The interior design, too, reeks of reckless expenditure. "Anything that looks like gold is gold," says a member of the public relations team, waving vaguely at some of the hotel’s 21,000 square feet of 22-carat leaf. In the lobby, a parade of leather-backed sofas with checked velvet cushions and striped silk bolsters marches across the multicolored curlicues of the carpet towards fish tanks bigger than the guest rooms of a lesser hotel. Gilt vases hold impenetrable forests of fleshy tropical flowers above which hover whole flocks of birds of paradise. Even the cocktails come with succulent slices of fruit cantilevered out over the rim of the glass on an elaborate gantry of straws and toothpicks.
 

One floor below, the "undersea" restaurant boasts a simulated submarine ride. The bed in the royal suite rotates shudderingly at the touch of a button. Even the workaday logistics of staying at a hotel have been turned on their head in an effort to accentuate the Burj al Arab’s distinctiveness. There are no check-in desks or cashiers—the staff comes to you. All the suites contain butler’s rooms with separate entrances, so that food can be warmed up, champagne chilled and shirts pressed without the guest even knowing. Money, although plastered all over the walls and spent in enormous quantities between them, must never be seen, for fear that grubby bank notes might remind guests of the drab realities of everyday life.

The irony of all this is that Dubai—the Burj al Arab aside—is a very drab place. The endless vista from the panoramic bar consists of flat desert scrub punctuated by unfinished highways. The climate is so inhospitable that a special new protective coating had to be found to stop the desert grit from literally eating the windows away. Although the city is billed as a beach resort, summer temperatures rise as high as 130 degrees—enough to send even the most devoted sun-worshipers scurrying indoors. It is not even a good place to build: The Burj al Arab rests, poetically enough, on sand. The hundreds of cement piles that reach 130 feet under the seabed to anchor the foundations are held in place not by bedrock, but by friction. In other words, the load is not focused at the base of each piling, says structural engineer Martin Halford, but absorbed along its length by the loosely cemented sand and silt around it.

Perhaps this ritzy haven from Arabia’s sandstorms does serve as a civic symbol of sorts, although not in the sense Sheikh Rashid imagined. Both the hotel and the city, after all, are monuments to the triumph of money over practicality. Both elevate style over substance. Above all, both were designed from the top down, working backwards from a desired image to its physical incarnation.

Dubai is a city composed of symbols of itself. Just a few miles up the road from the Burj al Arab, Sheikh Rashid has built a pair of towers (including the world’s tenth-tallest building) as "a highly visible statement of the region’s corporate success." In the same development as the Burj stands another hotel, shaped like a breaking wave "to represent Dubai’s seafaring heritage," a conference center, decked out like one of the city’s traditional dhow boats, and a water park, based on the theme of Sindbad the Sailor, the Gulf’s most famous fictional son. The overall effect is more of a film set than a city. There is an impressive enough row of tall buildings, and plenty of extras enacting scenes of ordinary life within them, but just outside the frame lies trackless desert in place of normal urban fabric. Dubai has built itself the body of a city without the soul. The yachts which inspired the Burj al Arab remain in Saint Tropez—and it will take more than a few grandiose construction projects to lure them away.

Source: www.architecturemag.com