tired of burning your feet on the sand at the beach? dubai has the solution for you

Developers in Dubai continue to try and one-up each other to create the most outrageous building and/or built environment. The latest and greatest is a 9,000 square foot refrigerated swimming pool and an artificially cooled beach, complete with giant wind machines to create a gentle breeze. I expect the next monstrosity built in Dubai to be along the lines of a small village enclosed in a giant glass bubble, climate controlled and equipped with snow machines to recreate the charm of the Swiss Alps in winter.
 

Chilling developments in Dubai
A refrigerated swimming pool and an artificially cooled beach – Dubai’s latest excesses are enough to make conservationists weep.
Leo Hickman, The Guardian
Thursday 18 December 2008

 

There will surely come a day when Dubai runs the world’s reserves of hyperbole dry. But in the meantime, we continue to draw a sharp intake of breath each time a new construction project is announced. We have had ski domes built in the desert, seen vast artificial islands rise from the sea and watched several structures vying for the title of world’s tallest building. Dubai represents the will, vision and ambition of our species. Yet many believe it shines an unflattering light on our tendency for folly and hubris, too.

This week, it was reported that the Palazzo Versace hotel – the Emirate’s latest offering for those still in the market for exorbitant luxury – will boast, when completed in 2010, a refrigerated 820sq metre swimming pool and a beach with artificially cooled sand to protect its guests from the excesses of a climate that can see summer temperatures exceeding 50C. Wind machines will even be on hand to provide a gentle breeze.

“We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on,” said Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace, a hotel group with plans for a further 15 luxury hotels around the world to add to the one that already exists on Australia’s Gold Coast. (I’m a Celebrity junkies will know this as the hotel where the celebrities are sent once voted out of the “jungle”.) “This is the kind of luxury that top people want,” he added.

The energy required to run this project can only be guessed at (when questioned, Hyder Consulting, the British company hired by the hotel to build these facilities, said it has signed a confidentiality agreement with Palazzo Versace and therefore couldn’t comment), but it is likely to leave the world’s environmentalists with their heads in their hands. First there is the energy required to power giant wind machines all day long, not to mention the electricity needed to pump coolant around tubes laid under the sand. However, the most energy-intensive element of this plan is likely to be the power needed to refrigerate a whole swimming pool under Dubai’s baking sun.

Of course, in a place like Dubai, this kind of audacious project goes relatively unnoticed, among the many others currently underway. To pick just one other example, 30,000 mature trees are scheduled to be shipped to Dubai to help landscape a new Tiger Woods-designed golf course that will be bordered by “22 palaces and 75 mansions”. Even without the twin threats of climate change and a global economic recession, Dubai’s grandiose plans might seem short-sighted to some. Is it really wise to be building at all, let alone on this scale, in a place that the United Nations describes as one of the most “water-imperilled” environments on the planet, but where per capita water use is three times the global average?

“It’s grotesque that while the world’s poorest people face the loss of their homes and livelihoods, as well as disease and starvation, because of climate change, the world’s richest people think it’s acceptable to waste precious energy so pointlessly on things such as artificially cooled beaches,” says Robin Oakley, head of climate and energy at Greenpeace UK. “While Abu Dhabi, like Barack Obama, is betting on green technology as the engine for growth this century and even building a zero-emissions city, Dubai is apparently still stuck in the 1980s.”

Dubai’s ruling elite insists it now places “sustainability” at the heart of its plans for existing and future projects. Last year, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler, spelled out the “Dubai Strategic Plan 2015″ in a speech. He explained that oil now contributes only 3% to Dubai’s GDP and that his plan is to “sustain Dubai’s environment, ensuring that it is safe and clean”. Each new construction project now boasts a paragraph in its brochure about how it will “follow environmental best practice”, but even if these new measures do materialise, Dubai is a place built on the ideology and convenience of cheap, free-flowing oil. Its business model, particularly its ever-expanding tourist sector, is based on the premise that people will always be willing and able to fly long distances to get there. (Some airlines now euphemistically describe Dubai as both a “long short-haul” destination and a “long-haul weekend break destination”.) A new six-runway mega airport is being built to serve a predicted capacity of 120 million passengers a year.

