Posts Tagged Dubai
Bailed out and broke, Dubai opens the world’s tallest building
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 4, 2010
Developer claims almost all the 1,000 apartments in the 818m high Burj Dubai have already been sold
The world's tallest building, the Burj Dubai, officially opens its doors tomorrow, leaving a colossal reminder of the hubris that
brought the emirate crashing in November.
The $4.1bn building is 818 metres (2,684ft) high, has more than 160 floors and will boast the world's highest observation deck. More than 50 lifts travelling at 25mph, will take two minutes to reach the top.
Developer Emaar Properties claims that almost all the 1,000 or so residential apartments in the tower have already been sold, in defiance of a property crash that saw prices drop by 50% last year. Laden with debt, Dubai was last month forced to accept a $10bn bailout from neighbouring Abu Dhabi.
During Dubai's boom years, developers built increasingly outlandish schemes including the "seven-star" hotel Burj Al Arab and a 22,500 sq m ski resort on the edge of the desert. Work on an archipelego of man-made islands in the shape of the world's land masses has been suspended due to the financial crisis.
The Burj is more than 300 metres higher than its nearest rival, the Taipei 101. The tallest tower in the United States, the Willis Tower in Chicago (formerly known as the Sears Tower), is 442m high. Rival developer Nakheel announced plans to trump the Burj with a tower reaching 1km, but with its parent Dubai World admitting last year that it was unable to repay its debts, the plans are likely to remain on the drawing board.
Video: Burj Dubai – the world’s tallest building
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 4, 2010
The Burj Dubai tower in UAE is due to open today, standing at 818m
Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building, set to open
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 4, 2010
See video of the Burj Dubai here
With batteries of fireworks and an invited crowd of 6,000 guests, the rulers of Dubai will tomorrow attempt to convince the world that their financial troubles have been overstated with a lavish inauguration of the world's tallest building, the Burj Dubai, rising almost a kilometre from the Arabian desert.
Setting aside fears that the emirate is on the brink of defaulting on its debt, Dubai's ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, is expected to make a triumphal ascent of the spire-shaped tower which rises a giddying 818m. With swimming pools on floors 43 and 76 and plans for the world's highest mosque on the 158th floor, the $1bn "superscraper" dwarfs both the world's previous tallest building, the 508m tall tower 101 in Taipei, and the 629m KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota, the tallest man-made structure. It is so high, the temperature is said to be 10C cooler at the zenith than at the base.
But with many investors in the building's 1,044 apartments already facing losses after property prices in Dubai slumped, the Burj's owners are struggling to present their architectural achievement as anything but a pyrrhic victory. The offices and most of the flats are still an estimated two months from completion and the emirate's neighbours in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, which provided Dubai with a £15bn bailout last year, are also understood to be unimpressed at the ostentation of the building.
The fountain outside cost a reported £133m and the 160 room hotel was designed by fashion designer Georgio Armani and boasts a nightclub, two restaurants and a spa. It is reported to have been built with enough glass to cover 17 football pitches and sufficient concrete to build a pavement from London to Naples. Meanwhile labourers on the project, including many immigrants from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, earned low wages. Skilled carpenters took home just £4.34 a day and labourers, £2.84.
But even by the standards of an emirate which has created miles more beach front by building vast islands from millions of tonnes of sand in the shapes of palms, the tower stands out as Dubai's most remarkable achievement yet.Around 12,000 people are expected to live and work in the tower which is part of a 500-acre development known as "downtown" Burj Dubai.
Mohamed Alabbar, chairman of Emaar Properties, the state-owned developer said Burj Dubai was "another demonstration of Dubai's ability to achieve what few people thought possible".
"The tower is a global icon," he said. "It represents the determination and optimism of Dubai as a truly world city. It is a powerful symbol for the entire Arab world."
Towering follies: the Dubai architecture you couldn’t make up
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 4, 2009
The kilometre-high skyscraper, the underwater hotel, the cloud on stilts ... Steve Rose mourns the eye-popping erections that should never have been commissioned
Pundits have been lining up to say "I told you so" over the bursting of Dubai's construction bubble, so now it's my turn. I did tell you so, a year ago. But what now? In architectural terms, Dubai has surely been the story of the decade. We're just not sure if it's a comedy, a tragedy or some surreal, hallucinogenic fairy tale.
