UIA 2017 Seoul World Architects Congress

UIA 2017 Seoul World Architects Congress 1

P- 0815

The “Meta-Imaginary” Dubai Mall

Delarue, Henrique*1

1 Student, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Abstract Blessed, or cursed, by the largesse of the oil industry, Dubai has been developed as a fully constructed mirage. Its given condition—the desert—allows for the city to be apparently independent from any context, enabling it to fashion, without restrictions, its own interpretation of what it should be. Amidst the frenetic rate of building construction, changes in local lifestyle and the importation of foreign customs, Dubai’s historic architecture has been re-cast in new forms of traditional styles, a generalized reminder of the past, although detached from any specific chronology. Reflecting on texts by Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson, this article takes the Dubai Mall to be a duplicate of the simulacrum that is the whole of Dubai. In discussing how the Mall mirrors the postmodern condition of the city, it studies the fabrication of Dubai’s contemporary identity, in which representations of Western elements are combined with those of the traditional Arabian medina to establish a recognizable urban environment. Keywords: Dubai; postmodernism; city identity; simulacrum; historicism

1. Dubai and the Desert

As the lavish promises of the oil industry disseminated around the Persian Gulf, Dubai’s rulers have since actively decided to lure new inhabitants to the city. The former fishermen’s town hence underwent a process of modernization “that elsewhere […] required more than a century of work,” as Reisz, T. (2008) observes. This article investigates Dubai as a city concerned with the preservation of its heritage whilst being one that mainly developed in the transition between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By analyzing the Dubai Mall as an architecture that exemplifies the postmodern culture, which has contextualized Dubai’s growth, this study considers the building as a part of the city that comes to stand for the whole. The argument is supported by Frederic Jameson’s and Jean Baudrillard’s writings of “late capitalism” and Disneyland respectively. Their accounts of postmodernity provide ways of speculating on the significance of the Mall’s architecture as the design of an identity that illustrates the richness of the heritage in which it is located.

*Contact Author: Henrique Delarue, student, Pontifical

Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro Address: Praça Santos Dumont, 66, apartment 304, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, 22470-060. Tel: +55 21 98412-9185 e-mail: hcdelarue@gmail.com (The publisher will insert here: received, accepted)

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In order to understand how the city has grown as an image of the Emirati culture, firstly, its physical surroundings should be considered. Resting on the desert, Dubai posits its natural environment as a true tabula rasa, a no-place that has underpinned its rapid ascent to the metropolis that it is today. Built on pile foundations that render the instability of the ground irrelevant, the city negates the desert, but is dependent on it to be real. It can only be construed as Dubai because, like Las Vegas or Los Angeles, it came from “nowhere.” As Baudrillard, J. (1986) explains, the desert brings a “mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity, […] an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no reference-points.” The desert endlessly repeats itself; it fails to concoct any sense of space or direction; its scale is indeterminate. One cannot be psychologically bounded to the sand, for it offers nothing in return. If it is fertile ground, it is so only for a mirage, an image constructed from the desires of the imagination (Fig.1).

As in Disneyland, the credibility of the image is preserved insofar as there is no connection to the “real”

world. Theme parks are generally built behind visual obstacles, such as a mass of trees, becoming what Ito, T. (1999) notes as “a world in itself” (free translation). Around Dubai, the desert disentangles the city from all other possible contexts, removing any sense of comparative proportion. Dubai is free to assume any form it desires. New icons and re-presentations of its own historical architecture are key parts of this contrived fantasy. Perhaps the purest form of Dubai’s conceptualization is in Downtown Dubai, a twenty-first century mixed-use neighborhood of 500 acres. Around the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Boulevard, buildings emulating traditional Arabian design and high-rise towers look out together across an artificial lake. As the central piece, stands the Burj Khalifa, still—just—the world’s tallest building. It is as if each element is designed and positioned to draw attention to its neighbor in a carefully calculated miscellany (Fig.2). 2. The Dubai Mall

