Christian Kerez designed the curved slabs and ramps that give a continuous transition from one level to the other, a radical avant-garde parking structure, designed to not only provide essential parking but serve as public spaces, whilst providing a constantly changing spatial experience.
Planes floating in the urban landscape, create a series of new stacked landscapes, whose only Cartesian elements are the elevators and slender steel pillars. The rigidification of the whole to withstand horizontal thrusts, the slabs form a whole as they are all connected to each other.
Thanks to a meticulous disassembly process, the formwork of the slabs with double curvature geometries, was made with a system of scaffolding and conventional wooden planks.
The car parks serve the community by providing free parking spaces for city residents, while also offering paid parking for visitors. They are conceived as public spaces within the city. Their open structures offer a new urban attraction, adding new qualities to the historic city centre.
Car park plot D. Four Car Parks by Christian Kerez. Photograph by Maxime Delvaux.
Car park plot A. Four Car Parks by Christian Kerez. Photograph by Maxime Delvaux.
Project description by Christian Kerez
The four car parks in the Old City Center of Muharraq are part of the Pearl Path Project by the Ministry of Culture of Bahrain. This project combines the renovation of traditional residences and contemporary projects like the Pavilion for the World Expo by Anne Holtrop, a visitor center by Valerio Olgiati and a series of urban squares by OFFICE.
The car parks cover and multiply the large open voids in the dense medieval urban structure of Muharraq. They create first and foremost a space for the public that could also be used for prayer, events or markets. Many people will visit the buildings not just to park their cars, but also to experience the ever-changing spaces walking through these structures.
The parking facilities in Bahrain's old city center of Muharraq consist of four buildings with a total surface of 45,000 m². They follow the same principles of design in four different ways on four different plots. The slabs of these buildings bend and slope, merging into each other so that they also serve as ramps connecting one level to another. The slabs create a distinctive spatial experience when moving up or down the car park through their geometrical transformation from concave to convex, high and low, into spaces expanding to the interior or to the outside of the building. The movement of the cars creates a continuously changing space throughout the entire building.
Plot A
This is by far the largest plot with a length of 170m facing a main road and a roundabout. A car can drive in a continuous movement around the entire plot from the ground floor to the rooftop. To drive down from the top, the car makes another tour around the entire building on the opposite side. The spaces change from one side to the other since half of the building almost adjoins the green corner building by Anne Holtrop.
No slab is identical, creating an endless diversity of spaces. The formwork is based on conventional industrial products such as scaffolding towers. Very little of the sculptural formwork is customized. The constantly changing surfaces made it necessary to draw 75,000 sections on a scale 1:20, which was done by scripting. These sections were later printed 1:1 to cut the last element of the formwork on site. The large workforce usually required on construction sites in the Middle East was also necessary here in addition to the contemporary possibilities of computing to create this endlessly varied geometry. The project was possible only by bringing both together.
Plot B
In this car park the slabs are not perforated with circular openings, but simple cuts to allow passage from one level to the next. Otherwise, the circulation system is similar to Plot A. The geometry of this building is very regular, and surrounded on all sides by relatively homogeneous low buildings.
Plot C
This car park is just opposite a large Mosque and the Palace of the Winds, one of the first heritage buildings in Muharraq. Out of respect to the spirit of this neighbourhood, it is the only car park that has just one level.
Plot D
This is the smallest of the four car parks but since it is also the most exposed, it has the most distinctive sculptural, vertical expression. In addition, as the most challenging to organize, this small plot was used as a role model for the other car parks to be designed later on.
The exposed load-bearing structure of the car parks consists only of slabs and columns. The stiffening to withstand horizontal loads like winds or earthquakes is achieved by the connection of one slab to another. The composite columns measure between 25 and 30 centimeters. The span of approximately 10 meters produced very high punching forces in the slabs. Bent metal steel plates at the bottom and top of each prefabricated column connect the heavy large slabs with the vertical structural elements.
The stairs and elevator shafts are totally exposed, the latter covered with a transparent foil of PVC. The stairs work like springs between the slabs. Due to differences in building height between 220 and 480cm, the location of the landing changes from one level to the next. The circular stairs had to be very lightweight to avoid uneven loads within the load-bearing structure.
No slab is identical, creating an endless diversity of spaces. The formwork is based on conventional industrial products such as scaffolding towers. Very little of the sculptural formwork is customized. The constantly changing surfaces made it necessary to draw 75'000 sections on the scale of 1:20, which was done by scripting. These sections were later printed 1:1 to cut the last element of the formwork on site. The large workforce usually required on construction sites in the Middle East was also necessary here in addition to the contemporary possibilities of computing to create this endlessly varied geometry. The project was possible only by bringing both together.
