Commercial Project – Convention Center for Dubai

January 24, 2012, 3:27 am
Filed under: Commercial Work

Hello again web viewers. I got ambitious and decided to design on a much larger scale. I wanted to design something very modern and trendy in a money no object environment. The obvious location was Dubai, where money grows on trees and no project is too extravagant. Above you see a rendering that includes a resort hotel, a convention center, a parking garage, a maglev rail line and terminal, even a rotating restaurant in the sky with its own rooftop helipad. As I developed this urban environment I began to feel like the architect in Inception who created all of the virtual worlds that the dream extraction team migrated through. It was just like playing SimCity.

The project’s architecture has an Arabian feel to it with sculptural elements that evoke a cobra while the larger buildings could be seen to resemble the Egyptian Sphinx. Others might see snails moving through the sand. To each his own. Projects by both Mies and Le Corbusier inspired the convention center’s spacial layout, but the actual design is pure randomness. After the fact I realized that the support piers for the convention center resembled the ill-fated “Hands of Victory” sculpture found in Baghdad, Iraq. That sculpture was originally commissioned by the late Saddam Hussein and was destroyed in the war and later rebuilt by US occupation forces.