Aug 15, 02:33 am
DUBAI: STUDIO RESEARCH AND URBAN MAPPINGS
The article featured in “Streetnotes: Ethnography, Poetry, & the Documentary Experience… a biannual electronic exhibition space for socially descritive art and text.” Spring 2005: TRANSIT
Published in www.xcp.bfn.org
A city can only be understood by direct participation…
Despite its artificiality, Dubai’s hybrid and complex urbanism has an invisible and unique infrastructure with a hierarchical system that operates within an economic matrix of activities, goods, and participants. Developed through a continual transformation of cultural, economic and social parameters, Dubai is a fragmented, or “cut and paste”, city. Its allure lies in its ability to adjust rapidly, in its complexity, in its contradictions. It is within this perpetual “flux” and uncertainty that architectural works, studio research and student projects may be triggered and generated. The work is sited somewhere between the real/possible and the imaginary / projected.
While Dubai’s suburbs expand rapidly, like an urban carpet that effortlessly rolls out onto the desert, its center is also undergoing a dramatic transformation, characterized by increasing density and layering. Existing buildings seem inadequate. They are unable to sustain this “urban condition” that is dynamic, complex and unpredictable. The studio work presented herein employs evolutionary design and morphogenetic processes, which subsequently test the creation of architectural prototypes and formal solutions.
Direct participation gives rise to individual strategies for the construction of space, while mirroring the contemporary experience of urban life. Starting from recordings and observations of the “instantaneous,” the work re-imagines, redefines or reinvents the public spaces of the city. This “design of moments” becomes a technique of “mending” the fragmented and disconnected city. Rather than falling into the trap of seeing the city from an idealistic/romantic perspective, the work aims at exposing the entrails of architecture, at discovering unique and invisible opportunities.
Each project becomes a vehicle in the exploration of the new “urban condition.” Starting from observation and direct action, and moving to speculation, these proposals respond to the new condition, and underline that cities are not static, but dynamic and complex organisms, fluid fields of rapid change. Architectural notions like “simultaneity,” “multiple affiliation,” and “smoothness” correspond to organizational systems like “matrix,” “network” and “blur.” The map of the city that emerges is both seamless and complex. Patterns of behavior are transformed into urban organizational structures that negotiate, and adapt to, the forever-changing demands and multiple realities of the city.
Dubai projects / Project titles:
(Un)Folded City, Instantaneous Urbanism, Urban Incubators, Urban Condensers, Metropolitan Institute, Urban Hybrid, and Interface /Interchange.
(Themal photography, image by Ahmed Ebrahim of the Studio of George Katodrytis)
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