http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,11710,1652149,00.html
*Sand and freedom *
Dubai is trying to build itself a future as a great global city. In the
process, it has become the largest architectural experiment on earth.
Steve Rose reports
*Monday November 28, 2005
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>*
'Greenland', Dubai
Brave new world ... how 'Greenland' will look in the Nakheel company's
ambitious 'The World' project
Welcome to Greenland, a sun-drenched, palm-fringed island 100m across.
On a clear day, or even an unclear day, you can see across to Canada. In
fact you could swim to it in a couple of minutes, but at the moment,
there's nothing there except sand. Greenland, meanwhile, has a luxurious
air-conditioned villa with an infinity pool - not that anyone lives in
it yet.
This isn't the real world, of course: it is The World, situated a couple
of miles off the coast of Dubai, just next door to The Palm, a giant
artificial island shaped like a stylised date palm, which gained
national attention a couple of years ago when David Beckham and other
England footballers bought luxury properties on its fronds. The World
takes the whole concept one step further, laying some 300 new islands in
a blurry Mercator projection. Both developments are run by the
state-owned Nakheel company. As their sales literature puts it, "The
Palm put Dubai on the map, The World is putting the map on Dubai."
It isn't a literal map of the world. Channels have been carved between
land masses such as "France" and "Spain", so as to create attractively
saleable individual plots. Britain will set you back about US$32m, but
it has apparently been sold (to an undisclosed buyer). Already, The
World is undergoing its own tectonic shifts. A private consortium has
purchased the whole of Australasia, for example, with a view to turning
it into a holiday resort. They have plans to alter its shape entirely,
join it all up with bridges, and build a 12-storey hotel on the south
island of New Zealand.
The World is the latest in a string of building projects that have made
Dubai, the second largest of the United Arab Emirates, the most
spectacular and outlandish architectural experiment on the planet. The
country is relentlessly, almost obsessively, building itself into
significance. Under the auspices of the crown prince Sheikh Mohammed and
the rest of the ruling Maktoum family, Dubai is being transformed from a
blank canvas into an Islamic fusion of Singapore and Vegas. Extra land
is being reclaimed off the coast (Nakheel has two more, even larger
Palms to follow, plus a crescent-shaped city of half a million people),
just as artificial lakes and canals are creating waterfront real estate
in the heart of the desert. Nothing seems impossible: an underwater
hotel, an indoor ski slope with real snow, and a theme park twice the
size of Disneyland have all recently been finished or are under
construction. And then there is what will be the world's tallest
building, the Burj Dubai.
Even here, the Burj Dubai is something special. The world's current
tallest building, the 101-floor Taipei 101 in Taiwan, is about 1,700ft
high. Nobody is saying exactly how tall the Burj Dubai will be, for fear
of being eclipsed by a rival, but in the showroom of its developer,
Emaar, the mocked-up elevator has buttons that go up to floor 189.
According to the sales staff, from the tower's top, on a clear day, you
will be able to see across the Gulf to Iran.
Designed by US skyscraper specialists Skidmore Owings and Merrill, it is
a remarkably elegant structure. From a three-pronged footprint, it rises
up in slender, silver-glazed tubes. Its core is already 12 storeys high,
and progressing at about one floor a week. Around the Burj will be
apartments for 150,000 people and the world's largest shopping mall, all
of which is being billed "the most prestigious square kilometre in the
world". "The Burj is nothing about the past," says Mohammed Ali Alabbar,
Emaar's chairman. "It's about saying, 'We have arrived. We're here.' "
It would be natural to assume that this grand entrance on to the world
stage has been funded by easy oil money, but that's not the case. Oil
revenues make up less than 6% of Dubai's income. Historically, Dubai was
a trading post between east Asia and Europe, and through the efforts of
its rulers, combined with favourable geopolitical conditions, it is
regaining that role. In the national museum, a 19th-century British map
shows a small walled city next to a creek with a few groves of date
palms. Modest oil reserves were discovered in the 1960s, and Sheikh
Mohammed's father, Sheikh Rashid, used the wealth to improve Dubai's
port facilities and free-trade credentials. The result today is a place
that's liberal enough to attract western corporations and tourists, but
Islamic enough to attract Arab money too. With the can-do attitude and
feudal might of Sheikh Mohammed, the work continues. To attract more IT
companies, he commissioned a technology zone called Internet City. To
compete as a broadcasting centre, there's Media City. And to position
Dubai as a financial stop on the daily global trading cycle, there will
be Dubai International Finance Centre - a business district larger than
Canary Wharf.
