Badran Design Studio

Program: 2 retail floors, 20 residential floors, 15 office floors, 6 floors to be rented out as luxurious offices or cafes, restaurant on the 50th floor with panoramic screens and a roof garden on the summit of tower “The metropolitan verticality” Architecture is a language that can be interpreted according to its own time and place, and can be construed by experiencing the needs and culture of its users. It expresses itself by enveloping the space of their living. Sharja Gate project is a reactive statement to the negative image that high rise buildings have been portraying, on local and international arenas. Located on the entrance of Sharja city from Dubai road, the project stands as a living testimony of a humanized mixed-use building, extending the design of high rise buildings to new horizons.The concept morphology emerged out of the two main project’s components: the sea-Sharjah city’s façade (front and back) and the plain side façade (two sides setbacks). These two facades typology interpret the spontaneous clustering of the horizontal city roofs scape. The façade is therefore a vertical incarnation of a city horizontal strip. On the other hand, the traditional city wall- fortification have been expressed through the contemporary vertical plain side thick wall framing the “vertical city”. These walls meet at the building top level in an open manner to establish- Sharjah Gate- towards the sky. Growing from the ground up, the outer frame of the building acted as a gate inside which the chaotic units (mixed use) of the building came to exist. Depicting the natural organic growth of a city, the project redefines such growth horizontally, in a notion that boldly adapted the heritage of the past into a contemporary statement, where the land prices & limited spaces are among the main challenges architects are encountering. The apartment have been individually designed uniquely, overlooking the beautiful seafront for the majority of the units, that provided a sense of individuality for the residents of a large scale building, which strengthens their sense of personal belonging to the place.