On the other hand, the Dubai experiment has undeniably expanded the realms of what it is possible to build. Before the Palm Jumeirah and its ilk, or the World, who would have contemplated works on such a scale? Reclaiming land from the sea is nothing new, but only Dubai had the imagination to make pretty patterns with its coastline, to shape the earth to such a colossal degree that you need Google Earth to appreciate it.
Other countries have evidently been eyeing Dubai's coastline, too. In Russia, for example, Eric van Egeraat has designed Sochi Island, an artificial resort island in the Black Sea. Bahrain is developing a similar type of offshore resort. Abu Dhabi is making good use of its previously undeveloped islands, for instance Saadiyat Island, which will soon house a very different collection of wonders to Dubai in the form of new museums and galleries designed by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel and Tadao Ando. Even Boris Johnson's recent proposals for a new airport in the Thames estuary had a touch of Dubai about them.
Foreign architects have had a ball in Dubai, at least until recently. It's been the place where you can get away with anything. No matter how outlandish or oversized the idea, no one seemed to be saying no, and somebody else was always paying. As a result, the emirate has been waging some sort of architectural arms race with itself, each new development trying to outdo the last, while the rest of the world looked on with a mixture of disdain and envy.
The Dubai dream was ultimately unsustainable on many levels, environmental as well as financial, and it's safe to assume that most of the crazy ideas proposed for the city will never happen now, given Dubai's dire credit situation. So here are some of the craziest highlights from a future that will probably never arrive – but, you never know, still just might.
Nakheel Harbour and Tower
Bad timing for SOM's Burj Dubai, which is due to open on 4 January 2010, just when a conspicuous symbol of Dubai's hubris was needed. But in the Dubai spirit of one-upmanship, plans were afoot to build an even taller skyscraper with an even shorter name: Al Burj. Originally designed by IM Pei Partnership, the tower was taken over by Australian architects Woods Bagot. It was renamed Nakheel Harbour and Tower after its backers, the state-owned property group Nakheel, which is at the heart of Dubai's current woes. The sentiment behind this stupendous tower seemed to be: "I see your 800-metre-high Burj Dubai, and raise it to over 1km. How d'you like that?"
Trump International Hotel and Tower
Surely a frontrunner in any competition for the ugliest skyscraper the world has ever seen, this 60-odd-storey atrocity, designed by Atkins, was supposed to be the centrepiece of the famous Palm Jumeirah and super-luxurious addition to the Trump brand. It looks like it was inspired by one of those 1980s vases you find in a pound shop. Mercifully, construction has been on hold for a year or so.
Dubai Towers
In the same way the peacock's tail evolved into a flamboyantly useless appendage, Dubai skyscrapers have had to resort to ludicrous contortions to stand out. From the "ignore them, they're just trying to get attention" school of design comes a quartet of bendy skyscrapers supposedly inspired by the movement of candlelight – or perhaps Jedward's hair.
Hydropolis Underwater Hotel
Why reach for the sky when you can plumb the depths? This German-designed scheme would offer 220 bubble-shaped transparent suites, 66 metres below the surface, so guests can enjoy a privileged view of Dubai's spectacular coastal dredging operations.
The Dynamic Tower
A nice idea: each of this tower's 70 floors revolves independently around its central core, so everyone lives in a revolving apartment and gets a 360-degree view of Dubai's cranescape. And from the outside, the building changes shape all the time. And it's all powered by green energy from wind turbines and solar panels. All perfectly possible, architect David Fisher assures a sceptical world.
The Dubai Opera House
Not even Dubai had the stomach for French superstar Jean Nouvel's idiosyncratic formal experiment – a strange cross between an oil rig, a greenhouse and a psychedelic light show. Nouvel's pretentious accompanying text didn't help: "It is a little like the clouds. Each person can see what attracts them, what makes them question. The architect plays only the role of provocateur, claiming innocence." Nouvel is at least building the new Louvre, in neighbouring Abu Dhabi, which promises to be stunning.
The Cloud
A poetic but preposterous scheme imagining a resort landscape of lakes, palaces and floating gardens, raised 300 metres in the air on slanting columns. The brainchild of Lebanese architect Nadim Karam, it's been described as "a bridge suspended between dreams and reality". Why not put a gigantic pie on stilts instead?
Waterfront City
A whole city for 1.5 million inhabitants on an artificial island twice the size of Hong Kong. Rem Koolhaas's OMA were behind the plan. Reckoning that nobody in the Gulf watched Star Wars, he put a replica of the Death Star as its centrepiece – or was that his idea of architectural satire?
