November 2019 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Behold Dubai’s Museum of the Future, the very first monumental building to be designed entirely by algorithm!

The official hype sez:

We will be a showplace for a new era – a center of creativity and hope where you can see, touch and shape our shared future.

And a megaphone for empty platitudes, too, like the oval hole in the center of the thing. Ironically the city of Dubai is exactly what you’d come up with if you wanted to design a building with no future — an overblown re-make of the worst elements of Los Angeles in a country with too much unearned money and no idea what to do with it. I’ve been there, too. I was brought in by McKinsey & Co. for a completely absurd urban planning session about five years ago. Most of the other “experts” on hand were MIT Media Lab dudes and computer animators from Disney (and one schmuck from the Harvard architecture school, real estate division). The Dubai officials thought that urban design was about projecting movies on buildings. I never sat through such a gale of idiocy, even at Midwestern land-grant diploma mill symposia. (Took me six months to get paid for the gig.)

Don’t worry. By 2050, tawny eagles will be roosting in the skeletal ruins of Dubai’s massive real estate folly. A genuine museum of the future would be a pre-owned camel sales office in a tent.

Thanks to Drew Keeling for the nomination.

By the way, notice how much the Museum of the Future resembles the abandoned space ship from the original Alien movie: