Dubai: a city as a capriccio

Abstract

Dubai is a fascinating young city projected to the future. Its skyline offers nowadays a wide panorama of architectural works, from hi-scale landscape interventions to small size projects, designed by some of the most renowned world-famous architects. Those projects aim at a radical change of the urban landscape, attempting to reconnect a built environment today fragmented by the bursting expansion of recent times. The Essay talk about the proper perception of a peculiar “collage city” like Dubai, in an analogous but inverted manner in the rapport between reality and representation, generate an idea of city that puts the visitor in a condition of surreal estrangement, where any kind of juxtaposition is possible and where normality is given by the single exceptional nature of each perceived object. The overall reversal of sense that we find between the built city of Dubai and the idea of pictorial “capriccio” is the same reversal that we may find if we may confront it to any stratified “palimpsest” city.