Meinhardt is a façade engineering and consultancy firm based in Dubai, and Gariando, its technical director, with over twenty years in the region, chose two of her team’s projects that sit at opposite ends of the scale. One is Burj Azizi, a roughly 750-metre supertall in Dubai, set to be among the tallest towers in the world. The other is the AMAALA Triple Bay Yacht Club at Yanbu in Saudi Arabia, a low-rise waterfront pavilion.

The premise sat in the title: same material, different physics. On the supertall, the façade’s problem is wind, drift and accumulated movement, building actions that are large but broadly predictable, and that build up over a very tall structure. On the waterfront, at almost no height, the governing forces flip to thermal expansion, geometry and interface movement. The engineering response has to be reconceived at each end rather than simply resized.

The Yacht Club shows how hard “low-rise” can be. Its glazed envelope is neither vertical nor orthogonal, it transitions continuously between flat, inclined and double-curved geometry along its whole length, with an architectural curvature held to a minimum radius of about four metres, right at the threshold where cold-bent glass reads as truly curved. Rationalising it, Gariando’s team weighed parallelogram against trapezoidal panels and chose trapezoidal for operability, accepting the trade-off: near-total non-repetition, every panel geometrically unique, and the fabrication and quality-control demands that come with it, with operable doors inclined 15 degrees in plan and 22 out of it.

Her argument was that the way through, at either scale, is the same discipline: design for movement rather than against it, and use parametric modelling and total design to put order into the complexity, letting one method reconcile a 750-metre tower and a four-metre-radius pavilion.