April 2023 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

It’s in the ironic nature of futuristic icons that the closer you get to the putative future’s arrival time, the more these icons look like yesterday’s tomorrow. That’s certainly the case with Disney World’s Tomorrowland, which seemed maxi-awesome in 1960, with all its tropes about space travel, robots, and never-ending progress. But the moon-landing is now so far in the past that not many people living remember seeing it happen (assuming it actually did happen, and was not an extravaganza staged by the late-and-great Stanley Kubrick, as rumored lo these many years). Nowadays, Tomorrowland is little more than one big Star Wars commercial — Disney bought the franchise lock-stock-and-barrel from George Lucas in 2012.

Anyway, behold, above, Dubai’s Museum of the Future. Dubai is the Emirates’ Tomorrowland, a city so extravagantly cuckoo that it invokes a kind of giddy reflex nausea. (Or maybe it was just the ferocious Arabian heat.) I was there once, as a speaker at a city planning conference run by the global business consultancy McKinsey for the Emir, Sheikh Mohammed ibn Rashid Al Maktoum, who incidentally also heads the town’s biggest property development company. That conference was nuts, too. At least half the speakers and panelists were computer imagery wizards from Hollywood. After the first morning session, it was obvious that McKinsey knew zip about urban design. The conference was all about projecting movies on buildings, the kind of thing you saw in the movie Bladerunner, and not much else. There was literally no talk about streets or frontages or building codes or any other hardcore particulars of assembling a place to live. It was all just showbiz.

Hence, it’s not surprising that the basic design ethos of Dubai is like Wilshire Boulevard in LA bumped up a couple of orders of magnitude: much bigger, much taller, way hotter, and with every street as broad as an interstate highway. Chalk that up to the stupendous accumulated oil wealth of the region. The place gave me the heebie-jeebies. I spent every spare minute swimming laps in the hotel pool. I passed on the opening cocktail party at the top of the Burj Khalifa, the half-mile high, needle-like skyscraper currently billed as the world’s tallest building. (The damn thing slowly sways in the breeze up there… no thanks.)

As to the Museum itself… the torus-shaped shell was designed by the British firm of Buro Happold. It’s touted as “platinum green,” meaning super-duper environmentally correct. The Arabic inscription on the exterior is supposed to be a poem composed by the Emir himself. The exhibition spaces inside opened with a WEF-inspired show about climate change and related globalist propaganda. The sad truth of the matter is that when Arabia’s oil wealth runs out in not more than a few decades, Dubai will no longer have a future. Rather it will only then embark on its true destiny — as history’s most incongruous ruin. Of course, reenforced concrete and plate glass won’t age as well as Rome’s limestone and marble… but Dubai is like the proverbial fraternity house food-service: not very good, but there’s a lot of it. It will take centuries for time to consume the debris.

Numerous people nominated this humdinger-grade beauty. Thanks to all!