New architecture in Abu Dhabi

The UAE will soon be home to the Guggenheim museum, the Performing Arts Centre, the Maritime Museum and the Louvre.

As Pritzker Prize winning starchitects like Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel set their sights (and blueprints) on Abu Dhabi, Romita Ray examines the nature of their contribution to our changing skyline and asks whether importing culture as a brand can really be a good thing.

The great dunes of the desert are shifting. Ski in Dubai and pop into the Avalanche Café for some Canadian smoked salmon.

Far from David Lean's vision of a camel-trotting peninsula where British spies named "T. E. Lawrence" once lurked about, Arabia seems to have become the land of dreams again.

Just cast a quick glance at the ever-growing, glittering coastline of Dubai. It doesn't take too long to realise that the world's best architects are competing to build cathedrals in the sky.

But the dunes have been shifting for millennia. While some may be surprised that green grass and powdery snow can appear on the face of sand, technology is no stranger for denizens of the desert. Look at the dhow.

It has been navigating the seas for centuries. By the medieval period, its triangular lateen sail revolutionised shipbuilding, allowing sailors to sail closer to the wind than they had before.

And today, its billowing sail has been immortalised in the stunning concrete and glass construction of the Burj Al Arab towering over the Arabian Gulf.

Where art and technology meet

The alliance between art, design and technology can be formidable. For it can change the way we look at the world. It can even change how we look at ourselves.

Take for instance, the Taj Mahal. An exquisite piece of engineering that still leaves its spectator breathless, this tomb has been branded and advertised like no other building.

The inspiration for a historic luxury hotel that overlooks the Arabian Sea, its name was also adopted by a famous Blues musician.

Who would have thought the Taj Mahal was hip to the jive? Mr Trump couldn't escape its allure either when he built a casino in Atlantic City.

Never mind the variety of products it has promoted - fine chocolate, golf courses, even a steaming cup of tea. But at the end of the day, the Taj remains a veil of white marble nestled in aromatic gardens reminding us of the power of love and loss.

Architecture moves people. It shelters us, guides our paths of traffic, fools us into believing we are in Paris when in fact we are wandering around Nevada, and transports us above the clouds in Kuala Lumpur.

Great buildings give us pause because they are great works of art and design. They strike at the very core of who we are, creatures in search of safety yet yearning for that precious glimpse of beauty.

The wise grand daddy of the Prairie School of Architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright once reflected that "all fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable."

So what is it about the burgeoning skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai that are so "valuable"? "How about a cool $520 million?" reported a New York Times article on the Louvre Abu Dhabi. And that's the price tag just for the name. Sorry to disappoint Mr Wright. It is also about money.

Selling culture
The hullabaloo created in France about one of its national treasures being franchised in the name of globalisation is priceless. I am not entirely convinced by the wagging fingers. If that great monument to love, the one and only Taj Mahal can be branded, why not the grand old Louvre?

Come to think of it, French starchitect Jean Nouvel's futuristic design for the Louvre Abu Dhabi may just be what the doctor ordered.

It gives the Louvre a certain joie de vivre, a much needed makeover from its Mona Lisa days. I say, let's give the Louvre a chance.

It is well known among curators that many museum treasures are consigned to storage. In fact, most of us get to see only a fraction of a museum's collection when strolling through the corridors of the world's most venerated institutions.

Here is a terrific way to bring them out of hiding even if an expensive price tag is attached. Somebody else is paying the bill.

So why the fuss?

News about the reported $1.3 million Louvre Abu Dhabi deal sealed between the French culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and the chairman of Abu Dhabi's Tourism Authority, Shaikh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, flew around the globe.

"Il faut acter, hélas, la création du Louvre-Abu Dhabi," lamented one disappointed French observer, echoing the sentiments of many.

The collections of the Louvre are indeed beloved treasures. "Renting" them out seems abhorrent to the lofty idea of museums being temples of high culture. And like all temples, the Louvre is well guarded. But this lands us on a slippery slope.

Take any major museum in the western world. Dig deep into the provenance of their collections and you may be surprised to discover how some of their "treasures" were acquired.

Dishonourable acquisitions?

The Greeks have been agitating for years for the Parthenon marbles to be returned. All because British aristocrat and diplomat Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, helped himself to the marble sculptures from the Parthenon for several years starting in 1801.

Less controversial today but no less shameful is the scramble for Egyptian antiquities at the end of the 18th century, in the wake of Napoleon's Egyptian campaigns.

Monuments were carted off to Paris, most famously the obelisk from Luxor that was propped up in the Place de la Concorde in 1836 before a cheering crowd of over 200,000 spectators and the French king.

The noble goals of archaeology to gather knowledge about different cultures and to "rescue" the past, have long disguised the unpleasant reality of loot and imperial ambition. So let us not get too cross about parceling out works of art far from home. A much heavier price has been paid already.

Jean Nouvel and the Louvre
The advertising wizard David Ogilvy once said, "any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand".

