Is there a new paradigm of sustainable modern design?
A new paradigm of sustainable design needs to be explored and made manifest. We know scientifically and technically that good passive design is the key principle to sustainable modern design. So if we can learn the lessons of traditional adaptive design and then apply them as principles rather than imitations, then I think we have identified a meaningful new paradigm to re-conceive the future of Middle East Architecture and urban design. Could you give some examples from The Intelligent Tower, Doha, Qatar? Any tower has good and bad qualities. If you can create a compact community in a tower which may accommodate four or five thousand people or more, the idea of compaction in one unit in general is good. However, if the compaction is vertical and exposed to all the elements, and has a tremendous heat gain, you are going to have to find ways to overcome that and to make it adaptive. So the Intelligent Tower in Doha first of all has attempted to have a very high performance skin. I think
