Architecture & Urbanism
How Dubai was drawn - towers, wind towers, masterplans and the space between them.
Architecture & Urbanism
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About Architecture & Urbanism
No other city has built this much, this fast, this recently. Almost everything you can see from Sheikh Zayed Road was constructed inside a single lifetime, and much of it inside a single generation. That makes Dubai an unusually legible case study: the decisions are recent enough to trace, and the people who made them are mostly still working.
This section takes the buildings seriously as buildings. We look at how the Burj Khalifa's buttressed core solved a wind problem before it solved a height problem, why the Burj Al Arab sits on a man-made island, what the barjeel wind towers of the old quarters actually did before air conditioning, and how the palm and world islands were dredged. We also cover the work that never makes the postcards - district cooling, the metro, labour accommodation, the drainage that keeps a desert city from flooding when it does rain.
Urbanism is the other half. We write about masterplans and what happens between the towers: whether a street is walkable in August, how superblocks and service roads shape who meets whom, why the free-zone map produced the density it did, and what the current push toward shade, transit and the twenty-minute city will actually change. The aim is to explain the mechanism, not to rank the skyline.