Emirates fantasy continues to crash
June 4th, 2009 | by Simon |One of my favorite architectural blogs brings us news of serious concern over human rights abuses in Abu Dhabi, involving some of the world’s leading “starchitects”:
http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/darkening-dubai/
This only adds to my qualms about the whole idea of stardom in architecture – not only is crap often purveyed as art under the cover of a famous name (see for example Foster’s Russian exploits), but the rush to maintain media exposure has also resulted in a lack of sensitivity to the human aspect of architecture that I would ascribe largely to the corporate dimension of the starchitects themselves. “Zaha” or “Gehry” are not really flesh-and-bone Zaha Hadid or Frank Gehry, they’re well-branded but in fact faceless multinational corporations that have more in common with IBM or Exxon than with the likes of Wright, Le Corbusier or Mies.
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