Dubai
In a recent article I have published a year ago (Bidoun Magazine and katodrytis.com) I had suggested that Dubai is “The emerging Prototype City of the 21st century: prosthetic oases overland and water” and that Dubai is perhaps becoming architecturally the ultimate fantasy city. Dubai’s current condition is an accelerated form of urbanism, consumable, spectacular, diagrammatic, telegenic (as opposed to photogenic), an escapism from the daily banality, a constructed leisure-land, exaggerated familiarity and constructed by Photoshop and other digital media as an iconography of over-dramatization. As such, this is a unique urban condition. A surrealist machine of self-stylization and fantasy, Dubai is both an experiment and a success.
Fantasy
Architectural fantasies link the past with the present and future. They inform the present with a sense of the past and also give a glimpse of the future. Both the fantastic and the visionary suggest mental pictures produced by the imagination. They suggest unusual perception into worlds we cannot visit everyday, except through the visual dramatization of the imaginative environment. They depict grandiose scale using aerial photography and vista renderings, which are extravagant, flamboyant, excessive, disproportionate, and over-elaborate. Fantasy is a deliberate exercise to amaze and amuse. Visionary perception is usually applied to designs of great scale. The Italian Futurist architect Antonio Sant‘Elia noted: “We must invent and rebuild the futurists city like an immerse shipyard, mobile and dynamic.” Visionary architecture is the name given to architecture of the work of: Étienne-Louis Boullée, Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Antonio Sant’Elia / Futurism, Constructivism, Buckminster Fuller Archigram, Archizoom and Superstudio.
Digital Media
If the 20th century film industry became the main dream-tool for fantasy, e.g. in films such as Metropolis and Blade Runner, with scenes of melodrama, social imperfection, urban disintegration and polemical, then the 21st century is all about digital media and animation, a new form of iconography, making architecture better and cleaner than reality. This is an accelerated form of iconography. The 21st century architectural practice has diminished the gap between visionary and mediocre: now all looks fantastic. Digital technology enables new ways of imaging and imagining. The imagery of the unbuilt architecture has become more sophisticated, resembling the “true” photographic image. The imagery is always prescriptive. Like advertising, in a hyper-consumer culture the selling of unbuilt buildings as a “total lifestyle experience.” What this reveals is how the built environment we inhabit is just the residue of a much greater imaginative world.
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