Water Fountain For Expo 2020 Dubai
Sabeel, our competition entry for Expo 2020 Dubai, takes the region’s public water fountain, where offering water is a long-standing act of hospitality, and is designed to draw part of its drinking water from the air, as some desert organisms do. As Dubai’s Expo 2020 planned to attract millions of global visitors, the competition asked how to give them fresh drinking water.
‘Sabeel’ water fountains have long been part of the urban fabric of cities in the region. Built and endowed as charitable gifts, they offer water to anyone passing.
With this in mind, we designed a water fountain for Expo 2020 in that tradition. We believe a public fountain in this climate should make use of the air’s humidity.
Our proposal pairs water drawn from the air with that old gesture of offering it.
Learning From Nature
The Expo 2020 site at Jebel Ali, Dubai, is hot and humid, in a desert climate. Our proposal takes a biomimetic approach, learning from how living forms of the desert turn its weather to their advantage.
Some beetles in the Namib Desert, for example, collect drinking water from fog-laden wind on their backs. Our proposal also takes water from the air, using atmospheric water generation.
Atmospheric water generators, such as those made by GENAQ, harvest drinkable water from humid air. We also looked to the spiral leaf arrangement (spiral phyllotaxis) of some aloes, which we read as a way of shading the plant from sunlight and keeping its water from evaporating.
We used these geometric principles to design our fountain: 12 brushed aluminum sinks spiral around a central stainless steel structure and fold out to channel water. Once opened, water flows out of the 3D printed spouts made from polymers of recycled water bottles.
Water From The Air
We designed the fountain to harvest moisture from humid air. The process would turn the site’s humidity into a resource.
The water fountain we designed looks to examples from nature to rely less on the mains supply. Water from the condensing system was designed to supplement filtered, chilled water from the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) mains and so reduce the amount drawn from them.
Water For Everyone
Sabeel’s design includes a swivel mechanism that rotates the fountain’s sinks, making them accessible at different heights. The design is meant to let people of different ages, heights and abilities reach the water. Each sink has a faucet that draws chilled water from tanks inside the fountain.
The mechanism can also open several sinks at once in a blooming sequence, like petals. In its closed state, the fountain is sculptural and reflects the environment around it on its metallic surface.
Designed To Stay Clean
When closed, the sink mechanism is designed to keep dust off the sinks. Given the dust and sandstorms in the UAE, the retractable sinks are designed to protect the fountain from damage and help its parts last longer. Excess water would rinse the sinks.
Sabeel proposes a public fountain for the UAE, in the spirit of the Expo 2020 theme, Connecting Minds, Creating the Future.