ABSTRACT
DESIGNING FOR THE ICON AGE OMA was asked to design a high-rise building in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, a location which has had an incredible rate of growth over the past two decades and is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. The incredible modernization of the Middle East, of which Dubai is perhaps the most extreme example, should be considered in the context of an ever-growing relationship between commercialism and iconic buildings. At OMA, we refer to it as the ¥€$ Regime – Yen, Euro and Dollar, i.e. the world that is governed and driven by the market economy (figure 21.1). In this regime, there is not only the usual pressure of budget control and fast-track scheduling, but also enormous pressure to design iconic buildings, resulting in the current condition we refer to as the Icon Age. (The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, completed in 1997, represents its starting point.)
Zhan Wang, a Chinese artist, visualized a future city in an installation made of kitchen pots and utensils (figure 21.2), shown in Chicago in 2005. We think it shows the future city, or the current condition in Dubai under the ¥€$ Regime, quite accurately. In a similar vein, we created a composite image (figure 21.3) – the Skyline of Egos – as a collection of buildings designed over the past ten years by the so-called starchitects. Basically, the end result is a collection of “genius” forms that lead to a meaningless overdose of themes and extremes. We at OMA, as part of the starchitect enterprise, wondered how to avoid this situation when we took part in a competition that potentially offered Dubai a chance to be the first twenty-first-century metropolis with a “new credibility.”
