When Mr. Charles Jencks came to my school’s last year’s symposium, he mentioned OMA commisioned 2 projects in Dubai, while loosing a comptetion to Zaha Hadid (The Dancing Towers project). Well, dezeen mentions that Mr. Rem is negotiating, if not settled by now, on building his design on a different site. His proposal suggests his anti-iconic stand to designs:
The ambition of this project is to end the current phase of architectural idolatry – the age of the icon – where obsession with individual genius far exceeds commitment to the collective effort that is needed to construct the city…
Now this is just a Toohey line, trying to be implied in the wrong place! Dubai is being filled with architectural icons branded to the extreme where every single project is massively covered by the media, branded to the extent of creating a name for each building, a logo, and a website! Anti-Iconic designs are much more digestable in the case of Yemen for instance; homogeneous architecture built by generations, not in Dubai where every architect is trying to build to his own name and profit.
The design attempts to reflect a minimalistic, less articulative image to push it to a less-iconic image, but the details in which show closely are much more articualted, and contradicting; first the exterior looks like a slick iconic shape that would stand out of the herd, with the help of the concaved/convexed shapes, especially in the setting proposed to it in the Ras Al Khor Wildlife Sanctuary, and as it shows, in the middle of the lagoon.
This is not the interior, but it seems like OMA are trying for a similar interior concept, however, I feel really disturbed by this split of personality between the exterior and the supposed interior.
The gist lies in this; the structure rotates. According to dezeen, Mr. Rem admitted that the feature was added later on to add a hip feature to his design in order to win, well, it didn’t. It’s an anti-iconic tower that rotates.
All photos by dezeen.
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