Dubai's love affair with iconic, or at least record-breaking,
architecture began in 1999 with the opening of the Burj Al-Arab. At 56
storeys, it remains the world's tallest hotel, and its simple sail-like
form has become Dubai's national symbol. As usual, it was the brainchild
of Sheikh Mohammed, but British firm Atkins won the design competition.
"All that was specified was that it needed to be iconic," says Simon
Crispe, the building's design director. "We looked around the city for
references, and there were lots of dhows with nice curvy sails but this
was a city that was saying, 'We're modern, we're going forward,' so we
started think about something like a spinnaker."
The inside of the Burj Al-Arab is as symbolic of Dubai as the outside. A
vast atrium with high-tech water features, it is grand and theatrical,
though what evidently began as a stylish, unadorned space has now
adjusted to local tastes: loud patterned carpets, bright colours and
shiny metallic surfaces, usually combining gold and silver plating. When
the hotel opened, the Burj Al-Arab was 25km out of town, in the middle
of the desert, Crispe remembers, peering down from the cantilevered
cocktail bar at the top of the building. Now it is somewhere near where
the centre of the city will probably be. Looking up the coast in the
other direction, a new stack of skyscrapers rises hazily in the distance.
Apart from these several heroic and imaginative works, there are few
other structures there you'd consider putting on postcards in Dubai.
Architecturally, the country has been the equivalent of a teenager
experimenting with make-up. In its commercial skyscrapers, Arab kitsch
prevails: coloured glass and arbitrary turrets have been tacked on to
standard concrete high-rises. For malls and residential estates, Dubai
has co-opted the rest of the world for its architectural reference points.
Thus, Egyptian-themed Wafi City is all pyramids and obelisks, while Ibn
Battuta Mall presents Arabian Nights-style indoor villages and a vast
Chinese-decorated atrium with a life-sized sailing vessel in the middle.
On the drawing board is Nakheel's International City project, which will
house some 60,000 people in virtually identical four or five-storey
blocks, each dressed in different national styles: for England, a mock
Buckingham Palace-style neo-classicism; for Thailand, pagoda-like
spires. There is apparently no distinction between resort architecture
and permanent housing. Nor is there much of a genuine urban realm
outside the old city centre. Instead, there are discrete, self-contained
developments, separated from each other by 10-lane highways or empty
desert. This is the type of empty, rootless scenario that Guy Debord's
Society of the Spectacle and Rem Koolhaas' Generic City warned us about
- but then, what else should a 21st-century Arab city look like?
In the Bastakia Quarter, Dubai's small pocket of "old town", some
examples of historic, pre-industrial architecture remain. Usually built
with thick clay walls, around an open courtyard, the defining feature of
these traditional Gulf houses is the barjeel or "wind tower": a square
tower rising above the roofline that channels the winds into the
interior. Combined with sun-shading, these traditional houses (or
rebuilt versions of them) feel perfectly inhabitable in the winter
months. Some attempts have been made to adapt this traditional style to
large-scale contemporary commercial needs - most notably the Madinat
Jumeirah, a new complex of hotels, bars, shops and resort facilities
surrounded by canals. Its mall is an indoor version of a traditional
Arab souk, with craft shops and piped Bedouin music, and you can get
around the complex by internal river taxi. Externally, the development
is massed like a collection of small buildings rather than a
mega-structure, although the barjeels that make up its skyline are
actually exhaust vents for the air-conditioning.
There are signs Dubai's tastes might be maturing, though - not least in
the presence of recognisable architects. Foster and Partners are
embarking on an 80-storey skyscraper there, Nicholas Grimshaw recently
entered a competition, and Hopkins Architects are working on two
projects: a pair of towers and a mid-rise office development in the new
financial district. Both of these schemes attempt to adapt traditional
energy saving techniques, says Simon Fraser of Hopkins. Rather than
simple sleeves of glass, the 60-odd storey towers - one commercial, one
residential - will be 40% covered by sunshading, and will include sky
gardens. The commercial scheme incorporates traditional thick walls and
shading based on traditional Arab mashrabiya screens, and consists of 10
blocks connected by narrow streets. "You'll have to go out into the
street at times," says Fraser. "And you'll be able to open the windows."
Planning for a sustainable future has hardly been a priority in Dubai.
While developed nations are moving towards a low-energy future, Dubai
has plenty of cheap energy and a grand vision to fulfil. Experts have
been predicting that Dubai's bubble will burst for decades, but seeing
the massive amount of real estate that is coming on to the market, and
factoring in the foreign workforce required to build it and buy it (80%
of Dubai's 1.2 million people are foreigners) the stakes are now higher
than ever. The question is whether the rest of the world will be able to
keep up with the emirate's vision - which, after all, depends on them -
or whether Dubai is in for a reality check.
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