In a previous post, I briefly touched on Norman Foster’s design for Masdar, a sustainable, zero-emissions, zero-waste city to be built in Abu Dhabi, with its ceremonial ground-breaking on February 8th, 2008, and its scheduled completion in seven phases by 2016.

This video introduces the project and concept:

Those who were skeptical about the project can now chew on this, an announcement that a design has been selected for the first phase of the city, Masdar Headquarters.

Masdar Headquarters will, among other things:

• be the first mixed-use net positive energy building in the world
• be the lowest energy consumer per square meter for a modern class A office building in an extremely hot and humid climate
• feature one of the world’s largest building-integrated photovoltaic arrays
• employ the largest solar thermal driven cooling and dehumidification system
• be the first building in history to generate power for its own assembly, through development of its solar roof pier before the underlying complex

Pretty crazy. And the personal trasit system is pretty cool in Foster’s little desert Utopia.

But hey, we’ve got Dartmouth Crossing, right?

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This is exactly the kind of stuff we should do in Halifax.