The Lusail project just north of Doha, Qatar, was tasked with designing an entire city. The final result is a 38 square kilometer urban area mostly along the water. It\u2019s a city for a half million daily occupants: 190,000 residents, 170,000 workers, and 90,000 visitors. The following rules of thumb will help you understand how the Lusail designers thought about the project.<\/p>\n
The Lusail team had no past city to deal with, as they were starting from scratch. That means that they had the freedom to think through and carefully plan every aspect of this city, from land use to infrastructure. The following are some of the rules that the Lusail designers followed to create a beautiful, cohesive city.<\/p>\n
The Lusail project is a testament to the discipline of good planning. The Lusail planners carefully considered the unseen parts of the system that make up the foundation of a well-functioning city. For example, they considered where to place utility corridors in order to keep them out of sight and keep the streetscape beautiful. The Lusail team also made sure the district cooling plant would meet the 500,000 tons of refrigeration connected load, so that the city would be able to efficiently pump chilled water through underground piping. This eliminated the visual clutter that can otherwise appear from air conditioning units all across the rooflines. In short, the Lusail designers knew that a pretty system is one that\u2019s well-organized. And that organization happens below the surface.<\/p>\n
When you\u2019re working on a system design project, it\u2019s easy to focus on the rules of the whole system and then create the subparts according to those rules. Lusail\u2019s designers did think in terms of the system: each district connects to the next and is supported by the larger infrastructure that the city has to offer. But it\u2019s just as important to think about how each district can have its own function and character as well. Lusail\u2019s Marina district is all about life on the water, with its waterfront buildings and yacht harbor. Seef Lusail and Al Erkyah are both residential districts but have different densities. Fox Hills is a smaller-scale neighborhood with mid-rise residential. Lusail\u2019s districts function well because they all have strong individual identities that add to the city\u2019s collective identity. In this way, Lusail demonstrates how the best systems don\u2019t feel like systems at all, but rather feel organic and natural.<\/p>\n
The Lusail project team was faced with a challenge: make a city for half a million people. A design challenge for a brand system is to decide how to distribute your identity elements and create a visual language to tie them together. Lusail\u2019s skyline does this, letting one singular, iconic silhouette dominate the landscape: the crescent-shaped towers at the marina. In creating one tower that can represent Lusail, the Lusail team made sure there wasn\u2019t visual competition between different landmarks and thus avoided a cacophony of identity. Lusail\u2019s skyline demonstrates that less is more.<\/p>\n
All design systems, whether at Lusail or in brand design, must follow the same rules: consistency, adaptability, usability, and distinctiveness.<\/p>\n
Consistency. The most distinct feature in Lusail\u2019s skyline is its silhouette, which has two memorable focal points on each end: the crescent shaped towers over the marina, and the golden bowl of the 89,000-seat Lusail Stadium. The rest of Lusail\u2019s silhouette is relatively quiet by comparison.<\/p>\n
By day or by night, it forms a unified composition of form and light, from the Marina towers to the bridges and promenade. There is no haphazard array of signage from tenants to obscure the silhouette or the nighttime illumination, or any other competing focal points. Lusail has one singular, consistent, memorable identity.<\/p>\n
Adaptability. Lusail\u2019s masterplan is composed of nineteen unique districts. Lusail is big enough to have diverse districts, yet still feel like one unified city; just like good design systems should feel natural while allowing flexibility and room for growth in different directions. A design system feels natural when the units have uniqueness in character.<\/p>\n
Usability. Lusail is a planned city, built to accommodate approximately half a million daily occupants. The ultimate goal for Lusail is 500,000 daily occupants: 190,000 residents, 170,000 workers, 90,000 visitors.<\/p>\n
The masterplan of Lusail shows great sensitivity to its climactic extremes. Shade, in the form of colonnades, covered promenades, and canals, which offer a psychological cooling effect as well, make the city a viable space for walking during all seasons. The water districts in Lusail are placed to pull marine air through walking corridors. All major destinations (residential towers, retail, public transit stops) are accessible in a short walk, which is crucial during the hot summer months. The fact that Lusail has such a minimal visual language is a result of the investment in systems that you don\u2019t see: transit, and infrastructure to cool the city. There are 336,000 tons of refrigeration plants, and the ability to cool 500,000 tons. Lusail is designed for its most extreme context, the summer heat. Good design systems must be able to perform in its most extreme contexts as well.<\/p>\n
Distinctiveness. Lusail\u2019s success as a planned city is a result of its distinctiveness in the market: Lusail\u2019s real estate<\/a> is priced competitively to attract residents. In Lusail, residential properties are roughly in the range of $330 and $380 per square foot. In Qatar, rental yields range from 5.5 to 6.8 percent. Waterfront property is about $527 per square foot in Miami Beach, or $560 per square foot in Dubai Marina. Few addresses in Qatar offer this combination of features. A city built from scratch needs to have strong identity to compete with established cities. Lusail\u2019s identity is derived from the investment in its masterplan and execution on all scales. Lusail was designed, not as an art project, but as a space in which people live<\/a>.<\/p>\n Methodical and clear-thinking has made Lusail a strong contender in the market of global cities. Lusail\u2019s designers understood that every decision, from the largest scale to the smallest, was connected, meaning that every detail, and the relationships between details, adds up to the experience of Lusail as a city. Lusail is about 38 square kilometers, along the shoreline, just north of the city of Doha, Qatar. It is still under construction. About 15 years of work so far, and Lusail is already starting to come into focus.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Lusail project just north of Doha, Qatar, was tasked with designing an entire city. The final result is a 38 square kilometer urban area mostly along the water. It\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[282],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedesigninspiration.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedesigninspiration.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedesigninspiration.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedesigninspiration.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedesigninspiration.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41916"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thedesigninspiration.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41918,"href":"https:\/\/thedesigninspiration.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41916\/revisions\/41918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedesigninspiration.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedesigninspiration.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedesigninspiration.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Summary of Design Lessons, with Lusail examples<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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