Nothing can be more challenging than creating Brand Louvre in the Arabian Gulf. This is not about selling a cheeseburger for a $1.99 beneath the Golden Arches.

It is about making sure people recognise the Golden Arches. So the Louvre Abu Dhabi needs its shrine, its very own set of Golden Arches.

And for that, we have the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate Jean Nouvel who has imagined a floating 24,000 square metre dome on Saadiyat Island.

Inspired by the ethereal effect of sunlight transformed into translucent lace through lattice screens, a hallmark of Islamic architecture, Nouvel's web-patterned dome appears at first glance to be a futuristic creation.

But it pays homage as well to a rich and complex heritage of design and architecture that has had a powerful global presence for centuries. Islamic art and design changed the face of Granada. It helped shape the famous façade of the Doge's Palace in Venice.

Travel eastwards and we have the elegant Bibi Khanum Mosque in Samarkand and the beautiful Shalimar gardens in Kashmir.

Clearly, Nouvel has a tough job ahead of him. He has to live up to a tradition that has given the world innovative design and great engineering. And all the while, he has to make his own mark.

Zaha Hadid and the Performing Arts Centre
Which brings to mind the Iraq-born Zaha Hadid who has been charting fresh directions in architecture and design for nearly three decades.

The chosen architect for the Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre, a new cultural institution that will also occupy Saadiyat Island, Hadid is the cutting edge of contemporary Islamic architecture.

Not because she is a Muslim woman. Not because she shies away from the by-now stereotypical domes and tiles. But because she is a bold visionary who creates new and unexpected spaces for old and familiar places, even at the risk of raising an eyebrow or two.

Not unlike Coco Chanel who did the same for fashion. And whose iconic quilted bag from 1955 was at the heart of Hadid's clever design for a mobile art pavilion commissioned by Karl Lagerfeld.

Let's pause here for a second. How many architects or fashion designers can mix together handbags and buildings? That's enough proof of brilliance.

No surprise then that Hadid is the only woman to win a Pritzker Architecture Prize, an award she bagged in 2004 (for those unfamiliar with architectural mumbo jumbo, the Pritzker is like the Nobel Prize for architecture).

She can lay claim, to name just a handful of spaces, a ski jump, a bridge, a tram station, an art museum and now, a cluster of performance spaces.

In short, she is a member of the very small and very exclusive circle of starchitects. Like Nouvel, she approaches her design with a keen eye for organic forms and fluid lines.

The performance spaces, she explained at a press conference in Abu Dhabi, "spring from the structure like fruits on a vine and face westward, toward the water". The ornamental borders of a Persian manuscript illumination meet the Arabian Gulf.

One of Hadid's design ideas depicts a theatre floating above the sea, its ceiling an abstract web of sprawling windows through which sky and water mingle.

The entire complex hovers on the shoreline as if it were rising from the sea, or returning to it. It has been compared to "the interior of a bone" and to "a dragonfly". But the dhow is never too far away.

Frank Gehry and the Guggenheim
Enter the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which will operate the Performing Arts Centre on behalf of the Tourism Development and Investment Company of Abu Dhabi.

Hadid's cultural cluster will rub shoulders with Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, slated to be the world's largest Guggenheim at a whopping 30,000 square metres.

Long before the hullabaloo about Brand Louvre, the Guggenheim has been planting its presence in all sorts of international venues under the Guggenheim banner. New York City, Venice, Bilbao, Berlin and Las Vegas.

Hadid was even commissioned to design the proposed Guggenheim Museum in Taichung, Taiwan. More recently, she won the competition to create a Guggenheim for its latest outpost in Vilnius, Lithuania.

While her dynamic design for Abu Dhabi sweeps into the sea spilling just over the water's edge, Gehry's resembles a pile of cones and cubes that seem to sway as if they were riding the crest of a wave. In his own words, he wants "to play off the blue water and the colour of the sand and sky and sun".

The observation may seem predictable and even a bit Lawrence-of-Arabia-ish. But it strikes at the core of what all the starchitects poised to shape Abu Dhabi into a cultural hothouse, are doing. Playing with sand and surf. And with the infinite expanse of blue sky that stretches over the Gulf.

But it is neither the Louvre Abu Dhabi, nor the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi that best evokes the stark desert beauty of the Arabian peninsula. Nor is it the Performing Arts Centre.

Instead, we have to turn to fish. Japanese starchitect Tadao Ando's Maritime Museum bows to the creatures of the deep blue sea.

More specifically, it bows to the dhow. While the Burj Al Arab pierces the sky, Ando's design works horizontally, emphasizing the force of the wind as it fills the curve of a billowing sail.

Suspended in a vast water court, its ship-like interior with floating decks and ramps will usher the visitor into a quiet aquatic world where the works of art are nature's treasures.

Three generations of Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates have been gathered for Abu Dhabi's transformation. Frank Gehry (1989), Tadao Ando (1995), Hadid (2004) and Nouvel (2008).

To put this into perspective, imagine Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Marie Curie and Masatoshi Koshiba designing an Institute of Physics. Not bad. And pretty cosmopolitan too, I may add.