 Concept design
2013 Design competition (2nd prize)