The NAi (new web­site) hosted the book launch and dis­cus­sion fea­tur­ing Rem Kool­haas, Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman Monday night in Rot­ter­dam (10-09-2007).

The three pre­sen­ters first out­lined their posi­tions about the gulf region con­text, before sit­ting down to take ques­tions about the book. As a pos­si­ble strat­egy to dif­fuse the poten­tial early judg­ments and crit­i­cisms of the crowd, Bouman asked the ques­tion, “Who has been to Dubai [or gulf] and seen it first hand?” Roughly not even 10% of the crowd raised their hands, and only half-​heartedly at that. It reflects one of the weaker themes of the evening that ‘we should not judge’ the sit­u­a­tion in the gulf region, espe­cially in the UAE. When it came to the ques­tions at the end of the evening, the pre­sen­ters were at times defen­sive, and repeated numer­ous times that the books aims to sus­pend judg­ment and rather present a detached overview/reading of the sit­u­a­tion. But this is not to say the evening wasn’t full of great ideas, polemics galore, and of course, the excit­ing sub­ject of Dubai and the Gulf Region itself.

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Ole Bouman: Archi­tec­ture and Social Change

Ole Bouman pre­sented the most aggres­sive posi­tion of the evening, argu­ing quite easily that Dubai and the other wealthy emi­rates are sur­rounded by the “ring of pain” extend­ing from Africa to the Middle East, to Cen­tral and South-​East Asia. Encir­cling this pocket of extreme wealth is the misery and hard­ship of inter­nal and exter­nal wars, civil strife, infra­struc­ture col­lapse, envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion and a bottoming-​out of healthy con­di­tions for soci­ety. In a very pow­er­ful way, he toured the sur­round­ing region show­ing the utter destruc­tion of cer­tain coun­tries listing:

• 9 o’clock Darfur
• 10 o’clock Palestine
• 12 o’clock Baghdad
• 12 o’clock Basrah
• 1 o’clock Asfa­han, Iran
• 2 o’clock refugee camps in Afghanistan
• 2 o’clock Pakistan
• 3 o’clock slums of Mumbai
• 4 o’clock Sri Lanka (Civil War)
• 5 o’clock Indian Ocean (Tsunami)

Under­stand­ing the scale and inten­sity of the strife and destruc­tion is the turn­ing point for Ole. Archi­tec­ture, know­ing these ter­ri­ble things, should think hard about the prob­lems, and the often simple ways to remedy the larger prob­lems. He didn’t argue that archi­tects were to tackle the larger prob­lems, given the “absurdity” of the task, but rather engage with the every­day solu­tions to very real human prob­lems. As an exam­ple, he showed a win­ning project for the 2007 Agha Khan design awards. The suc­cess, he says of the Samir Kassir Square in Beirut, Lebanon, is because of its mean­ing within the con­text. The simple public space with its trees, is a com­plete con­trast to the grey con­crete and at times destroyed city sur­round­ing it.

While Bouman cer­tainly declared the urgency and neces­sity of archi­tects to engage with this dilemma, he seemed to receive a per­haps unflat­ter­ing title of preacher, and pro­claim­ing a mes­sianic mis­sion, espe­cially by Wigley. It was as if Wigley ridiculed the task Bouman believed in, sug­gest­ing an absur­dity to his whole mis­sion to improve the world.

Rem Kool­haas: Dubai in Theory and Practice

Enter Rem Kool­haas, and his attempts to give a bit more of an intro­duc­tion to the book and region itself, as a counter to Ole’s more gen­eral global per­spec­tive. In many ways, Koolhaas’ lec­ture was frag­mented, devel­op­ing a number of inter­est­ing themes, that didn’t always con­nect. Start­ing with an inter­pre­ta­tion of glob­al­iza­tion and its eco­nom­ics, he then went onto the “earnest” his­tory of archi­tec­ture and urban­ism in the UAE. He fur­ther aimed a refusal of Mike Davis’ posi­tion that Dubai is an “Evil Paradise”, and con­tin­ued with a dec­la­ra­tion of the already or immi­nent “collapse of iconography”. The last treat were photos of Rem inter­viewed on Al Jazeera -and the audi­ence was clearly pleased with this.

This theme con­cern­ing the trans­fer of finan­cial con­trol from the estab­lished mar­kets to the emerg­ing mar­kets was by far the most inter­est­ing. It espe­cially con­cerns the idea of semi-​democratic coun­tries begin­ning to invest in estab­lished democ­ra­cies. Tra­di­tion­ally, while the devel­oped west­ern coun­tries of Europe and North Amer­ica have largely had the great­est finan­cial stakes in the rest of the world, this is revers­ing. It is a story you can read about in nearly every issue of The Econ­o­mist and The Finan­cial Times. The above slide illus­trates the wealth of indi­vid­ual nations and their demo­c­ra­tic status. It of course con­cerns the west, and our abil­ity to con­trol our own resources, com­pa­nies, and mar­kets when large stakes are bought-​up by either dictatorship-​controlled or semi-​democratic nations.

