Yoga and meditation sessions are coming back to The Green Planet Dubai.
The origami-shaped glass dome in City Walk was designed by Grout McTavish Architects.
More than 1,500 animal roam freely inside the unique bio-dome, which will host a Yin yoga and meditation session every Friday from 8.30am.
Teacher Vanessa Roux from Core Direction studio will use speakers to talk through an hour-long session with up to 40 students, who’ll be spaced around the four-storey venue.
Green Planet is home to 3,000 different species of plants, animals and birds and is made up of wooden walkways looped around the world’s largest man-made tree.
Classes, which cost AED 149, can be booked by downloading the Core Direction app.
A worldwide team of specialist engineers, scientist and animal husbandry experts came together to work the feat of design and engineering, which was a collaboration of design and engineering between Grout McTavish Architects, Studio Hanson Roberts, James Peterson Designs, Rob Halpern, Gallagher & Associates and CD+M Lighting Design Group.
The architecture is based on a fragile origami cube that shields and protects a living biome within the shape of a cylinder. The exterior cube houses the support spaces required to sustain a living environment designed to accommodate tropical plants, mammals, insects and fish.
Completed in 2016, the building was developed as a living machine able to sustain itself while providing a constant tropical environment able to support its inhabitants.
The concept for the visitor experience was developed to show how the various species that inhabit the rainforest can be found in the vertical zones of a Kapok tree; from its flooded riverbank setting to its upper canopy.
Speaking about the project, Grout McTavish Architects said: “This unique mandate afforded us the rare opportunity to study and develop very advanced engineering and architectural systems that we are now looking to apply to future projects such as water conservation.”
