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Horizon Mall

Part 2 Project 2015
Fortuné Penniman
Architectural Association London | UK
Can architecture create ‘common’ spaces by defining use and program? Dubai is a city of control where everything you do, and every space you occupy, is regulated through strict social codes that are prescribed in the city’s architectural fabric. Perhaps the only way to break down these social boundaries is to remove them in their entirety. The Horizon Mall is architecture on the outside, but its nothing on the inside.

'Its desert, only desert....'

The temenos is a rejection of predetermined value in architecture; An interior where boundaries cease to exist, where use is never prescribed, where value cannot be quantified. And ultimately, where what you do and where you do it, can only be determined by your self.

To be ambivalent is to have simultaneously conflicting feelings. Why can't architecture be ambivalent?

The other side of Dubai, beyond the branded city of spectacle, is desert. The desert is a place where nothing is fixed, where territory is defined not by lines, but by moments in landscape.

Temenos is a space so large that it creates a nature in and of itself. An interior where architecture dissolves. It erases program, it erases value '...what starts in desert, ends in desert…'

Fortuné Penniman

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2015
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