Dubailand
A vast landscape of leisure, twice the size of Florida's Disney World, proposed for the interior of the emirate. Highlights include four theme parks, five golf courses, life-size replicas of some of the world's landmarks, a zillion hotels, a Beauty Museum, and, of course, another "world's largest shopping mall".
Charlie Brooker | Remember those dreamlike images of Dubai? Guess what. You were dreaming
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 2, 2009
Dubai's fantasy skyline seems to have been built on sand
• Datablog: Dubai's financial crisis - how much money do banks lend around the world?
I am phenomenally stupid. Stupid in every conceivable way except one: I'm dimly aware that I'm stupid. This means I spend much of my time assuming the rest of the world knows better, that everyone else effortlessly comprehends things I struggle to understand. Things like long division, or which mobile phone tariff to go for. In many ways, this is a comforting thought, as it means there's a limitless pool of people more intelligent than myself I can call on for advice.
But sometimes I find out my gut assumption was right all along, and it's a deeply unsettling experience. Take Dubai. I'm no expert on Dubai. Never been there, and only read about it in passing. The one thing I knew was that everything I heard about it sounded impossible. It was a modern dreamland. A concrete hallucination. A sarcastic version of Las Vegas. Dubai's skyline was dotted with gigantic whimsical behemoths. There were six-star hotels shaped like sails or shoes or starfish. Skyscrapers so tall the moon had to steer its way around them. It had immense off-shore developments: man-made archipelagos that resembled levels from Super Mario Sunshine. One was in the shape of a spreading palm tree. Another consisted of artificial islands representing every country in the world in miniature. As if that wasn't enough, a proposed future development called The Universe would depict the entire solar system.
When I first read about all this stuff, I felt a bit uneasy. None of it sounded real or even vaguely sustainable. I'd been to Las Vegas a few times and seen crazy developments come and go. The first time I visited, the hot new attractions were the Luxor, an immense onyx pyramid, and Treasure Island, a pirate fantasy world replete with lifesize galleons bobbing outside it. Roughly halfway between the pair of them, a replica New York was under construction. By my next visit, the novelty value of both the Luxor and Treasure Island had long since palled, and they now seemed less exotic than Chessington World of Adventures. Meanwhile, unreal New York had been joined by unreal Paris and unreal Venice.
But even at their most huge and demented, none of these insane monuments looked as huge and demented as the projects being announced in Dubai. Yet the novelties, while larger, were wearing thin even more quickly. Dubai's The World archipelago hadn't even opened when the same developers announced The Universe, thereby making The World sound like a rather diminished prototype before anyone had moved in.
In Las Vegas the grimy engine that paid for each new chunk of mega-casino was there in plain sight at street level: woozy drunks thumbing coins into slots 24 hours a day. Hundreds of thousands of them, slumped semi-conscious in rows like dozing cattle hooked up to milking machines. Ching ching ching, slurp slurp slurp. It was like watching a gigantic crystal spider increasing in size as it coldly sapped the husks of its victims. Ugly, but at least it made sense.
Where were the coin slots in Dubai? I had no idea. I just gawped at the photographs and was secretly impressed by the cleverness of the people who'd managed to generate so much money they could safely take leave of their senses and construct 300ft buttplug skyscrapers and artificial floating cities shaped like doodles scribbled in the margins of sanity. To my dumb, uncomprehending eyes it looked like a collection of impossible follies. But what did I know? Clearly the people actually paying for all this stuff knew precisely what they were doing.
But ah and oh. It appears my uninformed gut reaction, that slightly worried vertigo shiver, the hazy sense of "but surely they can't do that . . ." may have been precisely the correct response. Now it's in trouble, the world's financial markets seem shocked and surprised, like Bagpuss being disappointed to learn that the mice from the mouse organ couldn't really create an endless supply of chocolate biscuits from thin air. They should've phoned me for advice. If only I'd known. I could have charged a fortune. But then I'm so dumb I'd probably have blown it investing in an artificial Dubai archipelago shaped like Snoopy's head or something.
In the cold light of 2009, Dubai resembles a mystical Oz that was somehow accidentally wished into existence during an insane decade-long drugs bender. Those psychedelic structures, pictured in a fever by the mad and privileged, physically constructed by the poor and exploited, now look downright embarrassing, like a Facebook photo of a drunken mistake, as though someone somewhere is going to wake up and groan, "Oh my head . . . what did I do last night? Huh? I bankrolled a $200bn hotel in the shape of a croissant? I shipped the workers in from India and paid them how little? Oh man! The shame. What was I thinking?"
