DUBAI: PHOTOSHOP URBANISM
Printable Version
George Katodrytis
StudioNova Architects – Dubai / Toronto / Nicosia
www.studionova.org
George Katodrytis is the founder of StudioNova Architects, Dubai. His works and articles have been published in several magazines. His built work ranges from offices, residences, residential conversions, corporate interiors and exhibitions in UK and Cyprus, as well as contributing proposals for developments in the UAE. He is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the American University, Sharjah, UAE and has previously taught at the Architectural Association and the Bartlett, London.
TO VIEW HIS WORKS click here >>
1. Space – non-place – the generic condition
2. Photoshop Urbanism - paste-up & thematic
3. Constructed Leisure-land - tourism
4. Shopping Malls
5. Mystery with no history
6. The paradox of the Prototype City – present /future
Space – non-place – the generic condition
“Dubai: The hippest city in the world” foxnews.com, October 26, 2005.
In the last twenty years, Dubai has developed at a remarkable pace to the cosmopolitan global crossroads that it is today. Dubai thrives on newness and bigness, in an act of ongoing self-stylization and fantasy. Hence architecture is crucial, for it defines these elements. Little more than a grand-scale shopping mall, the city is comprised of 'mind-zone' spaces, and of airport-like lobbies. In this theme park oriented cityscape, there is no differentiation between old and new. Everything is recent. Yet everything seems to point to the twin towers of consumerism and tourism.
What used to be the ‘thrill’ of the urban voyage is quickly giving way to banality and exhaustion: one has nothing more to discover, nothing other than immense, general and non-descript spaces. The visual voyage through the city like in any contemporary cityscape operates like a continuous shift between eye and mind, as though differences no longer existed between the two. The city has definitely ceased to be a site: instead, it has become a condition. Perhaps the city has even lost its site: it tends to be everywhere and nowhere.
Figure 01: Dubai’s contemporary cityscape
Rem Koolhaas, in his well-known essay “The Generic City” which was published in the Italian magazine Domus in 1994 contemplates the following observations, which pertain so well to Dubai:
“1.1 Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport – “all the same”?
1.6 It is big enough for everybody. It is easy. It does not need maintenance. If it gets too small it just expands.
If it gets old it just self-destructs and renews. It is “superficial” –like Hollywood studio lot, it can produce a new identity every Monday morning.
6.3 The Street is dead.
9.2 The Generic City had a past, once?
10.2 The only activity is shopping…
11.5 Because the Generic City is largely Asian, its architecture is generally air-conditioned.
11.8 The apparently solid substance of the Generic City is misleading. 51% of its volume consists of atrium.”
Photoshop Urbanism - paste-up & thematic
Dubai is an extreme and complex example of urbanism. One of the fastest growing cities in the world today, it represents the epitome of sprawling, post-industrialist and car-oriented urban culture, and most of all real estate villages and spectacular enclaves. "Sixteen percent of all the building cranes in the world are in Dubai right now," Thompson said. "Sixteen percent. That's absolutely amazing for a city to have that kind of economic development." Foxnews.com, October 26, 2005.
Almost overnight, the city has become a juxtaposition of barren desert, 21st-century skyscrapers at extravagantly optimistic construction sites. The city is a large construction site, preparing itself for the incoming international nomads: new settlers, laborers, consultants and in-transit business travelers and tourists.
Figure 02: Dubai: Explosion of mega-scale cities
New building precincts and cities are planned as the existing fabric sprawls out to the arid region. The explosion of mega-scale structures and satellite cities provides opportunities for the study of new typologies of building programs and forms. Within the urban grid, and the monotonous and predictable urban condition, the generation of prosthetic geometries and new morphologies acts as a catalyst for innovation. Maybe this is the right time, in the evolution of 21st century architecture, to study and adopt new forms and technologies. The aura of optimism and the apparent financial success of the new building boom seem to require fresh, daring architects and designers.
This urban mirage continues to spread out vertically and horizontally without any signs of slowing down; it takes in/purports a vertical urbanism - giant atriums and spidery passages among the towers – curiously set against a background of a sprawling “nothingness,” the desert.