At the base of the Burj Khalifa, on an 85 acre site, lies the Dubai Mall, considered “the world’s largest and most-visited retail and entertainment destination” (The Dubai Mall, 2016). With 1,200 stores and a total floor area of approximately 550 thousand square meters (135 acres), the building’s size resets the scale for indoor environments. The vastness of the desert the city explores seems to be present here as well. For construction, the project was subdivided into thirty-seven buildings containing, in addition to the retail space itself, a souk, an aquarium, a cinema, an ice rink and two entertainment centers (Megastructures: Dubai Mega Mall, 2011). In its atria, themes ranging from Arabian settings to the night sky are explored (Fig.3). It is a place to immerse yourself in different architectural languages and programs, to spend a day, or possibly a weekend (if you are a guest at the Mall’s hotel), oblivious to the city outside.

Fig.1. View from Nad Al Sheba of the city’s skyline. Delarue, H. (2011).

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Fig.2. View of Downtown Dubai with the Old Town in the foreground. Delarue, H. (2009).

The Mall itself forms a quarter circle; it is framed at both ends by enclosed car parks and its curved façade opens onto the artificial Burj Lake. Pedestrian access is only possible on either of the longest façades, but neither is directly connected to a street. Even the fifteen meter wide stretch of pavement that separates the Mall from the Boulevard shows no pedestrian entrance. The Mall stands in the city like a wrapped present in front of a child—whatever is inside can be imagined, but not seen or touched.

Containing a considerable diversity of activities and a limited contact with the city, the Dubai Mall, like the

Westin Bonaventure Hotel, in Los Angeles, described by Jameson, F. (1991), “does not wish to be part of the city but rather its equivalent and replacement or substitute.” The visitor—let us call him or her the monad—leaves home to experience Dubai by entering another reality. He or she drives the car, disconnected from weather, smells, noise etc., and enters the Mall as if through a portal into dark space (the car park), where mysteriously glowing glass boxes entice him or her further inside. From outside, the Mall is nothing but an apparently immeasurable mass. Once inside, the architecture “expand [sic] our sensorium and our body to some new […] dimensions,” like Jameson, F. (1991) interprets the “new architecture” of postmodernity. The scale changes, the city is forgotten, and the monad is immersed in a fantastic endlessly proliferating scenario. The Mall has neither beginning nor end. Like a vast desert inside a box, it is an example of a “hyperspace,” an architecture that Jameson, F. (1991) characterizes as that which bewilders the monad and “transcending [sic] the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself.”

The Mall is a non-stop emitter of stimuli, targeting the monad with a continuous flow of information—fairs, fashion shows, dance presentations, prize draws and the European fashion seasons at the shopfront windows. In this ever-changing scenario, the Mall relies on technology to strengthen its effect, much like as Baudrillard, J. (1986) depicts Disneyland with its gadgets. Air-conditioning and electric lights ensure that the interior can have its own atmosphere independent from the weather and time outside. Escalators and mall taxis replace walking to ensure that participation in the spectacle is uninterrupted, as in a Disneyland ride. The movement is accentuated by LED panels displaying advertisements, abstract animations and movie trailers. In the Dubai Fountain, the technological artifice of the Mall comes to its climax. Streaming upwards in rapid spurts, synchronized with the music played from speakers arranged around the lake, the fountain mimics mechanically a human response to a song, dancing as if spontaneously. It is a trick in which the spectators participate as they forget about the technology behind it; for a moment (or indeed), it seems more moving to watch the machine than a human dancing.

