Made of cement reinforced with cellulose fibers, fiber cement cladding is a building material used to cover the exterior of a wide range of buildings, including hotels, schools, office buildings, retail centers, hospitals, corporate centers, and residential buildings. Fibre cement panels are aesthetically pleasing, long-lasting, and highly resistant to fire and weathering.
Architect Diana Najib Hamad provides interesting case studies for the use of fiber cement in three recent Dubai-based commissions.
With more than 15 years of experience in the GCC and Levant, Diana Najib Hamad has had the opportunity to experience a high level of diversity in both her interior architecture and conceptual architecture work. Diana has worked on various projects which include residential, commercial, industrial, hospitality and recreational spaces in addition to exhibition stands, set designs, and consultancy in TV and cinema sets.
As a 2006 graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Lebanese University Faculty, Deir El Qamar with a D.E.S. (Diplome Des Etudes Superieures) in Interior Architecture, Diana has worked on projects in different countries that have required travel to the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. In these several international projects, different cultures were discovered, studied, and integrated into her designs. Diana’s work experience with people from different parts of the world led her to have a deep understanding of the client’s individual needs, hence why every design created is customized with its own unique personality.
Driven by passion, Diana ensures that her clients have the “know-how” of a project’s success by understanding the importance of involving the designer in their projects at the initial stages to ensure the project is completed with the identity that was envisioned for it.
Hospital / Mirdiff, Dubai, U.A.E.
Area: 30,000 m2
Year : 2018
The project was initially designed and built to be a shopping center in Mirdiff, Dubai. Diana took on the project's interior architecture and facade design. During the construction phase, there was a decision to change the function of the building from a retail mall to a high-end inpatient ad outpatient service hospital.
Hospital architecture comes with different requirements than a retail mall, with its different functions the design of certain areas had to change. Design changes incurred some challenges especially to the external facade, where natural light is now to be introduced to the two-story building. Each elevation is 100 meters in length, flat, and tightly fitted within the plot limit. Construction was already in progress, which brought another challenge into the equation.
Challenges in the design and construction industry are not rare, it always depends on how the design team goes around them to find solutions that maintain a balance between the budget and client satisfaction. In this case, Diana took each challenge separately. She began with opening the vertical glass slots to the facade, working on a wood finish canopy, then creating water and light features at the Main Entrance, and finally using cladding material to treat the building’s external facade.
After thorough research in the UAE market for architectural cladding material, Diana contacted Obras, a well-known and esteemed local distributor to explore how to work together to solve the existing challenges. They suggested Equitone Fiber Cement cladding material that comes in a wide range of colors and natural finishes and textures.
Meeting the team reassured Diana that Equitone would be the right material for this project, and their journey together began at that time. Equitone cladding material checked all the boxes when it came to specifications, requirements, and aesthetics. As time went by and the work progressed the final product started showing, it revealed great results that exceeded Diana's expectations.
The exposure that this project gave her practice eventually led to other developers in the neighboring area reaching out. This ultimately ended up winning her two additional projects: a bank head office and a mixed-use building.
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One Square / Warqaa, Dubai, U.A.E.
Area: 15,275 m2
Year: 2019
Diana began the One Square project from the initial stages of concept design. Unlike the Hospital Project, this project was relatively challenge-free. The front elevation (adjacent to the street) was narrower than the side elevations, and would only fit an entrance and two retail spaces at street level, so Diana decided to bring the outside street level inside, creating more retail space at the street level for drive-by and drive-through units.
She used the raised median for pedestrian crossing, a coffee shop, and escalators connecting the basement to the ground, first and second floor (for vertical circulation). The first floor is dedicated to retail spaces and an anchor tenant, the second floor is for office use. To the right side of the building exists a shopping center owned by one of the partners of One Square, and the idea came up to build a pedestrian crossing bridge across the two buildings to make the shopping experience more diverse.
Bank Head Offices / Mirdiff, Dubai
Area: 2,200 m2
Year: 2020
With this challenging year-long project, Diana started the concept design during the initial March 2020 COVID-19 lock-down. The brief was direct, and the client had approached her after the success of the Hospital's external façade design and requested a similar look and feel, using Equitone cladding, HD Blue glass, and wood finish baffles.
The building consists of a parking basement, G+2 office space, and a roof terrace. The vertical circulation at the core of the building allows the owner to lease the office space out to two banks, as both sides of the building are symmetrical.