These latest plans for an artificially cooled beach may be causing ripples around the world, but why isn’t there more vocal opposition by environmentalists within Dubai? The simple answer is there are no environmentalists in Dubai; not in the sense of a campaigning, placard-bearing activist that you might find elsewhere. NGOs are barely tolerated within the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a part. When I visited Dubai two years ago to investigate the environmental and social impacts of its tourism industry for a book I was writing, no one was willing to talk to me on the record, such was their fear of speaking out against the ruling class. The few environmental groups that do exist in Dubai rarely stray from a brief that seems largely limited to educating school-children about the importance of recycling.

The one place where dissent does seem to be allowed – or is harder to police – is the internet, where people can hide behind their anonymity. Discussion forums are a popular way to vent criticism about the direction Dubai is taking, as are blogs such as Secret Dubai Diary. One recent controversy is that over Sammy the Shark, a young whale shark that was caught in the Arabian Gulf and then transferred to the aquarium at the Atlantis Hotel, which opened last month with a £20m party and firework display. More than 16,000 people joined a Facebook group calling for its release, and one local newspaper started a campaign urging that the shark be returned to the sea. A local radio DJ has even been playing a “Free Sammy” interpretation of Michael Jackson’s Heal the World.

But while Dubai’s citizens fight for Sammy to be freed, its leaders refuse to be diverted from realising their vision. At the United Nations climate talks, held in Poland earlier this month, Dr Rashid Ahmad Bin Fahad, the UAE’s minister of environment and water, gave a speech in which he spoke of the need for his country to consider using nuclear power to desalinate its fresh water. Well, how else are they going to keep those swimming pools filled and chilled?

Link.

50 strange buildings of the world

Check out this collection of unusual buildings. Some of them are quality design. Some are just awful. I’ve posted a few examples below. Kunstler would have a field day with this group.
 
Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri

 
Wonderworks, Pigeon Forge, Tennessee

 
The Hole House, Texas

dubai building craze

Have you seen what’s been going on in Dubai lately? I think the developers and government officials have lost their minds. I say this not only because of the amount that they are building, but also because of what they’re building – 2,600 foot tall buildings, new islands in the sea, indoor ski slopes, spaceports. Remember, this place is in the desert. Very similar to Las Vegas but on the coast. Las Vegas, surprisingly, has higher average temperatures in the summer but Dubai is hotter year round. Its average highs and lows in January are Seattle’s in August. Good place to build a ski resort. I’ve only included a few teaser photos. You have to check out the site (link at the bottom), which has many more photos that will make you scratch your head.
 

This is the city back in 1990:

 

 

This is the same shot from 2003:

 

 

Here’s last year. Same street, slightly different angle:

 

 

Palm Island, which you have probably already seen:

 

 

And finally, my favorite, the indoor ski slope:

Link.

$7 per gallon of gas by 2010

The link at the bottom will take you to Planetizen where you can find the full report on what the rising cost of fuel will mean to America.
 
Report Predicts ‘Mass Exodus of Vehicles off America’s Highways’
Posted by: Michael Dudley
3 July 2008 – 8:00am
 
A new report for a Canadian bank examining the economic impact of rising oil prices predicts that millions of Americans will be forced to give up driving as gas reaches $7.00 a gallon.

“As gasoline prices climb inexorably, American driving habits are going to have to undergo a massive change, mimicking the driving habits long adopted by Europeans who have faced much higher gas prices. Average miles driven will likely fall by as much as 15%, while the market share of light trucks, SUVs and vans will be literally halved, reversing the trend of the last fifteen years. But the most fundamental, and unprecedented change will be in the number of vehicles on the road.

Over the next four years, we are likely to witness the greatest mass exodus of vehicles off America’s highways in history. By 2012,there should be some 10 million fewer vehicles on American roadways than there are today—a decline that dwarfs all previous adjustments including those during the two OPEC oil shocks (see pages 4-8). Many of those in the exit lane will be low income Americans from households earning less than $25,000 per year. Incredibly, over 10 million of those American households own more than one car.

Soon they won’t own any.

More fundamentally, the freeways are about to get less congested. Not only will the number of vehicle registrations in the United States not grow over the next four years, but by 2012 there should be roughly 10 million fewer vehicles on the road in America than there are today. For the past half century, America has spent the bulk of its infrastructure money on building highways—only to see that soon, $7 per gallon gasoline prices will lead to fewer and fewer people using them.”
Source: CIBC World Markets, Jun 26, 2008
 
Link.

friday funny: building under construction for 20 years and still not finished

The Worst Building in the History of Mankind

It’s the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea, where the world’s 22nd largest skyscraper has been vacant for two decades and is likely to stay that way … forever.