To the visitor, this cosmopolitan city might seem peculiar and hyperactive, with no layering or apparent hierarchy. Its allure lies in its ability to adjust rapidly, in its complexity and contradictions.
The city of Dubai represents the truly generic condition of the contemporary city. These are places where history has been almost completely blotted out, where the terrain has become completely artificial, where the urban tissues do not hold together beyond a relatively short time. This type of generic city amounts to no more than the coexistence of a number of apparently unconnected buildings that, by virtue of proximity, happen to form an urban condition. A new phenomenon that takes place without architecture, without extraordinary architects…
Perhaps the nearest analogy to the mode of production of this new type of city is Photoshop, which creates collages of photographs and other digitized images, combining and layering anything with anything, as though in an accumulation of objects of desire.
In this type of city, the notions of center and periphery have lost their validity. What is more, it seems as though the city has lost its site, for it tends to be everywhere and nowhere. This fragmented and collaged city, which is perpetually being made and remade “a la carte,” is really a replica.
Figure 03: Study of commercial spaces
Figure 04: Dubai’s islands
The city tends to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, because it has no urban center or core. Dubai thrives on newness and bigness, in an act of ongoing self-stylization and fantasy. Hence architecture is crucial, for it defines these elements. Little more than a grand-scale “shopping mall,” the city is comprised of “mind-zone” spaces, and of airport-like lobbies. In this “Theme Park"-orientated cityscape, there is no differentiation between old and new. Everything is recent. Yet everything seems to point to consumerism and tourism.
The city has lost its meaning but the quest to be spectacular – with an impressive display of staged buildings and iconic complexes – continues. Here, architecture and interiors act as interfaces to consumerism, to the act of purchasing, to the ephemeral experience. Interior shopping spaces are ever larger, more luxurious and seductive. The advent of air-conditioning liberated the architectural form and gave rise to a new set of formal possibilities.
Figure 05a: Dubai’s street bazaar
Dubai is a prototype of the new post-global city, which creates appetites rather than solves problems. It is represented as consumable, replaceable, disposable and short-lived. Dubai is addicted to the promise of the new: it gives rise to an ephemeral quality, a culture of the “instantaneous.” Relying on strong media campaigns, new “satellite cities” and mega-projects are planned and announced almost weekly. This approach to building is focused exclusively on marketing and selling.
Constructed Leisure-land - tourism
Flying over Dubai, one is confronted with a new type of 21st century urbanism which is both diagrammatic and prosthetic in the form of islands. As a tourist, there is no need to travel to distant destinations, to desolated islands. Islands are now close to shore, in a new typology of hydro-suburbia.
The island is the lowest form of spatial organization. Pure accumulation, it has an iconic form and a certain perimeter and location. It can be reached by dramatic arriving (compare here with Venice’s Lido and Florida’s Key West). The surface of the island reveals everything there is, all contents; islands are fundamentally consistent and predictable: they give an assurance of security. But they have potentials; they are exclusive.
This uniqueness suits the machinery that drives mass tourism. There was a time when cities relied on a specific confluence of raw materials, transportation routes, and labor to generate industrial revenue; now cities rely on a different confluence of architectural fantasy, slightly different transportation routes, and on tourists to generate entertainment revenues.
As Briavel Holcomb points out in his essay “Marketing Cities for Tourism” (1999), in the tourist realm “it is the consumer, not the product that moves. Because the product is usually sold before the consumer sees it, the marking of tourism is intrinsically more significant than the conventional case where the product can be seen, tested, and compared to similar products in situ. It means that the representation of place, the images created for marketing, the vivid videos and persuasive prose of advertising texts, can be as selective and creative as the marketer can make them – a reality check comes only after arrival”.
Figure 05b: Dubai Marina – promotion model: density resort
Figure 06a: Dubai Marina – promotion model: hybrid resort
Figure 06b: Dubai Marina – in the making
Increasingly, the kind of contemporary architecture and urbanism that simulates mass tourism has to be not only photogenic but also telegenic – buildings that look striking in a sequence of rapid-fire cuts, or that stand out in a static shot as backdrops.
