Hani Rashid has asked me to co-teach a design studio on Dubai at Columbia. We’re on the verge of some major projects there and will be using the studio as a laboratory to explore Dubai’s imagined but untapped architectural potential.

The studio brief follows:

Mega Brand Edge City | Dubai
Columbia GSAPP
Advanced Studio VI
Spring 2006
Hani Rashid and Alexander Pincus
Dubai is a place of extremes, from it’s climate and physical context, to it’s economic and geopolitical strategies to it’s urban infrastructure and architecture. Here limits are constantly being tested and surpassed, producing a city that today is subject to a darwinian trajectory. Dubai is either quickly becoming one of the most extraordinary and evolved cities on the planet, or a travesty of extravagance and excess, the potential result of both misguided vision and ambitious yet flawed enterprise.