Wadi Araba Crossing Duty Free Market
Located in Southwest of Jordan, Border gate with a mobile free market is an exciting project I had the privilege to design with other elite Jordanian architects. The project main theme was to leave visitors with a memorable tourist experience. The project was especially exciting not only for its size and great architectural details but also for giving me the opportunity to express my gratitude to my beloved country Jordan. In this article I'll walk you through the project, hoping you'll enjoy it as I had great time designing it.
The Project's total area is 240 square meters with an average width of 6 meters and a length of 42 meters. The commercial retreat comprises seven modules, creating separate areas for different commercial uses like; checking points, cashiers, retail areas, and restrooms within a simple steel-framed structure. The base of the building is raised off the ground to protect it from rising damp. The roof is covered with skylight and photo-voltaic cells to provide the market with natural light and to reduce use of artificial light. Natural stone is used to provide old traditional feel, and some stone masses are designed to provide a space for mechanical services like air-conditioning and water tanks. The challenge in this project was to provide a unique, contemporary, and affordable design.
Uniqueness; we achieved Uniqueness through the composition of volumes, creating spaces that are more than cubes from cubic modules. This was achieved by experimenting with masses created from different material and intersecting metals sheets with traditional materials like stone. This intersection creates an interesting composition. The overall design consists of heavy and stable masses holding a lighter one, as shown in the perspectives below.
Contemporary; Contemporary design is not an architectural style - like the Baroque, Futurism, or Modernism - there is no set of principles to apply it. But, the most interesting feature shared in contemporary buildings is the attempt to be different from what was done in the past. In this project, contemporary architecture is achieved through blending elements of older surrounding buildings with the new ones, in addition to adding natural elements like stone from the surrounding mountains, which make a more harmonic design to the soft and hardscape of the area. The prefabricated stone compositions make the simple cubes more surprising, and create a distinctive composition of volumes reflecting on the interior space in an unusual approach as shown in the section below.
Finally, Affordability; Budget is critical for this project, it was a challenge to make the right choices and still have an aesthetically pleasing design. and to do so we implemented the following strategies; Keep it small, As we look at other free duty markets, we see one common problem – building is too big, and a lot of wasted areas. Avoid complexity, the box is the simplest and most affordable shape to build so we started the design process with seven modular boxes which achieve our space requirements and plot limits. Material selection, we used low-cost materials that can be easily installed, transported in pieces and assembled on-site like aluminum sheets, and prefabricated stone walls.