Blue Crystal : A Prodigy in Dubai

Yeah that might be true that Frank Lloyd Wright's building that you mentioned may be bad design. But in a huge Japanese earthquake, his Imperial Hotel was the only building in the rubble left undamaged. He must have done something right.

must come down! haha

Since they weren't built by Jewish slaves, I fail to see the relevance.

I thought they were... my sources of information could be wrong. The Pharaohs?

Do tell me who build it and how you know this?

Does my probable ignorance, by any chance, diminish my point about slave labor and the environment? (source: original attached article)

Since the skyscrapers in Dubai are also not built with slaves, jewish or otherwise, and show a recent drive toward greener architecture, I still fail to see the relevance.

These buildings are designed in such a way that engineering solutions, materials, technologies and construction techniques need to be developed on demand. This would be brilliant in and of itself even without the ancillary benefits in terms of landmark architecture.

This story, like the Chinese mice made from skin, the German arm transplant, and the DNA lightbulbs is a testament to ingenuity.

I agree actually ( like I said before)

I really love watching / learning about human ingenuity ( personally love architecture too)..

Business men who build these structures in Dubai... let's stick to facts rather than our opinions...the artical explains better - did you read it? - here I'll show you what I mean

"The wide, beneficent face of Sheikh Mohammed - the absolute ruler of Dubai - smiles down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Saunders. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world - a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.

But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the Middle East. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the sky-line, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions - like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in a thousand days on its own artificial island, where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun, and more like Iceland in the desert.

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neoliberal globalized world that may be crashing - at last - into the sands......."

"III Hidden in plain view

There are three very different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang - but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their shining sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were delivered back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like microwaves in the desert heat. You see them sweating like sponges being slowly wrung out.

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings that look like multi-storey car-parks. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means 'City of Gold.' In the first camp I stop at - rivven with the smell of sewage and sweat - the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24 year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realize it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation and food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2300) for the work visa - a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy.....

"So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working fourteen hour days in the desert-heat - where Western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees - for 500 durhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home - his son, daughter, wife and parents - were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here - and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.

He shows me his room. It is a tiny poky concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds where he lives with eleven other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cell-phone. The room stinks of shit because the toilets in the corner of the camp - holes in the ground - are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.

The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink," he says.

The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat - it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer."

He is currently working on the 67th floor of a building, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor.

Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. "Here, nobody shows your anger. You can't. You get put in jail, then deported." Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-canons and blasted them out and back to work. The "ring-leaders" were imprisoned. I try a different question: does Sohinal regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. "How can we think about that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets..." He lets the sentence trail off. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by adding: "I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings."

Since the credit crunch, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison."

This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are supposed to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat - but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one...."

"Sahinal could well die out here. A British man who used to work on construction projects told me: "There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.

At night, in the dusk, I sit in the camp with Sohinal and his friends as they scrape together what they have left to buy a cheap bottle of spirits. They down it in one ferocious gulp. "It helps you to feel numb", Sohinal says through a stinging throat. In the distance, the glistening Dubai skyline he built stares down, oblivious."

Please do take the time it read it... These are not my opinions by an means and I believe this infomation is from a reliable.

I have backed up my point on slavery...do feel free to prove otherwise and let me know your source of info....I will definately concide at that point

I'm not entirely sure why you felt the need to post massive chunks of an overly emotive and distorted editorial piece [not proper objective investigative journalism] instead of a link, but who am I to judge.

What you posted amounts to a list of people who wanted to get rich quick and subsequently did silly things or had bad luck.

You could copy and paste the article replacing "Dubai" with pretty much anywhere in the world experiencing a boom of any kind and it would be the same.

Nothing posted detracts from the actual story, which is the big shiny house in the photo.

ok.... I see your mind is made up and so is mine.

to sum up your point if I may...(the way I understand it):
The end (shiny building in this case) justifies the means.

I am sorry that we could not agree on the my original point that although human ingenuity is an awesome thing... the environment and common human decency is more important in the long run.

BTW: (guy who wrote the piece that I am refering to)

Johann Hari: (born 21 January 1979) is a British journalist and writer. He is a columnist for The Independent, the Evening Standard and the Huffington Post. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Le Monde, Slate, El Pais, the Sydney Morning Herald and Ha'aretz. Hari describes himself as a "European social democrat", who believes that markets are "an essential tool to generate wealth" but must be matched by strong democratic governments and strong trade unions or they become "disastrous".[1] He appears regularly as an arts critic on the BBC Two programme Newsnight Review.

again I am stating my source, which you are not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari

[edit] Awards
Nominated for Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2008 and 2009
Author of Story of the Year at the Environmental Press Awards 2008
The Orwell Prize for political journalism, 2008. (Hari is the youngest ever recipient.)
Amnesty International Newspaper Journalist of the Year in 2007
One of Debrett's top 100 international 'People of the Year' in 2007
'Young Journalist of the Year' at the British Press Awards in 2003
'Student Journalist of the Year' by the Times in 2000

is every news source he is part of a complete farce "[not proper objective investigative journalism]"?

Please say something else, other than putting me down and that shiny building are cool .....

First, nothing has been presented regarding the "means" to the very pretty end. Cherry picking sob stories for an article on sob stories does not constitute representative analysis in any way shape or form [and you will find Hari and other journalists in the same outlets saying just that on a regular basis].

Second, I in no way implied Hari's piece was "farce". It is an editorialised piece of writing - that's what he does, he is very good at it, and I enjoy his writing greatly. This is not, however, written as an overview or representative exposition.

The very same type of article is written on a regular basis about every other part of the world undergoing rapid development - including, for example, Ireland. I always had to laugh at the "eastern Europeans are treated as slaves" articles in our media while my crew of migrant workers sat there enjoying excellent conditions.

I have no doubt whatsoever that a great many workers in Dubai are exploited - such is the nature of the world. I also have no doubt whatsoever that a great many workers are *not*, and that when they are, the workers in question are either faring better or no worse than if they had not been swept up in the boom.

Sounds entirely logical.... especially when you are deterring away from your earlier point of there not being any kind of forced labor... or rather slavery.

I understand that people go looking for ways to get rich and that was part of the reason that they moved in the first place, but what is the justification for taking away there visas/passports (which forces them to stay there with no way of getting out) and giving them lower wages than promised.

* I am going to feel really petty for pointing this out later, oh well, lol, I used the word "farce" and then quoted what you... I never said you used the word... what's that about?
You went from saying the article was not objective to now saying you enjoy reading his Hari's pieces. (I do too... besides the point though)

Lastly, I thought we were talking about Dubai specifically...
First you don’t see the connections I was making to other "slavery" instances now you are making your own?

Have a good weekend brother!… I’ll probably check back in on Monday to see if you have a response.

well said