QEWC

The project follows the design guidelines of Lusail District. The latter is a vast and ongoing expansion master plan in Qatar’s capital, Doha, which includes a central axis of towers to function as an integrated corporate district. At the tip of this business and services avenue, Qatar’s state utility company acquired a large plot to establish its office headquarters.

The tower-cum-podium guidelines for this plot are a typical format in the Middle East, but highly problematic due to the large commercial areas generated on the lower levels, usually without a proper business model. Therefore, the project concentrates the maximum area as per height and volume allowed on the offices (of 110m and 160m, respectively for Tower 1 and Tower 2), keeping the commercial podium within the minimum allowed height of 25m (3 retail + 1 office floors), limited to convenience retail for offices users and to the neighbouring park visitors.

The position of the towers has been devised in order to create a powerful presence at the end of the main axis of the plan. Moreover, as the towers are located at the extremities of the plot, the podium functions as a kind of amphitheatre opened towards the lagoon park. This podium also shields the square from the dominant NW winds, while at ground-floor level, with its double-height arcade, kiosks, water features and other recreational amenities, a landscaped plaza is proposed as a promenade extension of the adjacent park.

The polygonal shape of the towers, devised in order to reduce wind speed on the edges of the building and also to create a slimmer silhouette is evocative of the heroic period of late-modernism of the 1960s, like the Pan Am building in New York or Centre Point in London. Multi-storey green terraces crown the towers like lighthouses and simultaneously introduce variation on the façade. A brass-tinted curtain wall with vertical aluminium mullions conveys a contemporary presence to this classical skyscraper typology.