Dubai Saves Architecture Profession
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 03.10.08
Designboom calls it "A rather small city that has a population of 1.6 million people and a 37 billion USD economy based largely on trade,manufacturing and financial services." Yet it is employing a quarter of the world's cranes and probably the same proportion of the world's architects.
TreeHugger is fascinated by the scale and the pace of construction and consumption of material and resources over there when we sit and say "reduce and reuse" over here. Now DesignBoom picks up where ::Dubious Dubai left off to catalogue pages and pages of extraordinary development of I don't know what for I don't know who. ::Designboom
OMG, I'm so happy someone has also noticed this "emerald city", detached from responsibilty. I'm interested to see if this conglomerate of Kings and Coe's are even concerned about the planet outside the city limits...
Something tells me that not too long from now all this show-off architecture is going to suffer the same fate as Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, except bigger nad more expensive to maintain.
Seriously, Dubai's only reputation is for having a lot of rich people. There are a lot of people who are attracted to that sort of thing, but they're the sort who will leave the minute Dubai becomes unfashionable. Which it will, because things whose only attribute is fashion, always become unfashionable.
Real estate is one of the UAE's biggest assets.Although the country has a really strict immigration plan , it is centrally located on the world map and facilitates trade and business like no other.Now, all those properties being developed at a large scale is integrated with some business operation eg. IT, Media, Sports , Education etc.If there is a major rush for real estate development , architecture is bound to follow.
I have a stupid question: Did the architecture profession require saving?
I know it can be a tough profession, but I didn't know that it required saving... Does anyone have information on that? Thanks.
No, the profession of architecture didn't need saving. Especially not by the building of anachronistic skyscrapers in the middle of the desert.
This is a dumb post.
Architecture needs saving, so does the engineering profession. And by saving I dont mean that they need to continue to build large, expenssive buildings all over the world. But without architects and engineers, who is going to build for the future?? It has to happen, things will have to be built, we just need a new generation of architects and engineers who are going to design and build in a new way!