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Shading the pilgrimage route, Mina, Saudi Arabia
Our office has been commissioned to design the shading of the religious pilgrimage route linking Mount Arafat to Mecca in Mina, Saudi Arabia. The primary aim of the investment was to make the long and arduous walk more comfortable for the pilgrims.
- Location Budapest, Hungary
- Area 600000 m2
- Categories
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- Public
- Services
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- Execution Design
The site is huge in architectural scale; we designed nearly 600,000 square metres of shading over the 30m wide and 20 km long pilgrimage route. Studio IN-EX is responsible for the architecture and the design coordination of this unconventional design project, which also had to meet local needs. The structural design was led by Dr. Dezső Hegyi, a renowned designer, espacially in the field of tent and membrane structures.
The biggest challenge for us was to create a typified system of mostly uniform elements that could be easily assembled on site, along the entire length of the road, adapting to the changing environmental conditions – junctions, bends with different angles, tunnels, bridges, roadside rocks, landmarks. The solution was found in a membrane system stretched on a steel frame structure on masts, with uniform elements that can be prefabricated and easily constructed on each section of the road, based on easy-to-understand installation drawings.
We present the details of the design in this blog post.