A public room made of shade and moving water, for a plaza that had neither.
Program
Public shade structure
Location
Sharjah
Area
420 m²
Status
On site 2025
Sharjah's competition brief asked for 'shade with civic dignity'. Our pavilion is a single deep canopy over a falaj — the traditional water channel — that runs the length of the seating, cooling the air it passes over the old way.
The canopy's underside is a coffered vault in rammed earth tone; its depth keeps the low evening sun off the benches, the hardest shading problem in the Gulf. Water is recirculated, shaded and topped by condensate recovered from the neighbouring mall's chillers — a borrowed by-product doing public work.
On site since January; the structure tops out this autumn.
1:1 coffer mock-up, tested against the July sun
Design moves
One deep canopy; no columns in the seating field
Falaj channel pre-cools the seating edge
Condensate from adjacent chillers feeds the water loop