The world's tallest skyscraper, the Burj Dubai, is due to open in January. It looks like an almighty shard of misplaced enthusiasm: a lofty syringe injecting dementia directly into the skies, a short-lived spike on a printed readout, or a pin pricking a gigantic bubble. Not a shape you'd want to find yourself unexpectedly sitting on, in other words. Just ask the world's financial markets, once they've finished screaming.
Architecture: Stephen Bayley discerns the shape of things to come
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 23, 2009
Darmstadt and Dubai present the extreme possibilities of contemporary living. In the first, a small town south of Frankfurt, you find the Passivhaus Institut. Since 1996, it has been experimenting with the ultimate in environmentally intelligent building design.
Dubai has been doing the opposite: athletically raising the bar in competition for irresponsible, expensive and brainless architectural kitsch. So in Darmstadt you can find the ur-Passivhaus, while Dubai is offering a revolving building so your infinity pool on the 80th storey can follow the sun.
In Darmstadt, the question is: can we make our existing homes ecologically intelligent? Probably not. Most houses are thermal atrocities which waste and leak energy at every stage of their construction, existence and demolition. Short of layering up in ski-suits, switching off the power and using candles, the best option is to start again.
Thus, the commonsensical Passive House and its simple rules. Face south (if in Europe) to take full advantage of (free) solar energy. If at all possible, be partially buried: the ground is an efficient, and again entirely free, thermal moderator which helps keep temperatures stable. Use triple glazing and standards of insulation and sealing inspired by the disciplines of aerospace. Capture rainwater and recycle most of what is used. Integrate heating and ventilation into a single, very small, very efficient, very German electro-mechanical unit.
So the Passive House is completely airtight. And with no temperature drops, body heat is usefully retained. In this thermal utopia, the only artificial heating is carried by the minimalist ventilation. The UK's first Passive House, designed by Bere Architects, is now being built in Camden, North London. It will, perhaps, be a little bit like living on the Northern Line: what fresh air there may be is pre-heated through subterranean channels. Other problems? Ecological perfection will demand a quality of detailing hitherto unknown to our native builders. And there will be no flinging open the windows to greet the new green dawn. That way you squander your patiently retained heat.
In Dubai, the question is: how can we offer a market sated by excess a novelty to stimulate jaded palates? Dubai's natural hot-house atmosphere has already had an astonishing forcing effect on architectural imaginations, not all of it positive. Delirious money has driven stand-up comedy buildings high into the desert sky, creating a horizon of baffling vulgarity. But nothing yet built is so challenging as the revolving building proposed by the Dynamic Group.
This tower is designed to turn in circles, so offering not just commodity, firmness and delight, but rpm too. Each prefabricated floor will be attached to a central service shaft, supported by a bearing whose design and specification will surely be technically demanding. Concentric with the shaft and layered between apartments are giant horizontal wind-driven fans. If I understand correctly, these power motors which turn each residential floor separately on its axis. Will residents have a gearbox to moderate the revolutionary speed of their apartment?
While Darmstadt's Passive Houses look remarkably similar to a local bourgeois urban vernacular established in the early 19th century, artistically the Dubai revolver is part of the current fad for "torqued towers", buildings with an irrational expressive strain designed into them. Santiago Calatrava's Malmo, Zaha Hadid's Dancing Towers and Rem Koolhaas's Central Chinese TV HQ are examples. But all these architecture-sculptures are static. The Dynamic Group upstages them with a building that actually moves. The philosophical complexities and absurdities of modern life can have no more powerful symbol.
There may be objections. Those big fans: how much noise and vibration will they cause? If sitting in a Passive House is like sitting on the Northern Line, the revolving tower may be like sitting in a food processor. And since Dubai's wind patterns are dominated by daytime sea-breezes, won't all the floors end up facing the same way? Then there is the prosaic matter of plumbing. Those vital flexible joints require an untried technology! Might centrifugally expressed kitchen or bathroom slops ruin the shock of the view? In both Darmstadt and Dubai, it all comes down to hot air and waste water, as does so much of life.
Architecture, they used to say, is frozen music. In Darmstadt and Dubai, the extreme possibilities seem to be a solemn fugue or a drunken samba. Maybe the real future will have a different soundtrack.
