Global Art Forum 10, The Future was Dubai.
In 1972, George Candilis, a collaborator of Le Corbusier, created a masterplan for Dubai, a year after the formation of the UAE. How much did proposals such as ‘Dubai Tower’ and the Deira corniche follow Le Corbusier’s maxim, that ‘the materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel and cement; in that order and that hierarchy’? From the modernist ideals of John Harris to the work of Greek architect Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis, who also planned the cities of Detroit and Islamabad, Rashid Bin Shabib presented a visual history of the implied, unrealised and jettisoned ambitions of Dubai’s masterplans.