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The Village (originally called “The Grove”) is an area within Dubai Mall that is literally open to the sky, though it can easily be air-conditioned once the retractable roof is closed (Fig.4). Its corridor-space resembles the shopping street of a market town with paved mosaic floor, fountains, streetlights and shopfront awnings. Members of the crowd, whether from Dubai or from elsewhere, are like tourists; they cannot completely belong to the scenario, but they can recognize it loosely as part of a notional “Dubai.” In Plato’s terms (cited in Jameson, 1991), The Village is a simulacrum, “the identical copy for which no original has ever existed.” The monad feels vaguely as if he or she is back in the city, but the experience is a rarefied, attenuated one. There are no clothes hanging outside the windows, no pigeons flying, and the architecture cannot be identified as any particular historic style. Nonetheless, it is precisely the feeling, the experience of the “city-ness” (as Jameson might call it), that matters here. The aim in The Village is to create “an outdoor community feel” (The Dubai Mall, 2016), a taste of a fantasized cultural context.

To complete and make convincible the image of a cultural identity, the past might be used as the basic

language of the sign, what Jameson, F. (1991) brings forward as “historicism,” “the play of random stylistic allusion.” Dubai Mall’s architecture makes use of this strategy both in the quasi-street of The Village, and in The Souk. In the latter, a traditional Arabian market has been transplanted into the building in the form of a labyrinth of carefully selected and luxurious goods. The Arabian architecture is simulated in decorative terms: arches, beams and domes are repeated without a structural function and have their shapes intensified by light effects (Fig.3). Jameson, F. (1991) notes that the “spatial logic of the simulacrum can […] have a momentous effect on what used to be historical time.” The simulated architecture is not a remnant solid memory, instead, it uses images and elements from the past that are redesigned and rendered a-temporal to engender a sense of déjà vu, a memory of the imaginary. The past is recreated from the present, like an alteration in a body’s DNA after its birth. It is in identifying the quality of a past lost in time (that Jameson identifies as “referent”) in the image that makes the architecture somewhat recognizable for the monad.

Vagueness of effect is the result also of the juxtaposition of themes in the Dubai Mall—a strategy different

from that of Disneyland, where transitional spaces softens the incompatibility of each “land.” In the Mall, there are no constants that establish what it really is. The fantastical nature of each themed area renders the rest of the building—the corridors and stretches of shopfront that are familiar in their very banality—also less real, more strange. As the different architectural languages are perceived as belonging to the same place, the monad begins to assimilate them into a dreamlike succession of half-remembered places. Even the DubaiDino, the fossil of a long-necked dinosaur, blends in as part of the decoration, having its own real historicity diluted in the Mall’s architectural assemblage.

Fig.3. The DubaiDino at The Souk Dome. Delarue, R. (2017).

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Fig.4. The Village. Delarue, R. (2017). 3. The Mall and Dubai

Baudrillard identifies Disneyland as an imaginary world in which the United States is disguised as a child’s fantasy. The emphatic artificiality of the park conceals the fact it is the very duplicate of the country itself, therefore making the country feel more “real.” The same could also be said of the Dubai Mall in relation to Dubai: it is a simulated environment where “all [Dubai’s] values are exalted” (adapted from Baudrillard, 1986). Because the visitor—the monad—is aware of the Mall’s inauthenticity, the rest of the city appears more convincing. But in Dubai itself, the scenic spectacle encapsulated in the Mall is likewise repeated, in a sort of “babushka sequence” of simulations.

Dubai as a whole is an example of Baudrillard’s “hyperreality,” a place where “the image has supplanted

reality” throughout to become more real than reality itself, as Leach, N. (1997) explains. In the Old Town area in Downtown Dubai, for example, or in the Madinat Jumeirah resort, the image of a historical city is made concrete in the form of simulated old Arabian settlements. Nevertheless, neither the parts nor the whole carry their original meanings or attempt to recreate the specificity of their historic models, that is, reality. Whilst the vernacular elements of Madinat Jumeirah have no function except as a decoration to declare “oldness”, the new Old Town is not actually conceived as a coherent settlement, a community. It is the pure effect of historicity that is at stake; the intention is to represent, in the architecture, the sign (or theme) of the Emirati culture. Consequently, in the general urban experience, the past as “referent,” writes Jameson, F. (1991) “finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether.” After every new reference to the past, it becomes harder to distinguish what is original from what is artificial, and all becomes Dubai. In this way, the genuinely old buildings still present in Bur Dubai (“Old Dubai” in Arabic) come to seem no more real than those around the city that mimic them, just as the actual Old Souk seems no more authentic than The Souk in the Dubai Mall, and just as the real skeleton that is the DubaiDino seems pure fantasy.