Response: Dubai’s skyline is a mark of vitality, not superficiality
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 18, 2009
Its 40-year transformation from fishing port to busy city has been remarkable, says Siobhan Campbell
Germaine Greer's account of her recent trip to Dubai is disappointing (From its artificial islands to its boring new skycraper, Dubai's architecture is beyond crass, 9 February). Her verdict of Dubai as "crass" and "with neither charm nor character" lacks insight, and panders to the media pastime of rejoicing in the supposedly burst bubble of Dubai's prosperity.
As a Dubai resident I'm the first to admit that this place has its shortcomings, some of which are on a staggering environmental or humanitarian scale. The traffic and sewage problems that the city is currently experiencing are examples of this, but it cannot be overlooked that what was once a dusty fishing port and trading village has transformed itself in less than 40 years.
Sights such as the Burj Al Arab, the Palm Islands and the Burj Dubai, which Greer mentions, are being built on a jaw-dropping scale with the intention of attracting investment and tourists: with both of these come jobs. The UAE has long recognised the need to diversify its industries, and the fact that "only 6% of Dubai's revenue comes from oil" is testament to the success of this drive. One could argue that the entire mirage of "excess" and "megalomania" that Greer finds so crass is likewise created for tourist appeal.
In contrast, while Greer states that the dhows on Dubai Creek only have a purpose in taking "tourists on one-hour pleasure cruises", they are in fact an integral part of the city's transport network. Washing machines, televisions, DVD players and other household goods are unloaded from the dhows returning from India, Iran and the Gulf states, and stacked up on the creek banks without guard, where anyone can stroll past but where no one would dream of stealing anything - a remarkable sight to tourists but one, it would seem, that isn't on the tour bus route.
"Here, there is no subsistence; here there is only shopping," says Greer - a predictable response from someone who has taken a bus tour of Dubai's shopping malls and construction sites without setting foot in the city to witness its dynamism. Dubai has an intrinsic impermanence by virtue of its ever-changing skyline and its workforce of expats who are forever coming and going. Many find this constant flux energising and revitalising, rather than seeing it as a reflection of the city's superficiality.
As for Dubai having "neither charm nor character", Greer has failed to appreciate the dichotomy between Dubai's need to modernise and its desire to retain its cultural identity. With a population of whom only 20% are nationals, forging a single cultural identity will always be a challenge; but if it's history and heritage you're after then the Bastakiya and Bur Dubai areas should be on any tourist's itinerary.
The assumption that one can get a true sense of a place from a whirlwind visit compounds the popular view that Dubai's culture is skin deep and that the city is the epitome of the throwaway consumerist society. What did Ms Greer expect from four hours on a bus?
• Siobhan Campbell is a writer and editor for Explorer Publishing in Dubai siobhan@explorerpublishing.com
When this gaseous burp explodes in the desert air, we’ll still have the Burj Dubai | Simon Jenkins
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 4, 2010
The 818-metre tower is a true wonder of the world, a fitting monument to Dubai as the capital of excess and irrational exuberance
The scaffolding has cleared from the most astonishing man-made structure I have seen. It is outrageous, wasteful, egotistical, ridiculous; but ask if the Burj Dubai is beautiful and I cannot deny it. When it formally opens (mostly empty) early next year, this Dubai tower will, at 818 metres, be the highest building anywhere, its "sneer of cold command" thrusting a finger at the outside world even as its Ozymandian surroundings sink beneath the economic waters of the Gulf.
With the Dubai property market plummeting, the Burj is the final grandiose gesture of the emirate's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, on his long campaign to make Ludwig of Bavaria seem like a jobbing builder on the North Circular Road.
Unlike most new skyscrapers, the $8bn (£5bn) Burj Dubai does not rise until the point where an accountant calculates the lifts can take no more. Its 20-acre base has the plan of a six-leaf desert flower, from which it launches itself into the sky in a diminishing cluster of rocket-like cylinders, spiralling and soaring to a celestial climax.
This is no pastiche Mies, pastiche Corb, pastiche Foster, like the postmodern blobs, slices, wedges and cornets that crowd every Gulf skyline, screaming "look-at-me" at the brain-dulled passerby. Burj Dubai, designed by the Chicagoan architect, Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and closely watched by the sheikh himself, leads the eye ever upwards. It has the exhilaration of a Gothic spire. At the top, a spike rises further, swaying 1.5 metres in the wind and appearing to bend towards the viewer, as if appalled at its own presumption in puncturing the heavens.
Dubai this week lay in the shadow of its new tower, a partygoer still dancing in the streets hours after the party has ended. Its hyperbolic malls are crowded, its freeways jammed and its latest attention-grabber, an international film festival, mobbed by crowds. On Monday Dubai's more sober neighbour, Abu Dhabi, tossed its defaulting property market a $10bn note for one last drink, with another $1bn in pocket money for the embarrassed Maktoum family.
