It’s a tired, old story and the bane of many a design team: Win an international design competition and then watch helplessly as all the brilliant concepts get whittled away by the developer and its “value engineers” until the constructed building bares little resemblance to the original submission.
It’s a brand new story, and both the delight and challenge of the Chicago-based design team that beat out 158 others to design the 116,372-sq-meter headquarters for the Masdar Initiative in Abu Dhabi—billed as the world’s largest carbon- and waste-neutral office building. In a giant exception to the rule, the client is holding Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG) and its primary engineers, Thornton Tomasetti (TT) and Environmental Systems Design Inc. (ESD), to their competition promise of delivering not just a sustainable building but a 3% “net-positive-energy” building, as if the promise were a sacred vow.