ABSTRACT
Taking the Yas Island east exit from Sheikh Zayed Road—the road connecting Abu Dhabi and Dubai—one encounters a network of wide and mostly empty highways appearing to serve nothing but a long succession of construction sites. The scale of the physical infrastructure deployed onto this desert landscape is impressive. Empty steel structures by the intersections—latticed sheets of doubly curved metal folded across two twisted arches—shade the empty corners where one day people will wait for a bus. A long stretch of the six-lane highway is edged by a double row of light posts that are neither vertical nor perfectly straight; they tilt to one side and bend slightly near the middle—a gesture that, repeated ad-infinitum along the road, offers a distinctive image to the driver: as if the effect of a sudden magnetic force had distorted a myriad of wires. At night, these lit wires divide the Emirati desert from the Arabian Gulf waters, offering a breath-taking view of carefully landscaped, futuristic isolation.
