Part of Behind the Blueprints series of interviews with architects and urban influencers.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Imagine a public park and an observation deck towering 250 meters above Dubai’s skyscrapers, where visitors rocket up elevators in giant sunshine-shaped pillars. This is Beirut-based Lebanese artist Nadim Karam’s “The Cloud,” a 13-year project, along with an accompanying exhibition “99 Objects Possible to Find on a Cloud” at Ayyam gallery, Al Quoz until November 28.
In an interview with Gulf News, he says:
You talk about creating urban art to help cities dream. What does that mean?
I feel that city life is so fast-paced, mechanical and restrictive, that we have no time to be joyful or “to dream”. My urban toys are “dream catalysts” that stir things up and create some anarchy in the monotonous routine and rigid social and political systems imposed on us, inviting people to pause, look at the stories, interact with them and enjoy some moments of dreaming by creating new narratives. I believe that a city can dream when there is an accumulation of many such “moments of dreams” or ephemeral happenings and situations that I call “hapsitus”, created by different artists.
How do you design urban art for a specific city?
The aim is to go deep into the essence of a city, into the memory of the place and inject stories or moments of fantasy in it through works of art that have some relationship with the city’s culture, history and specific identity and evoke collective memory. But it is also important to bring something new and foreign to the city.
I want my stories to fuse with the existing stories and melt into the context of the city and enrich it. I want to create something that humanizes the city by giving it a soul and life. Although I use building materials such as steel in my “urban toys”, they are not intimidating. I make them interactive by using highly polished surfaces that reflect everything around them, and by filling them with fantasy characters that ignite the imagination. […]
Every resident would be able to say I want to go up to the cloud, and get into the elevators and go up to the gardens and water pavilions and enjoy a nice view of Dubai. As a public platform in the sky, “The Cloud” embodies the essence of Dubai, while also being an antithesis to what is happening in the city.
I think this was from an article on Architects.org, which is no longer up:
“On the edge is a fisherman fishing skyscrapers, and on the ground are buildings to come, like the museums on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, waiting to be fished.”
When asked if that meant there would be more room for organic neighborhood growth, or if the fisherman was stuck in a Sisyphean task of always needing more skyscrapers, Karam demurred. “It’s a critique and putting together two parallel worlds,” he said. “On the Cloud, anyone can be higher than the penthouse.”
Urban Fabric 