Burj Dubai: mais um templo sem alma do capitalismo global

 (Foto: "The Shadow of the Burj" por Ali Haider/EPA,The Guardian Newspaper, @

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2010/jan/04/burj-dubai-unveiled)
É sem dúvida uma das notícias do dia, a inauguração do edifício mais alto do mundo, com 818m e 162 andares, que vem destronar o Taipei 101 (Taiwan).

Vale a pena espreitar a cobertura que o The Guardian faz do acontecimento, e deste novo landmark da arquitectura moderna...

Artigo "Burj Dubai is the height of architecture – just don't look down" The world's tallest building may be a triumph of beauty and ambition, but the soulless cityscape surrounding it is another matter (por Steve Rose). Para ler o artigo na íntegra clicar aqui.

" (...) In 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled a scheme for an elegantly preposterous mile-high skyscraper for Chicago, safe in the knowledge that he'd never have to figure out how to build it. It was undoubtedly an influence on the Burj Dubai. It even had a similar triangular structure. But Wright's intentions with his mile-high skyscraper were to create a concentrated human habitat, the better to halt Chicago's unstoppable urban sprawl, and free up ground space for parks, nature and leisure. 

The Burj Dubai, by contrast, has become the tentpole for several more acres of anonymous, soulless, energy-hungry cityscape. You can apparently see for 60 miles from the top, but when you look down, the immediate landscape is the same schematic real-estate tat you see everywhere else in Dubai: vast shopping malls, bland office towers, sprawling residential developments semi-themed to resemble "traditional" Arabian villages, outsized ornamental fountains. The Burj Dubai might be a triumph vertically, but what about the horizontal?"

 Galeria de Fotos do edifício ("Gallery: From Foundations to Finished Product") Clicar aqui.

Curto vídeo com uma vista aérea aqui.