Oversaturation in Dubai

I admit that I don’t know much about Dubai, except that it’s somewhere in the Middle East, and that there’s a lot of business development there. A while ago, I heard about this “world islands” plan where they’re gonna have a group of islands that look like a map of the world. And before that, I saw this episode of Build It Bigger on the Discovery Channel where the host took a tour of one of the Dubai buildings under construction, possibly the tallest one ever.

But here’s what I’m thinking. Take a look at this post on designboom. There are so many interesting architecture designs, and it would be awesome to see them come to life. But the problem with these images is that, standard to architecture renderings, those buildings are visually isolated against all other buildings to emphasize certain characteristics and features.

That’s fine for other cities, because most of the time, all the other buildings in those renderings are probably mundane and boring-looking anyway. But in Dubai, there seems to be, or is going to be, an oversaturation of unique building designs that, together, might look more like a freak show, where they’re all special in their own ways but don’t really belong in the “normal” city landscape.

Landmarks are unique because they’re different from everything else around them. But here, the buildings are really different, so different that they’re going to look the same in their weirdness.

Perhaps that’s not the case at all. I don’t know how big Dubai is, so maybe those buildings will be more spread out, then in which case, it would be cool to get on some tour bus and make a dozen stops or something around the city to visit these buildings.

But for now, I can only imagine Dubai as a crowd of funky buildings, one next to the other.

Flush.