U+A Chief-Designer …

Middle East Architect magazine in its August 2013 issue, interviewed U+A’s chief designer as the region’s leading designer to express his views on Frank Gehry’s thoughts on architecture in Dubai.

In his interview Martin, criticized Frank Gehry’s statement on Dubai’s architecture and counter argued the subject by naming few vernacular architectural icons in Dubai and compared the city’s architectural style with other world’s great cities such as Hong Kong and New York.

My thoughts are somewhat divided. On one hand, I do think his remarks are not only evidently ironic, but to a certain extent Burj Khalifa for one is a wonderful example of an architect’s contemporary interpretation of localized design. As we well know, it is conceptualized not only through Islamic patterns based on a local desert flower, but its form is also reminiscent of spiral minarets found in Islamic architecture of the region.

The Burj Al Arab too, is another On the other hand, we could easily make the same remark for many great cities in the world. Hong Kong, New York, Toronto, are all guilty of building generic culturally disconnect structures. Most cities are in some ways burdened with “replicas” of the next town primarily due to a severe lack of originality.

An immediate reaction may be that architects are to blame. However, it is my strong opinion that although not all architects are distinctively creative to a level of establishing a single unique style of every building they draw, Gehry’s finger should point at the developer for the most part. These non-architects shamelessly impose their ideologies onto building forcing architects to compromise on their designs.