Skyscraper on fire in Dubai

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Just a thought about the comments on the random nature of buildings in Dubai compared to old cities like London... some of the newer taller buildings in the centre are abominations, they would be ugly no matter where in the world they would have been built. They look out of place in London just as they would in Dubai.
 
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Dubai will never learn. They build nearly all their buildings out of materials that simply wouldn't pass any UK safety tests. Pretty much every building out there with cladding is highly flammable and are just waiting for more disasters like this.

Lucky nobody was killed, if reports are right.
 
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Have you seen inside the average footballer's house? We can't complain about them foreigners having bad taste. :p

To be fair you're actually re-enforcing his point even you don't know it, the jest of his post is that money cannot buy class. Most footballers come from very poor and 'common' backgrounds and then suddenly find themselves practically millionaires in a very short space of time.
 
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It's not necessarily a unskilled labour problem, tall buildings in Dubai only had to have cladding made of stuff that didn't burn from 2013 onwards.

this is probably part of the issue

while Dubai might look modern in some respects it is still very much a backwards country in plenty of others
 
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I'm really confused. All I see in the latter image is some structural beams and a row of cheap tables and stools. Also, that lamp on the right looks bent. And I bet half of the chairs and tables in that place are wonky.
Your sofa doesn't define your house.

Are you saying that Dubai has abandoned un-upholstered buildings and a row of barely-within-budget cheap tables and stools for extravagance and luxury?
Nope, I'm talking about the building.

I ask because the latter picture looks like any regular commercial building and I'm sure there are still garters/structural engineering in that building in Dubai somewhere under all that upholstery?
Only in that it uses steel and glass, you won't find many buildings that actually look like that.

The reason the latter building is so bare is not because it's hasn't abandoned the idea of not having excess upholstery. It's bare because it's built by capitalists who are looking to maximise returns.
Returns on what? This isn't a commercial office building, it's to promote Arab culture in France. It's partly open plan inside and one bit looks like an Egyptian temple with huge pillars.

That room in Dubai is built for "look how much money we can splash".
Pretty much.
Certain cultures value displays of wealth, Russia and China do the same, they also share a common history of poverty.

I think the Arab World Institute is notable because it's taken the traditional lattice window covering and used it to create the whole facade for the building.

Those panels are light sensitive and the centre actually opens and closes like the iris on a camera, so they control the solar gain too.


That's the interesting thing about traditional Arab buildings, they are constrained by heat and light so the primary feature is how light is filtered and how air is channelled up.

Secondly it sits well in its position, its curve follows the flow of the river, it connects to other buildings around it, above all it is not culturally disruptive but it is culturally unique.

If a retard was designing this he would make a square building, slap a marble floor down, cover the sides with repeated arches, stick a dome on top and fill it with gold tat. It would stand out as unoriginal, aggressive and tasteless, you'll now find many examples of this around the UK.
 
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How dull would the world be if you stepped into a room in London, Dubai and Tokyo and they all looked the same.
Taste isn't a matter of all looking the same, it is the redefinition of that moment and what came before it.
The Middle East is frozen in time and its repressive nature doesn't permit the necessary cultural freedom to develop and evolve. Look at North Koreans, they dress like bad 70's porn stars and their buildings are like a Soviet Thunderbirds film set.


Yes they buy it in but what else can they do.
Japan evolved from some quite restrictive architectural motifs, yet their buildings developed and you can still see the original ideas being redefined.
The light square panels, the beams which manage to look heavy and lightly supported at the same time, the setting of buildings as temples.
Japan borrows and adapts to their culture, Dubai has just borrowed a single western concept (the wow factor) and that's the extent of their imagination.
It's saying to the world that they have nothing to offer but a pastiche of what they think westerners want - gaudy tat and shopping. They don't even understand what an utter pile of **** they've bought, it is insulting.

The more you look at the Arab World Institute building the more original it gets, because it shows how you can take a dead culture and bring it to life with simply the smallest of changes
 
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^^That's the first pic I've seen of it since the fire was put out. The damage is more extensive than I thought. I didn't realise the fire had extended all the way to the top of the building.
 
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It's almost certainly cosmetic damage though so probably more time consuming than expensive to fix.

I wouldn't be so sure.

There's a building, made from similar materials (ironically called The Torch) which set alight early 2015. The block has been condemned by nearly all insurance companies and the damage isn't expected to get fixed any time soon. Most residents who can, have moved out at great financial cost to them with little sign of compensation. If the same move is pulled by the insurers again, it simply might not be financially possible to fix the building.

(I should know, my dad kills them for a liv...oh wait. No he works in commercial property management in Dubai.)
 
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