Building Identity

In Fall 2019, the UAE Embassy and Meridian International Center brought a delegation of 13 architectural photographers, journalists, and curators to the United Arab Emirates. Only one of us had been to the Emirates before, and by all accounts, we had little idea what to expect outside of the images we had all seen in publications, television, and social media.

The trip was a whirlwind, our itinerary focusing primarily on Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, and a few of their outskirts. Our garrulous, kinetic group—pointing long lenses in all directions and often scurrying away from our patient guides—explored every type of place imaginable: broad boulevards and winding alleys; waterfronts and desert oases; ancient markets and shiny new malls; major museums and scrappy galleries; gleaming new airports and midcentury bus stations; mosques, forts, hotels, and skyscrapers. We chatted with world-famous artists and architects, received walking tours from urban and architectural experts, and gained entrée into both the newest and oldest built treasures in the region. In this effusion of experience, we were opening our eyes to a new urban realm, a new culture, and a new way of life. Beyond what we could even see, we were absorbing layer after layer of knowledge and meaning, shifting our view of the region from one dimension to three.  

The images in this exhibition are a vivid, living document of this experience. They indeed capture and accentuate the expansive, exceptionally rapid pace of development in the UAE: the rows of towering glass and steel skyscrapers, the freshly minted neighborhoods, the forms that stretch into infinity, resembling trembling abstractions, mirages, and natural forms. Through skillful, personal craft, these shots bring the remarkable thrust toward the future into clearer, realer view: the sunlight glinting off angled glass as the day comes to a close; mirror glass reflecting an errant cloud. The surreal scale of supertall towers multiplying; the feeling of a building bending and curving around you. The awe-inspiring process of a construction being pieced together; new structures and cities being willed into being.

But this selection of images—a true reflection of our experience— goes so much deeper. Deeper than we expected, and deeper than we were even conscious of during the trip. They reveal threads of building, history, and culture that have long been overlooked or oversimplified in the glorification, and commodification, of today’s modernity. Midcentury neighborhoods—many endangered by the continuing tide of progress— sharing their futuristic forms and unconventional structural devices; drawing on cultural traditions, but translating them into new shapes, materials, and living concepts. A vegetable market protected from the sun both by deep Arabesque arches and fan-fold canopies. A bus station translated through the futuristic, plastic thrust of space-age Modernism. The thick edge of a balcony shielding the sun like an abaya; a void peeking through like the bright eyes behind a burka. Evidence of a visionary spirit existing well before the current wave of building: historic forts, with their high blond stone walls; their play of geometric light. Sinuous mosques, their minarets punctuating the sky; their ornament forming a dazzling barrage of abstract shapes. Ancient homes and desert palaces hiding in plain sight, changing with the day as the sun moves and their surfaces warm and cool; employing what were once new technologies like canals and cisterns. The familiar markets and hustle lining the Dubai Creek, a center of trade long before any of these skyscrapers started to grow out of the ground.

And there are clear glimpses of the Emirates’ fascinating, often contradictory intersections of time, culture, and form. New skyscrapers and cultural institutions imbedded with ancient motifs or echoes of the fractured landscape. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, employing some of the world’s most sophisticated engineering to capture the dappled light and partial enclosure of a Bedouin village. The radiating buttresses of the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa, inspired by the most delicate of desert flowers, the Spider Lily. The Museum of the Future, a gleaming ovoid wrapped in a three-dimensional skin of Arabic calligraphy. Glass onion domes surrounding the Sheik Zayed Mosque; their sacred, interlocking geometries etched into thousands of blazing LED lights. New museums along the Dubai Creek, their layouts and building techniques rejuvenating old traditions, dedicated to rediscovering a past that has been largely forgotten. Built ancestors and descendants, merging and speaking through a new language of construction.

The depth, vision, and variety of these photographs—and the accompanying text by the trip’s writers, curators, and guides— is a reflection of our process, our unpacking. We are still unearthing stratum after stratum of texture and meaning.  Absorbing the lessons; seeing things we didn’t see before.  All are evidence of a rich, exceptionally complex reality that we were lucky enough to encounter, absorb, and, through the help of a skillful team and a phalanx of experts, not to mention much discussion and reflection, share with some degree of sophistication. It’s a process that’s ongoing. We continue to decode, through images and language. Understanding comes in layers and in waves. It never stops.

Such layers, usually obscured and flattened by single-toned narratives; by the noise and dissonance of our media and our preconceptions, come to life in these words and pictures. They speak to a need to connect, to understand, to absorb and feel. They remind us that everything is deeper than we realize; for visitors, of course, but also for people living in a place. Seeing what we think we know in a new, more nuanced and sympathetic way. Overcoming our differences, our silos, our prejudices. It’s hard to think of a time when this has been more important than right now.

Written by Sam Lubell