fishing and pearling.These villages, however, remained small and undeveloped by Western standards.When Abu Dhabi first granted oil concessions in 1953, the city had no paved roads or distributed plumbing and electrical systems.As oil revenue came in during the 1960s, city leaders embarked on a series of public works projects accompanied by residential development. As Abu Dhabi and Dubai began their rapid growth, the built environment took on a complex regional/global identity. Dubai’s first major master plan, designed by the British architect John Harris in 1960, envisioned zoned growth within a new gridded street system. Clearly at odds with existing dense, clustered and organic growth, this plan nonetheless preserved historic districts (though what counts as historic is certainly debatable). Also, much of the new growth was built in what the Mideast scholar Yasser Elsheshtawy calls the Arab-Eclectic or Gulf-Arab style. Many designers saw their work as part of an Arabic-Islamic tradition stretching back over a millennium and represented by cities such as Damascus,Aleppo and Cairo. A case in point is Abu Dhabi’s old central market or souq . Built predominantly of concrete in the 1970s on the city’s new orthogonal grid, the district nonetheless drew upon traditional elements such as small stalls, narrow lanes and covered passages. The market was demolished in 2005 to make way for its modern replacement, a Foster + Partners design that the architects say will itself be ‘a reinterpretation of the traditional marketplace’.
During the design of the Burj Khalifa, currently the world’s tallest tower, Dubai municipal officials asked the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) to justify the building’s form based on its context. SOM returned with an image of a Hymenocallis, a desert plant whose structure and flower roughly related to the floor plan of the existing design. Despite its whimsically contrived nature, officials accepted this explanation. SOM’s successful post-rationalisation raises some questions. Why did the clients accept this abstract visual symbol, barely specific to the region and largely invisible in built form? Why did the architects draw inspiration from nature instead of from the built environment? Dubai is certainly familiar with this referential posturing: the sail of the Burj Al-Arab, designed by the British firm Atkins and the Jumeirah Palm Island, developed by the Emirati firm Nahkeel, evoke their symbolic origins in unmistakable, blown-up forms. Given the shallowness of these cultural references, perhaps the most relevant question is: why do Emirati developers even ask for them? To answer this question, it helps to know a little history of the area now called the United Arab Emirates. Centuries before the discovery of oil in the mid-1900s, this land was occupied by nomadic Bedouin.After contact with British and Portuguese traders, they increasingly formed sea-side settlements based on
a sea of symbols architecture | references by corey schnobrich
global and Arab identity in the United Arab Emirates
Burj Khalifa
Palm trees and a wind tower of the 2003 Madinat Jumeirah development frame the ‘sail’ of the 1999 Burj Al-Arab
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Robert Perry
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