From an Out of Place societies to an Out of Place Identities

Dubai Dancing Towers model presented at the Guggenheim Museum in NY
Photo by Emad Salameh

....continued
I prefer to be realistic, and I want to keep positive. I don't see any famous global architectural firm or building technology that comes from the middle east. CCC are contractors working for Oil companies "with Headquarters in Greece". Zaha Hadid is Iraqi who worked and practice in London. Meanwhile, working for others is what we are good at for sure. On the other hand, the world pioneers comes from a minority group of %1 of the world population: Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, Daniel Lebskind, Peter Eisenman, etc... are all Jews who designed and built environments that reflects their believes and ideas.

I am not negative or criticizing I am defending our out of place architects , who end up working for other global companies or in other countries to design for other societies, whom became another kind of aliens.

In our lands we see alien buildings built by aliens "architects and developers" building the future of our societies, being out of place.

We need to answer this question: Do we have any Building Materials or Building Technology company from the middle east?

I looked into the specifications of major projects and realized that %99.9 were Foreign companies.

So, lets try to think about building our own technology and manufacture our own products instead of competing for the largest or the longest and building the Sea.

From an out of place architecture to an out of place identities.

We shall not forget that the Arts (Architecture, interior, music, painting, etc) are reflections of the societies. Our societies didn't produce those buildings and they can't compete to produce them. We just, with our money, bought these alien designs. The "under construction" projects in the Arabic world "and not only the Gulf" are out of place, and we can't say that the architects failed to compete. They are part of the equation and local companies don't have that competative advantage. Filling the gap between the academic and profession is always important but not enough. We are losing our identity in The Arts because we are rejecting our identities and adopting the western capitalistic idiologies. The architecture in the Arabic world is becoming more and more "Out of Place," and will refelct this in the furture of our societies identity. An "Out of Identity, out of Place" societies.

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