Architecture The Dreams of Dubai
posted by on February 2 at 14:07 PM
And it just don’t stop. Dubai is throwing money at big names to design buildings that have had no other home but in their dreams. Hadid gets to do this:
Gehry gets to do this:
Tadao gets to do this:
Of the three, Tadao Ando’s dream is the only one worth realizing. (Then again, when has Tadao ever gone wrong?) As for Hadid and Gehry, there is nothing impressive about their designs outside of the fact that they were commissioned by religious Arabs.
Is the Gehry one a design for a new building or a mock up of what Dubai is going to look like when the money runs out?
I dub Gerry's design - Escargot Emergeant des Deblais d'une Humanité Désespéré (Snail Emerging from the Debris of a Reckless Humanity). I dub it in french because Gerry is simply the Duchamp of architecture.
These are actually going up in Abu Dhabi, which (as of yet) has not seen the degree of over-the-top development explosion that Dubai has. To distinguish themselves, they've pitched their proposals decidedly toward art and cultural development, instead of sheer pompous exorbitance.
I think that Hadid one is the end boss for level 5. You totally have to wait until it fires it photon missles, and when it's reloading you use the upgraded hyper-blaster to destroy it.
And what of the article about the massive, under-sea "Hydropolis, a $500 million-plus, 220-room hotel under development near Dubai in the Persian Gulf."
http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/19/magazines/business2/ocean_real_estate.biz2/index.htm?postversion=2007020210
Funny, I thought that being underwater was against Islam.
Dubai and Abu Dhabi are both shitholes. Of course, they're using pseudo slave labor to construct every major project they've got going. Nothing like coming over from Pakistan, India or some other poor place, being treated like shit and working in 110 degree heat for a slave wages.
I'm fairly certain Gehry's designs are all from looking at Kleenex he's blown his nose into, semi wadded and thrown on the floor.
Hadid has to realize the green in his sketch is scientifically impossible in the Persian Gulf.
I don't know anything about Islam, but there's probably something against slave labor in one of those books too...
They'll be literally underwater soon enough.
looks like logan's run.
It is sort of astounding to see what happens when somebody with more money than god says to an architect, "Go all out. Money is no object.". Despite the slave labor and obscene amounts of money flowing through the gulf, some of the architecture blows my mind. In a good way. I'll be sort of sad to see it all end in 10 or 20 years when the money dries up. 99% of the architecture in this country bores me to tears.
Slavery is enthusiastically endorsed in all the major monotheistic religious traditions (and a few others besides). Check out Ephesians 6:5 in the New Testament, and Leviticus 25:44 in the Old. In the Qu'ran, slavery is everywhere. See Sura 2:178 and many other places.
This mini-empire is also doomed.
By the way Mr. Coffman, Zaha is a chick from Irag who most certainly understands the complications of green grass in the desert.
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