Education City Master Plan

About This Project



During her tenure as a Senior Urban Designer at Moriyama and Teshima Architects, Unbound's founder, Khatereh Baharikhoob, played a key role in design of the Education City Master Plan, located in the western Doha, Qatar. Education City is a 14 km² district with branches of internationally acclaimed colleges and universities.

Location: Doha, Qatar

Client: Qatar Foundation

Scope of Work: Master Planning and  Design Guidelines

Year of Completion: 2016

Key Challenges

• Lack of a Cohesive Design Approach: Each international branch university and facility acted as an independent "island" with its own distinct, often competing, architectural language and geometry.
• Microclimate and Walkability Paradox: The mandate for a car-free, highly pedestrianized environment conflicted directly with extreme desert heat and exponentially increasing walking distances across the expanded footprint.
• Preserving Regional Identity Amid Global Influx: The rapid transformation into a hyper-modern global knowledge hub threatened to turn the master plan into a generic, Westernized corporate park devoid of local context.
• Rapid Scale and Geographic Expansion: The sudden 500% increase in campus area forced the integration of massive public infrastructures, like a stadium and national library, into an urban grid originally designed for a much smaller scale.
  

Our Approach

• Framework Integration: Organizing new developments inward and utilizing selective infill around a continuous, shared central green spine and common public open spaces to visually, physically, and socially bind distinct, independent architectural structures together into a highly cohesive, walkable environment.
• Wind-Channeled and Shaded Transit Clustering: Orienting building masses and spatial corridors to channel prevailing regional breezes while grouping campus developments closely around shaded walkways and integrated emissions-free transit hubs to lower localized temperatures and manage long walking distances.
• Modern Interpretation of Traditional Spatial Archetypes: Incorporating regional Middle Eastern and Islamic design principles—such as shaded perimeter courtyards, geometric screens, and a dedicated central cultural nexus—to inject regional identity and ground a hyper-modern global knowledge hub within its local geographic context.
• Modular Zoning Matrices and Sustainability Standards: Deploying an adaptive, phased zoning grid aligned with neighborhood sustainability frameworks to seamlessly integrate massive new public infrastructure projects and sustainable, climate-resilient solutions without disrupting the existing traffic flow or utility grid.