Jeremy Hildreth
The track up the side of Al Ain was named on of the world's best driving roads by a major car magazine. In the future, it may lead to a ski chalet.
This one’s hard to talk about since it has yet to exist anywhere but on paper as an illustrated pipedream. But it’s still a great identity project.
The setting is Al Ain – an oasis on a mountain in Abu Dhabi near the Omani border.
Here on this rocky terrain was envisioned the world’s largest indoor ski hill (including the world’s only Olympic-size indoor ski jump). Along with the ski facility – which looked from the outside like a glacier stretching down the mountainside – would be built hotels, golf courses, shopping malls, houses and condos, and artificial wild rivers (or “wadis” in Arabic).
I led the Saffron team charged with devising the brand identity – crucially, the meaning, narrative and name – for this extraordinary enterprise.
One tenet of the brief was that the name should be “system-able” (I just made up that term, so if you’ve never heard it before that’s why). In other words, it should be usable as part of an ecosystem of labelling for all the sub-ventures and activities of this development, as well as being applicable to other outlandish, paradoxical developments (an artificial desert landscape created in the Arctic, for instance) which at the time were being considered in theory. This meant obvious names like The Glacier or Mount Ain, or anything to do with ice or snow, were off the table.
Boringly, I’m not at liberty to reveal the name my team came up with. I can say only that it’s a fanciful six-letter palindrome (a word spelled the same forwards and backwards) for which the dot-com was available.
At present, the project is on hold. But I have seen both the actual site as well as the plans, including a full-motion, computer-generated aerial “fly around”, with my own eyes, and if this development ever comes to fruition, it will blow people’s minds like a James Cameron movie.
