Amorphous Gaming Centre

.Amorphous. What is really stopping us from creating something unconventional? Something that does not necessarily fit with its surrounding. It is essential that when we design, we keep the future in mind as well as the interests of the users. How can we make this for everyone and for all ages and interests? How can we make this a piece of the future? How can we bring the virtual reality experience to physical reality?

This project started with questions. What is stopping us from building something unconventional? Why should our building fit into its surroundings when it can stand out? What other ways can we approach design that is not necessarily how we’ve been taught it? 

To begin, each member of the team set out on their own to understand the brief and collected some keywords that we wanted to work on such as harmony, experience, connectivity, immersive…, where then ideas and initial concepts began to form. Coming together later, we looked at each of our sketches and explained our visions to one another. Here marks the birth of Amorphous. 

Many iterations came about whilst experimenting with the form. We first started by bringing all our ideas together and forming a shape but later realized that would not be the most efficient solution. This led to our first revelation: how do we make this more about the visitors? And so, we focused our attention on the physical experience rather than just the visual pleasures of creating an aesthetically pleasing building that’s functional. We referred to the senses of the human being: sight, smell, sound, and vision and circled our research on how to formulate an interactive building. Like many curious students, we wanted to investigate where the boundaries of the design lay and how far away are they from our reach. 

We aimed to approach a new perspective; we wanted our fundamentals to be the element of the experience. Where we bring digital gaming to the realm of recreation, and where we put life into the gaming world and virtual reality in order to allow people to experience a whole simulation of the world rather than confining them in a limited space. When you think of experience film, cinema, or music comes to mind. We wanted to challenge the traditional ways of approaching a design that's why we started off by looking at the section. 

Sections. When looking at building details, sections seem to capture most of our attention. We see the little figures of people and imagine their movements across the different floors. Since we were interested in circling our interest around the ‘experience’ of our visitors, we shifted our attention to working on the section. Experimenting with the different possibilities that arise till we settled on wanting to shift about the heights and levels of different designated areas throughout the building. Having zones, with different levels, merge together seamlessly by using ramps or elevated paths, or even steps. 

 After coming to terms with how we wanted our section to look like we then decided to project the language of the shifting levels and height outwards onto the exterior of the building through its windows and its ‘shell’. 

Our methods of design investigation included playing around with our mass which we eventually decided would be a cylinder. Doing this, we subtracted, added, multiplied, and divided the shape to somehow get a physical feel of the movement of our building. What were the limits? Are there any limits at all? How far can we take it whilst also considering functionality? 

Form. for the form exploration, we first started with a cylinder that kind of matches the language of the site (Dubai Sports City), and it is the type of shape that promotes connectivity. Then we tried to push our building in and out in order to break the rigidity of the regular cylinder shape to have some movement in the outer form and to give a peek of what you can expect to see inside. Moreover, we wanted to have a core in the center to make sure everything is centered in one area relating to the keyword of immersive and compacted. The final step was to create an element that stand out by adding a VR slide that connects the digital world with the building experience and circulates our mass together to come up with the final form. 

Plans. The thinking behind our building is to make its heart a cylindrical atrium to promote connectivity and functionality. Also, the central plan mirrors the language of the site however we did break apart the cylinder through organic form while keeping the inside simpler for easier circulation. 

Starting from the ground floor we wanted to have a convention space as the core of the building to be a flexible space that brings people together. The ground floor contains more public zones that are suitable for beginner or amateur players, a seating area is dropped down and made to be a stepped seating area leading to the outdoors, and other functions like offices, reception, and retail. From the ground floor, you can explore our "hidden" level and take the elevators to go to the underground floor where visitors can have an experience exclusive to the arena and E-sports competition. As the brief asked for a gaming center, we preferred to give the center and the arena their own spaces with their own experience and movement. From the ground floor, you can also take the elevator and go to the upper floors where zones start getting more specialized for the expert gamers until you reach the last floor where visitors can find the coveted VR zone. There they can experience a new way of integrating technology with physical movement, the VR slide. The players would wear a headset and slide down amorphous to experience the immersive nature of gaming.  

Finally, to hold all the elements of the Amorphous building together we concluded it with an organic freeform shell that is extended from the inside (the steel structure in the core) out to the exterior.

Through this journey, our concept was to create a piece of the gaming world where gamers in the region can break out of their digital realities and experience gaming in a way they never did before.