Beach or desert?

© Vincent appel (Jumeirah Beach Hotel Towers)

My first impression is to sympathise with Rem’s comment that the city denies the desert. At least from a marketing point of view, It seems that Dubai would prefer to regard the desert here as a beach that stretches inland to the horizon. At Jumeirah Beach and Business Bay, building facades are as homogeneous as their foundation। The entire hotel complex, an ensemble of nearly two dozen skyscrapers rests on only one foundation. Instead of building foundations for each tower, the city was engineered as one footprint, a conceptual island of concrete under the sand.

© Vincent appel (Business Bay Towers)

In "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies," Banham introduces the first ecology as Surfurbia. He provides a brief anthropology of life on the beach: “The culture of the beach is in many ways a symbolic rejection of the values of the consumer society, a place where a man needs to own only what he stands up in - usually a pair of frayed shorts and sun-glasses.” The ecology of the beach in Dubai is seemingly the precise opposite. However, there are the beginnings of a rejection of materiality here in a differnt sense. According to one construction manager, the business to have in the next 10 to 20 years here will be Demolition.

© Vincent Appel

Advice for my travels

As my flight landed and I filmed what the downward camera from under the belly of the 777 was displaying on the LCD screen in the headrest in front of me, I was offered one last piece of advice from the resident of Dubai sitting next to me, (You may have to turn the volume all the way up to here this,)


© Vincent Appel

From a 777

Several hours before landing, looking out the window, there are clouds and there are burning oil fields. You cant see the clouds because it is night, but you can see the flames from the oil refineries glowing through them. Flying over Kuwait at night there were no stars in the sky, only red constellations to the horizon down below.

Prior to landing we were held in a holding pattern as dozens of supertankers circled below waiting to be filled with oil. The only other boats at sea were the trailing suction hopper dredgers drawing islands in the ocean, and the U.S. aircraft carriers from the 6th fleet, keeping Iraq on its toes.

© Nakheel

We dropped in over Deira, the old city. In the distance you could see the towers along Sheik Zayed Road and of course the Burj Dubai. As I shot this photo, someone in the cabin commented how the city looked like every other city in the middle east. I’m not sure what that means, but this photo of Deira stood out to me.

© Vincent Appel

It looks as if it could be a scale model, not an architect’s, but for a set designer in Hollywood. I was reminded of how many films from Hollwood find their plots in the middle east. I don’t remember their name, but there is a photographer who shoots whole series from these cities so that all the architecture is presented as if it were a scale model.