The city of Dubai sprawls out like an exponent of an algorithmically evolving pattern:
a fractal architecture with forms of increased perimeter and endless topological variations, as two-dimensional patterns, allowing very little for 3-dimensional variety.
Motivated by a desire for authentic experience of for exotic places, for escape or spectacle, or simply by an urge for new knowledge, the tourist leaves a familiar environment to view other locations. Today, as places increasingly get restructured as spaces of consumption, tourist activities merge with other mass-consumption practices. From shopping and sports to culture and education, architecture is becoming an integral part of the conception and economy of tourism, and vice versa.
Dubai’s recent development has put it on the map of iconic projects, of real estate prospecting and holiday dream destinations. Yet what is missing is the visionary realization of its architecture.
Historically, the origin of modern vacation time can be traced back to the 1930s, when workers in France, for the first time, were given the right to twelve paid vacation days. Today, tourism has become a “total lifestyle experience.”
Figure 07: Dubai as the “destination city”
The modern tourist resort is by definition a constructed one. The tourist’s perception seems to have shifted away from the pictorial 18th century: there is no longer the desire for the panoramic view. The excessively visual contemporary culture has made everything look familiar. Contemporary tourists are looking for familiarity: they want to feel at home in a strange place.
This has led to concentrated tourist infrastructures and mega-structure complexes (containing hotel + apartments + mall + cinema + expo + anything goes), which are clustered together. In this sense, architecture and landscape are part of a single system, characterized by stratification and controlled spatial experience.
While travel does resemble this description for some of us some of the time, an overwhelming density of the unknown can also shut down our senses. It is hard to revel in a streetscape at midnight when one is desperately trying to find a hotel with a vacancy. For these reasons, many of us prefer to reduce the quantity of the unknown by booking transportation, lodging, and even sightseeing excursions in advance. Mass tourism cushions the impact of arrival and enables the visitor to negotiate larger and potentially confusing stretches of territory.
In mass tourism, a dose of familiarization is required. Whereas it was once uncommon to shop for ordinary clothing items while on vacation, brand-name stores and outlets mall have popped up all over the world. Not only does one buy souvenirs, but also personal and household items, the identical kinds of shorts or running shoes available back home. Similarly, with the spread of franchised restaurants and hotels, it is possible to eat and sleep in circumstances that are remarkably alike, and tune into CNN almost everywhere.
Mass tourism is indeed like mass media. The lure of the new works best when the new is both anticipated and well packaged. In 1925, in his essay “travel and dance”, Siegfried Kracauer already remarked that tourists are prepared for foreign places though the perusal of illustrated magazines. Nowadays, though coffee-table books, television ads, and movies, tourists are well prepped for on-site architectural experiences. A profusion of tour guides, and especially Internet sites, launches the tourist into touring weeks or months before the actual trip begins. What is striking about this body of preparatory information is the degree to which issues of touring comfort and efficiency take precedence over historical information about architecture or place.
From the airport to the air-conditioned bus to the four- or five-star hotel, package tourists spend much of their time within a cocoon. They might as well be at home, or at the mall. The orchestrated itineraries, with their chosen spots for picture taking and shopping, and their frequent driving ellipses over ignorable terrain, are similar to the experience of movies and television.
In Dubai there is little difference between holiday accommodation and housing. Architectural programs are becoming fused and undifferentiated. The morphology of the landscape and seascape is becoming fabricated to the point that it may soon be difficult to differentiate between the natural and the constructed. Dubai’s natural beachfront is 45km long. Artificial islands will add another 1,500km of beachfront, turning the coastline and the city into an inexhaustible holiday resort. This constructed landscape, like a stage set, provides edited scenes of adventure and entertainment.
No matter which part of the world, whenever architecture is built from nothingness –it seems to be fond of a universal language of spectacle and the exoticism of the new. It might be useful to look at another aspect of the exotic at this point, and ask in what ways specific examples of architecture are elusive and foreign to the city itself. This is also a way of asking how the exotic intervenes in the cultural politics of global tourism.
