Yoni, Phallus and Globalism

Every Friday morning I get the new edition of World Architecture News, the Maxim of online architectural journalism. You can always count on getting the latest scoop on the latest sexy high-tech building projects around the globe. It's utterly ridiculous eye-candy, but fascinating to those of us who like to jerk off to Megastructures on the National Geographic Channel. Usually I just skim over the articles and look at the pretty pictures of these outlandish designs while preparing for the daily grind of change orders and fire separation wall details.

The only thing that struck me as odd was the absence this week of something wacky going up in Dubai. These days, if you want outrageously expensive and flamboyant architecture, screw Vegas, look to Dubai. Thinking I must have missed something I scrolled down the page and found this. Dubbed "The eye of Dubai" this new offshore intermodal transportation hub with it's open pulsating nerve center and curved symetrical "lips" reminds me more of a different body organ.

For some reason, I was then inspired to check on the progress of what promises to be tallest freestanding structure of any kind, Burj Dubai, going up a few kilometers away. I'd heard about the brutal conditions in which the construction workers toil, and kind of wondered about the wisdom of building such a technically challenging structure with an overworked and maltreated labor force. Sure enough, the first hit on my Google search turned up a story from March of last year about the strike at the tower site and the new airport which forced the rulers of the emirate to finally legalize unions. Further reading about the plight of these Indian and Southeast Asian workers makes the plight of a Mexican day laborer look downright cushy.

The name of the construction company on the Burj Dubai project also caught my eye: Al Naboodah Laing O'Rourke, you just can't get much more global than that. One more sign that the nation-state model is past it's prime, even in a part of the world where the concept never really took hold in the first place.