A picture doesn’t lie — the one-hundred-and-five-story Ryugyong Hotel is hideous, dominating the Pyongyang skyline like some twisted North Korean version of Cinderella’s castle. Not that you would be able to tell from the official government photos of the North Korean capital — the hotel is such an eyesore, the Communist regime routinely covers it up, airbrushing it to make it look like it’s open — or Photoshopping or cropping it out of pictures completely.

Even by Communist standards, the 3,000-room hotel is hideously ugly, a series of three gray 328-foot long concrete wings shaped into a steep pyramid. With 75 degree sides that rise to an apex of 1,083 feet, the Hotel of Doom (also known as the Phantom Hotel and the Phantom Pyramid) isn’t the just the worst designed building in the world — it’s the worst-built building, too. In 1987, Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers put its first shovel into the ground and more than twenty years later, after North Korea poured more than two percent of its gross domestic product to building this monster, the hotel remains unoccupied, unopened, and unfinished.

A bootleg video of the tower from YouTube. How the brazen videographer escaped without being arrested remains a mystery.

Construction on the Hotel of Doom stopped in 1992 (rumors maintain that North Korea ran out of money, or that the building was engineered improperly and can never be occupied) and has never started back up, which shouldn’t come as a shock. After all, who the hell travels to beautiful downtown Pyongyang? It would make sense if the hotel were in South Korea, where Americans are allowed to travel and where projects like the Busan Lotte Tower and the Lotte Super Tower now rise thousands of feet above the formerly modest skyline.

With Pyongyang’s official population said to range between 2.5 million and 3.8 million (official numbers are not made available by the North Korean government), the Ryugyong Hotel — the 22nd largest skyscraper in the world — is a failure on an enormous scale. To put it in context, imagine if the John Hancock Center (1,127 feet tall) in Chicago (population 2.9 million) was not only completely vacant, but unfinished with zero hope of ever being completed.

You may not be able to actually live there, but the building now has its own virtual real estate managers, Richard Dank and Andreas Gruber, a pair of German architects and self-described “custodians of the pyramid’s diverse manifestations.” The duo run Ryugyong.org, which they describe as an “experimental collaborative online architecture site.” Sad you can’t visit the building in real life? Log on, view the detailed 3-D models, and “claim” a subsection for yourself.

The Demolition S How video.

The Demolition S How video by the Italian architects Extraneo might not be as conceptual as Ryugyong.org, but this piece of architectural porn sure is fun to watch. The video (which you can watch above) was mounted as part of the exhibition Fiction Pyongyang, curated in part by Stefano Boeri, who also collected 120 speculative designs for the hotel in the June 2006 domus magazine. The designs, he says, “have forced it to reveal its icy nature, its irresistible fascination as a fragile alien meteorite.” The worst building in the world is also, we now know, “the only built piece of science fiction in the contemporary world.” And it’s true. Demolition S How is all Blade Runner-style flying ads and soaring concrete, and the video reminds us that the worst building in the world is the closest humans have come to building a Death Star.

Link.

gehry’s got nothing on protozoans

Seattleites shouldn’t complain about the downtown library. Check out this monstrosity. And yes, it is real. Here’s the link to the Czech National Library. Don’t forget to check out the competition. I think they should have sent out another RFP.
 
 
Eyesore of the Month: December 2007
By James Howard Kunstler
 

 
Behold the winner of the competition for the new National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague: a previously unknown parastic protozoa related to Cryptosporidium muris, which causes debilitating diarrheal disease in rodents, also believed to be transmissable in humans and responsible for a recent outbreak at the Czech National Bramboráky-and-Bratwurst Cook-off in October. Its discoverer, a laboratory assistant at the Czech Institute for Colon Studies, one Jan Kaplicky, has been referred to perhaps mistakenly as an “architect” in the Czech press.
 

 
The hole at the top of the organism has been described as “an eye” by its discoverer. It is shown in the classic “hover stance,” surveying a scene above the notorious Prague tree fungi, searching for “food.” A micro-vacuum vortex activated by flagella in the slot under its pseudopods absorbs nutrient matter, which is recycled organically and returned to the “environment.”
 

 
Depicted at ground level, the Czech National Library Organism is systematically grazing on smaller protozoans lulled by the music of Antonin Dvorak into ascending the purple pseudo-tongue at center.
 
Link.