Palm Jumeirah Hotel

The design draws inspiration from the local landscape features, featuring the magnificent dunes. These time-tested features of the region are often mentioned in passing, but almost never explored with fresh eyes, anew. Our proposal creates a coherent overall environment, cherishing the topography of the dunes, which blurs the boundary between nature and function, between what is visibly landscape and built form. Organised around ripples of dunes, the resort hotel and service apartment complex is formed as a series of clustered undulations, weaving up and down: generating valleys and peaks to form small intimate assemblages around interior garden oasis in the valleys, connected to special meditative-event spaces at the peak. It seeks to create an inexpressible, out-of-the world spatial desire, of natural light and fluidity, form and immateriality.

Our proposal is not a resort hotel complex like the many others that exist within its proximity, situated within a context of a man-made geography of island, in the shape of a palm, it is both a “place” and landscape of desire. It is another realm, where fresh eyes of its visitors can explore, question, venture, engage, disengage, and situate themselves in the in-between discoveries of new dimensions of themselves. On a beautiful form, connecting natural history to man-made achievements, they can explore inexpressible realm of peace and plenty. It is as much of a retreat to find oneself as it is a time to attain an even higher level of self-awareness.