CCA Events
George Katodrytis, "The Dubai Experiment: A Constructed Fantasy"
Architecture Lecture Series
Monday, January 22, 2007, 4 pm
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Info: 415.703.9562
Dubai is symptomatic of approaches to development in many regions in the world today and makes an ideal case study of urbanization. The city has created an 'urban taste' so unabashedly emphatic, so needy for the tallest, the biggest, and the most expensive. Beyond its apparent lack of identity, this city demonstrates a hybrid and complex urbanism, which has an invisible infrastructure of non-hierarchical activities. In an act of self-stylization, Dubai is a raw experiment in imagineered urbanism.
If Rome was the Eternal City and New York's Manhattan the apotheosis of 20th-century congested urbanism, then Dubai may be considered the emerging prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oasis presented as isolated cities that extend out over land and sea.
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