The development will provide a dramatic entrance to Abu Dhabi.

Creating a pleasant pedestrian experience away from the highway was crucial.

The falcon-wing sculptures is the symbol of the gateway.

The vision is for a waterfront that will have a variety of uses.

The focus was on creating attractive parks not just roadside greenery.

The design had to work on both a pedestrian scale and a commuter scale.

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Making an entrance

We tried to squeeze as much space out of it to create some parks that are more than just roadside greenery, that have some life," he says.

The masterplanners also had to deal with limitations on the placing of some landscaping elements, such as berms and trees. Under present planning regulations in Abu Dhabi, such features cannot be located over utility service corridors.
It was a battle, Nienstedt says, to obtain the needed space for landscape.

Another consideration was that as its name suggests, a key feature of Emerald Gateway was that it had to be a green development, not just visually but also as a sustainable project. Reconciling these two disparate goals can sometimes cause conflicts, since green plants tend to call for large amounts of water - which isn't necessarily sustainable.

KEO's response to this was to take a pragmatic approach to providing greenery. "We don't want to create a Florida in the desert," comments Nienstedt.

The method KEO took was to carefully study the different perspectives of the sites' two users - a resident walking behind the towers in the landscaped areas will have a very different perspective of what appears green to someone driving through the site at 120km/hour.

In the areas that will be seen primarily by drivers, the landscape design has been studied to create the illusion of greenery, without using vast amounts of grass.

"The trick will be to give it a green feel. There will be some shrubs and trees, but there is a strong push with the Urban Planning Council coming on board to keep a green feel but make it ‘green' in the sense of sustainability," says Nienstedt.

Despite the various challenges, working on the Emerald Gateway project has been a fascinating experience, says Nienstedt.

"After recognising and addressing the real issues which resulted from working on such a narrow and intense site, I think we take away with us a greater sense of the enormous potential that landscape design should play within a masterplan design, no matter what the scale," he says.

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