Jean Baudrillard has analyzed contemporary culture though the figure of Disneyland, thereby inserting a form of simulated architecture and tourism into the heart of his definition of hyper-reality. Disneyland is presented as an imaginary kingdom, set aside from the values of everyday. As such, it serves as a “prop” to make us believe that the world outside is “real.” For Baudrillard, however, the world outside is not “real” but “hyper-real,” and Disneyland is no different from that world. The logic of role-playing is and theming is not limited to Disneyland. It has permeated the whole of the Western society.
Everyday life is colonized by fantasy, dominated by escapist dreaming. Both the “authentic” architectural icons, and the simulated architectural icons, such as Disneyland or Las Vegas, are inscribed within the same logic of escapist dreaming.
Escapism is an ambivalent, even negative word when juxtaposed against realism or authenticity. Yet we are inescapably escapist. Animals flee when confronted by some sort of threat, when pushed. Humans are no different. What makes us different is that we are not only pushed, but also pulled by some imagined reality that is either already in existence “out there,” to be discovered, or by the possibility of its realization and manifestation. We escape from the given into the desirable through theme parks, shopping malls, and the suburban developments. Shopping malls have often been excoriated as fantasy worlds of facilie fulfillments.
To the visitor, Dubai might seem peculiar. It lacks historical identity: few traditional buildings exist, and most of those are reconstructions. There is no core, no clear urban evolution or hierarchy. Yet, this hyperactive city thrives in an unprecedented optimism. The prospect of the “new,” high-quality life makes Dubai an addictive place, where all points to one thing: consumerism. Urbanism and Architecture act as interfaces to trading, purchasing, and deal-making.
Not unlike the typical American suburbia, Dubai is experienced by car. Its hot and humid climate, especially during the summer months, makes it almost impossible to engage in outdoor activities. Air-conditioned mega-malls are the evening boulevards that draw crowds of all nationalities. Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity, replacing almost every aspect of urban life. Even airports have become wildly profitable by converting travelers into consumers.
Air conditioning transformed almost all interior spaces to retail spaces, by providing the visitor/consumer with the necessary comfort. The escalator provided the shopper with a means of effortlessly traversing the rapidly expanding distances, of scaling the heights of commercial environments. Even nature has been systematically reinvented, so that it can survive within the increasing artificiality of these new endless interiors.
The artificial is seen as a more desirable alternative to the natural. A description from 1938 of a windowless store describes a retail space “free from the slightest daylight or natural ventilation, thereby eliminating dust and at the same time creating better, air-washed, mechanical ventilation and more uniform, pleasing artificial lighting results […] In many ways the elimination of windows adds to the beauty and to the selling efficiency of the store”.
In the mid-1950s, the relationship between air conditioning and shopping is consummated in the “invention” of the shopping mall. Unlike the department store, the mall is the first retail type to exist because of air conditioning.
Shopping could never have become effortless without air conditioning. Only air conditioning can make windowless sealed interiorized and artificial environments feel natural and comfortable. Along with the escalator, engineered climates have enabled an explosion in the size of interior space, creating environments that are becoming increasingly divorced from the outside, and able to accommodate any range of human activity in almost any combination.
By making interior spaces more large and comfortable, it has become increasingly difficult to escape them. By combining activities that used to be dispersed in a single space, air conditioning radically altered the way that time is spent in public.
Shopping time was never as prolonged as it is now. Department stores and shopping centers began their steady encroachment on public activity by capitalizing on comfort. Therefore, by increasing the amount of time spent indoors, in comfort, the possibility of spending is increased.
The liberation of the architectural form from what used to be solely an environmental shelter has provided a set of new possibilities. Architectural form can now take any configuration. It can address human issues not only of comfort, but also of social contact.
It is difficult to conceive of Postmodernism without referring to structuralism, and post-structuralism in particular. Post-modern cities are caught up in the rapid changes brought on by globalization. The need for a new interface is seen as a departure from the paradigms of modernism. Already the cities are becoming profoundly heterogeneous and non-linear.
Mystery with no history
Dubai began life as a small port and collection of barasti (palm frond) houses clustered around the Creek. Lacking an abundance of fertile land, early 20th century settlers set about making their living from the sea, concentrating on fishing, pearling and trading. Commercial success, coupled with the liberal attitudes of its rulers, made the emirate attractive to traders from India and Iran, who began to settle in the growing town. This gave the city an early start before the explosion of wealth brought on by oil production in the late 1960s.
