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-- ARTIST COMMISSION Photography by Armin Linke Hey Doc, How about a Million Carrots? Setareh Shahbazi Stranger than Paradise Lara Baladi -- GULF AESTHETIC Tropical Baroque: A Rough and Partial History of Popular Furniture Tirdad Zolghadr Establishment Unwound: UAE Arts Antonia Carver -- MUSIC Slogans and Walls that Prevent Misunderstanding 2/5 BZ, aka Serhat Koksal Tirdad Zolghadr I'm Young and I need the Money: Eko Fresh, Konig von Deutschland Joel Bisang My Travels with Thomsum (or other ways I kept it real in old Dubai) Nima Nabavi -- FILM UAE Top Ten Antonia Carver Paradise Now: Interview with Hany Abou-Assad Spring Film Festival Diary -- INTERVIEW BOOKS Changing States Charlotte Bydler Cairo: City of Sand Maria Golia -- REVIEWS -- PRODUCTS -- COOKING with Jehane Noujaim -- AFTERTHOUGHT Human Rights as Fetish Negar Azimi |
Fantasy Dubai Projects:
Terminal City: A Project Proposal for Superlative
Architecture in Dubai
L.E.FT
Modern Dubai is littered with architectural monuments that
can be labeled as Superlative Architecture: an architecture
that is bred from the next big thing—from the shock
of the new by comparison to, and referential scale with
what has just become old.
In Dubai everything will soon be outdone, a taller, bigger
and larger structure will quickly be erected. What is here
today is almost immediately to be irrelevant,
insignificant, not worth mentioning tomorrow.
With Superlative Architecture, “what
if?”—a present state of possibility—is
replaced by “now what?” an afterward state of
wonder in doubt. There is no more aspiration, no more
imagination.
VIEW
IMAGES: 1 2 3 4
Our proposal, Terminal City, collapses the
“city” experience into one building. There is
no more city fabric, no more blocks, no more street, no
more lots, no more center and consequently no more suburban
spread and peripheries This new city, caught vertically
between two airport terminals, is the last structure that
modern Dubai will ever need.
Based on Dubai's business and demographic models (catering
to less then twenty percent nationals), it is a transient
city wedged between constant arrivals and departures; with
airports on the roof and the ground, the city becomes
groundless, non-contextual, and a continuous duty-free
experience, capitalism at its best, or worst.
Once checking out of the terminal, one can only be on the
way to checking in again, that is, on the way out. In
between, a vertical city stretches, with all living working
and entertainment amenities a city holds. Terminal City
even has a cemetery, which located at the center of the
structure, is the furthest point away from any gates.
Terminal City structure is shaped by the overlapping
geometry of the airplanes trajectories from Dubai to the
rest of the world (using the Emirates Airlines as our
model). Resisting any iconographic connotation the
structure can only be read as the seminal symbol of what
Dubai should ultimately represent: the first true global
metropolis in the desert.
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L.E.FT is a design collaborative dedicated to examining the
intersections of cultural and political productions as they
relate to the built environment, established in 2001 by
Makram el Kadi, Ziad Jamaleddine and Naji Moujaes in New
York. With an interest in diverse programs, a focus on
unconventional interpretations of the ordinary is posited
as a design onset. L.E.FT has had exhibitions at Parsons
School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Storefront
for Art and Architecture and Artists Space, and
collaborated with Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis and Office of
Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). L.E.FT received an
honorable mention for Surround Datahome in the 2001 Japan
Architect Shinkenchiku competition, and is a recipient of
the 2002 Young Architects Forum Award from the
Architectural League of New York.
http://www.leftish.org
