xCassia completed designs for this 1,200 sqm district cooling plant room conceived to service the Jebel Ali Dubai Metro stop located along the nearby Sheikh Zayed Road and Jebel Ali-Al Habbab cross roads. The Client entered into a strategic agreement with the Roads & Transport Authority (RTA) to serve the Dubai Metro and auxiliary developments with an estimated cooling capacity requirement of 300,000 tons of refrigeration (TR), of which this plant will provide 4,400 TRs.

The plant is divided into ground and first floors which consists of the control room, two cooling towers resting on two water tanks, holding tank, pump room, make-up water pump room, chillers yard, LV-MCC, MV-MCC, 11Kv switch gear, DEWA RMU room (Power Sub-station for Dubai Electricity & Water Authority) and underground cable trenches surrounded by 16 meter height boundary walls clad with 4mm composite aluminium panels and louvers. It has two main entrances to the south-east and the north-west and other service access points.

The cladding treatment adopts a regular subdivision of bays with an emphasis on creating colour-field depths to subdue the solid reading of a rectangle. Using cool contrasting colours, the louvers on the upper levels permit partial transparency that further lightens the volumes. Particularities of the project are its close adjacencies to the Dubai Metro track and major highway flyovers.

The design objective was to endow the plant with a sense of lightness, rhythm and through the use of cool colours, an upbeat and inviting industrial aesthetic