KFAS Convention Center
A passage to the sea
Project description
Architecture at its best is a hybrid of functions, program and formal gestures that aim to integrate a building into its environment by connecting it to the elements and creating favorable and unique conditions for its inhabitants to experience moments that challenge the ordinary. It is a vehicle that connects humans through spaces of consensus and togetherness, only then can architecture truly achieve performance and succeed
Space is not permanent it is transitory, as such the convention center was conceived as a large podium pierced by an 11 meter wide corridor that leads visitors from the entrance to the sea culminating in a pier in a move to celebrate Kuwait’s sailing heritage and a British team of archaeologists’ 2001 discovery that “small slabs of bitumen dug up in Kuwait could hold evidence that man first successfully built ocean‐going boats up to 7,000 years ago.”, public functions are distributed on each side of this communal space while the less public program is perched over the corridor in a cantilevering volume, the ground floor hallway is connected to the suspended volume via a series of atriums, escalators and stepping terraces that add vertical connectivity to the existing horizontal one allowing people to easily transition through its space.
The multi‐level atrium leads up to the green roof of the ballroom which gives users a unique vantage point of Kuwait city and the Arabian Gulf. The building core is designed as a separate volume taking up the entirety of the southern façade thus doubling as a heat buffer for the northern volume where main spaces are housed.
The sum of these conscious gestures allows the convention center to come together not as an object but as a three‐dimensional experience of communal and spatial continuity. The hybrid assumes a structural identity by responding to a site and a location, it iterates to optimize and moves to accommodate the program, its users, the public and, in an iterative process the natural elements.