The sheikh's obedient media barely mentioned the humiliation, as a drunk cares not who pays for the last round. The construction sites, once host to a quarter of the world's cranes, are mostly still building, but no one holds out much hope for the sea-girt ocean palms and "cities" planned at the height of the most reckless property bubble in history. The chairman of Dubai World, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, might cry earlier this year, "Dubai has a vision like no other place on earth," but it is a vision few want to share just now.
A quarter of new residential units stand empty and 34,000 are still under construction. Nothing is heard now of a plan to build a tower higher even than Burj Dubai in the port area. An archipelago in the form of a map of the world remains as piles of sand offshore, crazily shipped like coals to Newcastle from Australia and rumoured to have disgorged antipodean snakes into the Gulf. The capital of irrational exuberance has embarked on an almighty hangover.
Since I have long seen Dubai as a speculative accident waiting to happen, I could not resist a debate on its future, held on Monday in the rival statelet of Qatar up the coast – and held with not a little schadenfreude. Dubai's protestation of open markets, an open society and western freedoms have long been absurd. Its rulers reacted to the debate (broadcast next month by BBC World) by trying to have the Qataris suppress it and ensuring that three Dubai speakers and all Dubai journalists boycotted it.
This was absurdly self-defeating, since a motion critical of Dubai's breakneck expansion was defeated 60-40. Twitter and Facebook were flooded with the good news for Dubai, in a week when there had been precious little. Yet none of this was allowed to be reported in Dubai's censored media. Never were so many well-groomed heads buried in so much desert sand.
The surest sign of a polity that has lost confidence in itself is when its rulers cannot tolerate a debate on its affairs. Even the word default has had to be replaced in the Dubai press by "debt restructuring" or "new legal framework". Outsiders are routinely blamed for the property market collapse, which the emirate's buccaneers and paid stooges have for years been stoking with hyperbole. Property values are reported to be 50% down from their peak and are predicted by UBS analysts to be heading for 75%. Those who mimicked the 17th-century Dutch who believed that tulip prices could never fall are left with the paranoid's last gasp, blaming foreigners for their woes.
The most mesmerising thing about Dubai is not its present but its future. Will it be Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat or Fatehpur Sikri? Will it become a place of sand and weeds, so many "trunkless legs of stone" lost on a scorching Gulf shore?
What will happen when the world's funny money starts to flow elsewhere? What happens when a future sheikh goes either environmental or religious and tires of boosterism, returning to tents and camels, to order and respect for his ancestors? What happens when some political whirlwind sweeps across the Gulf from Iran, or down from Iraq, or across from Saudi Arabia?
At a certain point in the decline in property values, it no longer pays owners to maintain lifts, services and utilities (as on a British tower estate). More likely Dubai will be a desert Detroit, a place of widespread dereliction with some money remaining at the centre but with ghost towns and squatted housing in the sweltering suburbs. The smart money is already on the more cautiously developed Qatar and Abu Dhabi stealing its financial thunder and leaving Dubai with its bizarre hotels: Las Vegas to Los Angeles, or Atlantic City to New York.
There is a touch of Vegas to the gold-plated atrium of the "seven star" Burj Al-Arab hotel, with its casino baroque and computerised fountains like leaping dolphins. There is more than a touch of Disney to the $1.5bn Atlantis hotel, opened this year by Kylie Minogue, with shark-filled aquarium wall, garden gnome interior and giant conches for capitals.
Already the office towers of Dubai look like those of a pre-cyber age, when the rich had to live near the oil, and celebrities could be induced to buy off-plan and sell before the fireworks ended. Why live in Dubai and shop at an ersatz Harvey Nichols when you can live in Knightsbridge and shop at the real one?
Dubai is a gaseous burp about to explode in the desert air. But when it explodes it will leave behind the sensational Burj, standing visible across the desert, gleaming proudly in the sun. One day the cost of keeping it up will exceed its income, its steel will rot and the swaying summit will become dangerous. The mother of all demolitions will have to begin. Then Shelley can have his moment and Ozymandias his epitaph. But for the time being Dubai can at least boast a true wonder of the world.
Architecture, Art and design, Burj Dubai, Business, Comment, Culture, Dubai, Dubai World, Global economy, Global recession, Le Corbusier, Qatar, The Guardian, World news
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