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Regenerating the City Centre

72 > qatar today > august 2013

Msheireb Downtown is getting a fresh breath of design articulation with John McAslan + Partners putting their architectural sensibilities to work.
By Sindhu Nair

ith the whole Msheireb Downtown Doha construction site cordoned off, journalists will tend to sniff around for more attention-grabbing news. Which is exactly what I had set out for, as I sat down to chat with John McAslan from John McAslan + Partners, one of the leading UK architects steering 15 major projects within the Msheireb Downtown Doha redevelopment. These projects include the new Cultural Forum, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, a mosque, a school and four new museum spaces. John McAslans work has been widely recognised internationally, and his most recent work is the award-winning redevelopment of Kings Cross Station in London. In some ways, McAslans Kings Cross project and the Msheireb Downtown project are similar: Msheireb is being touted as the first sustainable regeneration project designed to revive and preserve the historical heart of Doha, while Kings Cross is among Europes most ambitious infrastructure projects, having involved far more than just the restoration and modernisation of Lewis Cubitts original double-barrelled train shed of 1852. But then McAslan informs me that one third of the firms projects (many of them international) concentrate on working within a historical context. Like the project in Doha, much of our work involves historic buildings, and many of them encompassing both restoration and adaptive re-use, he says. The firm has been involved in the extension of the Delhi Metro system, ur-

John McAslan from John McAslan + Partners

ban design of the public realm around Tate Millbank, Bond Street Station for CrossrailCross, and some projects in Russia. More about Kings Cross Kings Cross is Londons most important railway terminus. It handles about 100 million passengers a year combined with the adjacent St Pancras. Both St Pancras and Kings Cross were originally built in the 1850s and 1860s as terminus stations for London. St Pancras was renovated in 2007 and became the home of

the Channel Tunnel rail links. Kings Cross is the national rail hub and it connects Scotland and the North of England with London. The station also supports suburban rail connections and our scheme has improved links with London Underground, buses and taxis. It is now a mult-modal hub for the 21st century needs, he says. By mid-20th century, the station's original grandeur declined, the aura of order gradually frayed, and the Kings Cross area became one of Londons apparently intractable socio-urban messes, an ill-coordinatqatar today > august 2013 > 73

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Offbeat

In London there are five or six major museum projects under construction and many more being planned, while in Qatar there are 50 museum projects being planned. This shows the dynamics of the countrys ambitions.

London had close to 3,000 cranes during the height of its construction phase from 2010 to 2012, and it would be interesting to know how many cranes are being used in this small country at the moment and later on when the construction intensifies for the World Cup 2022.

McAslan are very interested to take on infrastructure projects in India and have submitted proposals for major railway projects there. McAslan Partners were invited by Indian Railways to send proposals for the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai, which is also a UNESCO World Heritage site. The project is to be funded by a public-private partnership and will undergo a massive transformation with facilities like underground parking, better passenger amenities, food plazas and separate terminals for arrivals and departures, among other things.

John McAslan + Partners also designed ten stations for Delhi Metro. McAslan calls it an extraordinary project that was also a low-cost and efficient. Fifty years of planning and construction, and after all this the Delhi Metro can be called a triumph in the transportation sector. It was challenging because it required us to work in ways we were not used to. It changed the way we work, challenging our approach to station design.

ed and ugly tangle of road traffic and trains, according to Edwin Heathcote, design critic at the Financial Times. By 1998, the existing station was overcrowded and there was a need to renovate it. We were appointed as the architects but there was no funding at that point of time, says McAslan. In 2005, when the venue of the 2012 Olympics was announced, funding was granted as the station was an important link in the infrastructure upgrade of the city. The main Olympic site is located some miles to the east of King's Crossnortheast of Kings Cross. This provided the required impetus and the scheme progressed rapidly in order to complete the project before Olympics. We handed over the project in March of 2012. Kings Cross is not just a restoration project; the main element is the new Western Concourse, which created a dramatic space. It was also an amazing piece of engineering. The concourse spanned 120 metres with a breadth of 85 metres, one of the largest freestanding rail structures in the world. The engineering design of the

Western Concourse is Arup, says McAslan. One year on, the project continues receiving international awards and accolades, the most recent one being the Building of the Year, and McAslan says with a smile, Now we are almost getting a bit tired of the attention. Kings Cross is an amazing combination of new and old, transportation and retail, with an additional boutique hotel element. It also forms a key part of a regeneration site to the north of Kings Cross, 10 million square feet of redeveloped space, an area similar to the Msheireb site, which is almost the same built area. The similarities between the Kings Cross project and Msheireb do not end here. Kings Cross is about sustainable regeneration of an entire city quarter, very much like the development of Msheireb. A city reimagined? For a city like Doha to flourish, feels McAslan, it has to build its downtown, it needs to build its infrastructure and improve its public transport system, which will then create nodes of development.

74 > qatar today > august 2013

Mosque project within Msheireb, Mandarin Hotel, both designs by McAslan + Partners

The growth of the city and Qatar in general, is phenomenal, and if the capital continues to sprawl outwards it will lose its value as a city. Hence the regeneration of downtown Doha is vital for its growth as a city, he says. A metro station is also planned within Msheireb Downtown, connecting it to various nodes of the city. So Msheireb, while being a walkable community, is aiming to be well-connected. McAslan believes that the regeneration master plan remains entirely sympathetic to Doha's historic past. You could have built Msheireb as 20 big buildings like those in West Bay, but that is not the idea. The idea is to bring back the historic form of the city. McAslan continues: Charming as some of the old buildings were, many of them were in states beyond repair and were becoming redundant. But we are retaining five or six of the historic buildings as part of the Heritage Quarter, connecting it back through to the Souq Waqif area. Four historic buildings are being restored and retained on the site. Forming a

Kings Cross is not just a restoration project. It is about regenerating the city centre for the sustainable development of a city, very much like the development of Msheireb.

core called the Msheireb Heritage Quarter, they are Company House, Bayt Jalmood, Mohamed Bin Jassim House and Radwani House, all of them alive with the memories and voices of Qatari history. As visitors pass through the Quarter, they will learn how Qataris lived and worked, and more about their interests and aspirations. These buildings are quite

important as they are family-owned. The buildings are conserved with some design alterations that make them work as a modern-day museum. We have a temporary exhibition gallery under one of the houses, which is very interesting. What is challenging was to install permanent exhibits within the confines of small spaces, so we have created a larger exhibition area underground, he says, ...which is being built as we speak. The heritage trails will then move to the religious square, including a new mosques, and then linking with public spaces, residential quarters and hotels. The pedestrian areas alternate from covered areas to narrow alleyways offering an engaging yet curious interplay of light and shadow, private to semi-private connecting spaces to create a human-centric streetscape, in contrast to the urban landscape in West Bay. While McAslan dispels all rumours regarding construction and the pace of development at Msheireb by producing pictures of the site, I come away a lot more educated about a development that is happening on schedule at the centre of the city
qatar today > august 2013 > 75