England is deserted, Australia and New Zealand have merged, and the man who bought Ireland has killed himself.
They were designed to make Dubai the envy of the world: a series of paradise islands inhabited by celebrities and the super-rich reclaimed from the azure waters of the Arabian Gulf and shaped like a map of the Earth. It was called The World.
As millions of tonnes of rock were dumped into the sea for the foundations, timely leaks suggested that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were to buy Ethiopia, Sir Richard Branson was tipped to occupy England, while Rod Stewart would border him in Scotland.
Instead it has become the world’s most expensive shipping hazard, guarded by private security in fast boats and ringed by warning buoys to keep the curious away. A development that was meant to send Dubai’s star into the firmament of First World cities has been left to the mercy of the waves and the baking winds.
Cautious planners and the recession have shattered architects’ dreams of a new London, writes Jay Merrick, who imagines what London might have looked like.
For the past twenty years the voice of the architecture profession has mainly been drowned out by the computer generated sky-piercing towers of luxury. Year after year the biggest names in architecture tried to out do each other in what is technically feasible with oddly named styles of ‘deconstruction’, ‘blobitecture’ and ‘ribbon architecture’. This constant craving to create jewels of desire in the urban fabric left the general public wondering what on earth we do. Now, with the global economy in tailspin, these exercises in object making have come to a crashing halt. For many of us, we couldn’t be more thankful.
eVolo Magazine has an annual competition of skyscraper design. They call for “innovative designs that take into consideration the historical and social context, the existing urban fabric, the human scale and the environment.”
So of course they are huge towers that do almost none of the above but are fascinating exercises nonetheless.
If Monaco is, in Jack Nicholson’s phrase, Alcatraz for the rich, what shall we make of Dubai? Dubai is a city built between the desert and the pale blue sea, that uses more water per capita than anywhere else in the world, and derives 97% of it from desalination, which means that it is the most expensive water in the world. Much of that water is being used to create a garden in the desert. All across the sprawling conurbation, labourers can be seen planting out millions, possibly billions, of bedding plants, into sand banks perpetually moistened by drip irrigation. Dubai has been built on the premise that nothing succeeds like excess.
Preservationists say they are fighting to protect Brasilia’s signature skyline designed by legendary architect Oscar Niemeyer — from Oscar Niemeyer himself.
Following the presentation of the Master Plan for the new Campus of the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) in May 2008, the WU and Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft (BIG), together with Austria’s Federal Minister of Science and Research Johannes Hahn and City Councillor Rudolf Schicker (Department for Urban Development and Traffic), recently announced the winning projects of the pertaining Architectural Competition.
Herzog & de Meuron is working with the developer behind the Shard, Sellar Property Group, on credit crunch-defying designs for the tallest residential development in the country.
The ‘Mecca of Architecture’ that is Dubai seems to be at the forefront in terms of the development of new, fascinating glass boxes. Saddled with one third of the world’s construction cranes, the building frenzy has engulfed the entire region.