In the book, AMO aims to high­light the early period of the extremely com­pressed his­tory of archi­tec­tural and urban design in the UAE. In con­trast, they argue that it was west­ern archi­tects and urban­ists that have recently con­tributed to the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion of hyper­bolic, iconic, and often kitsch projects. Can we per­haps inter­pret this to be such offices as Atkins Middle East -well doc­u­mented in Al Manakh? The two above images are par­tic­u­lar favourites of Kool­haas, show­ing the appar­ent seri­ous­ness and earnest­ness of under­stand­ing the urban issues and prob­lems. Other ref­er­ences to back the argu­ment of seek­ing design excel­lence in the gulf region from the period of the 1970s onwards leads to projects by respected west­ern design­ers such as Alison and Peter Smith­son, Robert Ven­turi and Denise Scott Brown, and also the Japan­ese archi­tect Kenzo Tange. Of course the book goes into full details. In many ways there is strong grounds to argue that the region devel­oped through its first “modernization” during the 1970s and 1980s with a seri­ous­ness of task. The unan­swered ques­tion then, is how did Dubai design today arrive at spec­ta­cle and com­mer­cial hype?

In the most polem­i­cal part of Koolhaas’ talk is the refu­tal of Mike Davis‘ claim that Dubai is cre­at­ing a con­di­tion of slav­ery for the work­ers, thereby cre­at­ing an ille­git­i­mate con­di­tion, an evil par­adise. This is a very sticky sub­ject, and I do not want to get caught in-​between the argu­ments. There is truth in what both Davis and Kool­haas is saying. The worker’s hous­ing pho­to­graph was taken by AMO (or a local sur­ro­gate) when vis­it­ing a hous­ing dis­trict. Kool­haas argues that the con­di­tions are not that of slav­ery. He also claims that “we were the first to enter these areas” which might or might not be true. Kool­haas also argues that these hous­ing con­di­tions are typ­i­cal of Asian sit­u­a­tions, and that to “read this as slav­ery, is to mis­read the Asian condition.”

This is an argu­ment which will always be bal­anced between the two sides, depend­ing upon what stan­dards we set. If we expect that the Dubai work­ers should receive the same stan­dards as Posh Spice and David Beck­ham who own beach prop­erty in Dubai (Dubai World?) then clearly there is a prob­lem. If how­ever, we only expect “Asian conditions” for the work­ers who inevitably all filter into Dubai from the “Ring of Pain” sur­round­ing the region, then every­thing is fine.

Kool­haas then jumped to the famil­iar sub­ject of the “collapse of the icon” in Dubai. This has been pre­sented world-​wide, from Moscow to Mon­treal, and is not worth com­ment­ing on. The biggest crit­i­cism most people have is that the very notion of the “star­chi­tect” is use­less. Per­haps there is no legit­i­macy to “Starchitecture” at all.

Also pre­sented were sketch mas­ter­plans of Dubai. They were beau­ti­ful plans that spec­u­lated what could happen in the desert region beyond the cur­rent devel­op­ments. One mas­sive over­sight is the obvi­ous fact that nobody builds in the desert now, and is unlikely to any­time soon. The cur­rent idea of Dubai com­pletely revolves around water (a psy­cho­log­i­cal ele­ment of sur­vival). The OMA plans are obvi­ously spec­u­la­tive, and served to show the size of what is pos­si­ble -fitting London, Paris, Barcelona and many other cities into the vast desert. It is not a con­vinc­ing future of Dubai -can we imag­ine many devel­op­ers will­ing to extend Dubai into the sea of sand?

During the ques­tion period, one of the audi­ence mem­bers pointed out that Kool­haas “let the cat out of the bag” in terms of his cri­tique of Dubai. In the plan, states Kool­haas, we can see that “there is still hope for Dubai”. Accord­ing to Rem, today’s prac­tice of cre­at­ing -at the hand of for­eign architects- “enormous devel­op­ments that focus on the tourism” and “creating end­less coastal loops of resorts” is “utterly unsustainable”. The hope for Dubai is also that a new period of design will emerge. This is exem­pli­fied, Kool­haas adds, by the recent plan of Sir Norman Foster’s zero emis­sion urban plan.

Clearly the biggest crowd-​pleaser was the photo of Rem pre­sent­ing Al Manakh on Al Jazeera tele­vi­sion. You could feel his sense of pride.

Mark Wigley: Going into the Desert

Mark Wigley won the award for rub­bing the audi­ence the wrong way. While admit­ting “never having gone to Dubai”, he was happy to say that he “sends many people there.” He also wins the award for being the most defen­sive of the three speak­ers. At nearly each ques­tion he attempted to accuse the ques­tioner of being judg­men­tal. Repeat­edly he argued that the book was not cre­ated to pass judg­ment on Dubai. It became utterly banal and boring. He states that, “The pur­pose of the book is not to dic­tate a path, but to open pos­si­bil­i­ties for the intel­li­gent reader.”

One appre­ci­ated argu­ment from Wigley was that it was the archi­tects in Dubai, and not Dubai that was off course. This how­ever seems like judg­ment. The rest of his talk focuses on a free-​flow dis­course about the desert and our per­cep­tion of it. The desert rep­re­sents the void of spa­tial def­i­n­i­tion, some­thing that - in the West - we feel a need to attack and conquer.