The trajectory of the development of Dubai is reflected in its population, which has grown fifteen-fold since 1969: from 60,000 then to well over one million today. It is projected that, by 2010, Dubai’s tourist trade will accommodate around fifteen million tourists per annum, serviced by more than 400 hotels. Comparisons are telling: in 2002, Egypt, for example, had 4.7 million visitors, and Dubai 4.2 million. (The former, of course, hosts ‘real history’, against the latter’s Las Vegas version – including, in the next few years, the construction of a set of Pyramids in the vast theme park Dubailand.)
The emirate’s expansion has followed the Los Angeles model: new developments sprout in the desert, beyond the older cores of Deira and Bur Dubai, linked by freeways and ring roads. The open spaces left in between are gradually filled with a lower-intensity, car-dependent form of urban sprawl.
Figure 08: Dubai’s Waterfront development
Figure 09: Dubai: Fractal Architecture
Since Dubai has no real urban history, it has had to invent a variety of new urban conditions. Using its transitory oil wealth, the emirate has built "free zone" areas, promoted as clusters defined by economic liberalization, technological innovation, and political transparency. The Jebel Ali Free Zone, an industrial and trading hub, was followed in the late 1990s by three sprawling industrial parks: Internet City, a bid to make Dubai the Arab world's IT hub; Media City, which aspires to replace Cairo as the Middle East's media capital while broadcasting the emirate's vision of openness; and Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC), a stock market headquarters meant to match those of Hong Kong, London and New York.
While the desert is usually considered barren and worthless, Dubai’s “empty quarter” has unique real estate value, thanks largely to two companies: Emaar Properties (founded 1997) and government-owned Nakheel. Among many residential projects, Emaar is currently developing the 3.5km-long Dubai Marina behind the existing Jumeirah beachfront hotels. A high-rise city-within-a-city and home to more than 40,000 residents, it is set to become the focus of the New Dubai. Nakheel has become synonymous with The Palm, Jumeirah, a 5km-long, reclaimed island. Other Palms and islands are currently being ”planted,” in the massive undertaking of transplanting the desert into the sea. The latest project, Dubai Waterfront, will not only add 375km of new beachfront but will include the largest man-made canal carved out of the desert. By 2002, when freehold property rights were established in Dubai, allowing foreigners to buy property for the first time, the stage had been set for a real estate boom.
Dubai is turning into a huge business-meet-leisure park. In the desert, “Dubailand” is being built – a $19bn theme park twice the size of Disneyworld in Florida. The plan also involves the creation of Dubai as a city for 10m people, compared with the current population of 1.5m. Hundreds of luxury hotels are being built and many hundreds of thousands of flats and luxury homes aimed at housing the rich, the retired and the tourists as well as the immigrant workers tasked with making his dream reality.
The paradox of the Prototype City – present /future
If Rome was the “Eternal City” and New York’s Manhattan the apotheosis of 20th century congested urbanism, then Dubai may be considered the emerging prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities that extend out over the land and the sea.
Figure 10: Dubai’s vision of it’s future - Manhattan
Figure 11: Dubai’s vision of it’s future - Generic
Dubai is perhaps becoming architecturally the ultimate fantasy city. Mass tourism provides the opportunity to create cosmopolitan and populated open spaces, defining a new frontier of a public space.
This is the story of the 21st century new metropolis: generic, mega-city, impressive but not original and, above all, consumable.
References
Koolhaas, Rem, (1994) “The Generic City”, essay, Domus Magazine
Bijlsma, Like, (2004)“Editorial: Architecture and the Tourist Landscape”, OASE#64, NAi Publications, Rotterdam
Davis, Mike, (2005) “Sinister Paradise: Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?”, essay, www.omdispatch.com
Augé, Marc, (1995) " Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity", Verso.
Briavel Holcomb, (1999) “Marketing Cities for Tourism”
© copyright 2006 LAYER
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs2.5 License.