Goodbye Du-Bye

March 9, 2009 · Filed Under Architecture Rumbling · 7 Comments
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According to the CEO of Dubai, the current global recession is not going to affect Dubai’s GDP. One of the many reason given by him is the continuous flow of money and projects guaranteed by the present government. I have not been to Dubai, and I’m not as informed or experienced enough to provide a wide range of viewpoints on the good and bad sides of Dubai, one thing for sure, it is a city without a soul.

Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai – it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous. Source: smashing telly

Not to mention the existence of Internet censorship, Sharia law, and the oven like climate.

Dubai is possibly the world’s biggest Disneyland where architects ditch their crazy ideas and concepts for a pile of cash. From an architecture point of view; it is a good example of a very bad example. Sometimes these people never ceased to amaze me, especially Asians. What happened to the traditional Baghdad or Arab courtyard houses? Or the Shahjahanabad Delhi from Arab? What’s up with the mini Doric columns?

Unlike other successful cities around the world build upon trade, natural resources, culture, Dubai’s economy on the other hand is build upon ’speculation’, the idea where bankers, developers, architects injected capital and time to make the entire desert look as if it is booming, like a pyramid scheme or a get rich quick scheme. Can you imagine 200 skyscrapers in 5 years? I bet most of them are empty; come to think of it, it makes more economical sense to litter the city with hollow skyscraper of four facades.

As people scramble for the exits in Dubai, there is no ‘key mail’, like in America, where people can often mail back their house keys and walk away from a mortgage without the immediate threat of jail. People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison. Perhaps Dubai will at least create a new Dickens? Source: smashing telly

Oobject has an interesting story on 15 skyscrapers around the world on hold due to the economic crisis.

From London to Moscow to New York, Chicago, Dubai and Shanghai, almost every single high rise city in the world is seeing skyscraper projects canceled even as they have their foundations laid and start to rise from the ground.

Here is a list of the biggest projects that have been put on hold so far. The disappointing reality is that almost none of them have any particular architectural merit, apart from Calatrava’s Chicago Spire, perhaps, and reflect a period when architecture firms were too overloaded with work to think very hard about the designs. Vote for which ones you would have liked to have seen finished.

Unfortunately, or shall we say fortunately, the four ‘finger like’ towers known as “The Lagoons” business district designed by Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback and Associates will not be completed in mid 2010 or anytime soon.

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Image Source: Oobject