The Dubai City of the twenty-first century can be seen as a celebration of Dubai’s culture, old and new. In

this way, heritage and consumption are merged. Copies of ancient houses sit next to high-rise towers, both often functioning as 5-star hotels. Both the urban form and the lifestyle are much more flamboyant than any original they might once have emulated. It is in this theatrical scenario, that the monad is required to perform. According to the World Migration Report of 2015, immigrants form approximately 83% of the population. Immigrants, then, are both the actors and the stage hands, those that indulge in extravaganza and the workers that turn the dream into reality. They are the characters the spectacle needs in order to be fashioned

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and brought alive, importing with them new tastes, new costumes, new desires. In Dubai, brands from overseas open their stores next to Arab sellers; schools, clinics and restaurants of all kinds ensure that people can simulate their lifestyles from elsewhere. Of course, the stores and services are also directed to the Emirati population, for whom local and foreign names come to seem equal, the Western goods as pleasing and tempting as the Arab ones. Dubai ends up strangely familiar to all, whatever their origin.

The Dubai Mall, as a simulacrum within Dubai, is its “meta-imaginary.” A synthesis of Dubai condensed

into one building; its architecture mirrors and thus helps to explain the city in which it is inserted. Its exterior walls isolate the interior of the building from its context, precluding any direct comparison, rather as the desert isolates Dubai as a whole at the urban scale. The sense of place, whether inside the Mall or in the city, derives from the easily recognizable architectural language, stripped of specific meaning but relying instead on effect. The monad-visitor (for all inhabitants are visitors in the Dubai-experience) is familiar with the effect the setting reproduces and is fully aware that its identity is sustained by artifice. Dubai’s copies, whether of the past, of other urban environments, or of imagination itself, do not point towards any specific original; they proliferate to create a new hyperreality, a place defined by simulacra. Dubai’s new identity is concerned not simply with the consumerism cultivated in shopping malls, the consumption of things; it is concerned with the consumption of images. Thus, it becomes perhaps a perfect demonstration of our contemporary culture (much like as Jameson notes about Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle). If Disneyland represents the United States, thus rendering the country more real, it is as if Dubai represents the world, so extravagantly that we fail to see that it is our culture itself that is made more real. Perhaps, in visiting and living Dubai, we are reaching the essence of our contemporary selves. References 1) Baudrillard, J. (1986) America. Translated by C. Turner, 1988. London: Verso, pp. 59-60, 123-125.

2) Baudrillard, J. (1981) Simulacra and Simulations. Translated by S. F. Glaser, 1984. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, pp. 12-13.

3) Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, pp. 2-54.

4) Leach, N. ed. (1997) Rethinking Architecture: a Reader in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, p.209.

5) International Organization for Migration (2015). World Migration Report 2015. [online] Available at: http://publications.iom.int/system/

files/wmr2015_en.pdf [Accessed 05 February 2017].

6) Ito, T. (1999) Arquitectura de Límites Difusos. Translated from English by M. Puente, 2006. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, pp. 14-15.

7) Megastructures: Dubai Mega Mall (2011). [film] Executive producer: A. Ong. United States of America: National Geographic Channel.

8) Reisz, T. (2008) As a Matter of Fact, The Legend of Dubai. Log, [online] 13/14, pp. 127-129. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765238

[Accessed 31 January 2017].

9) The Dubai Mall (2016). About the Dubai Mall. [online] Emaar Malls. Available at: https://thedubaimall.com/en/about-us/

about-the-dubai-mall [Accessed 31 January 2017].

All images have been reproduced with the permission of each of the respective authors.