SUNDOWNER

"I had the extraordinary feeling that all these cars were gathering for some special reason I didn't understand." - Crash (1996) by David Cronenberg

Graham Brenton McKay is an independent architecture writer, critic, blogger, and lecturer currently living in Dubai. His blog, Misfit’s Architecture, links an informal network of practitioners, instructors and students around the world. McKay deals with universal themes such as architecture’s relationship with art, nature, technology, society and education. Refusing to let the idea of social responsibility in architecture die, McKay highlights the foibles and dissects the statements of architecture media stars and the self-styled avant-garde. With equal regularity, he celebrates those misfit architects whose contribution to better performing buildings has never been fully appreciated, Josef Frank being his most recent honoree. McKay is currently a lecturer at Department of Architectural Engineering at the University of Sharjah.

Graham Brenton McKay

In Dubailand, © Graham Brenton McKay

I'd arranged to meet a friend who was staying in a part of town I'd never had a reason to visit. I did have a vague memory of having driven through it ten or so years prior when it was just a place on a map that a road went through. There hadn't been anything to stop for. Before I left the apartment, I checked the hotel's location and discovered that the road I remembered was now six lanes in each direction and with interchanges to two new highways leading off into the desert to places I'd never known existed. I didn't have the time to enjoy losing myself so I took a taxi instead.

We left the city proper behind us and crossed the new bridge to join the new road linking to the southbound artery. For the next fifteen minutes or so the driver and I talked about junctions, bypasses and flyovers and how much smoother and better it was now. We didn't have much more to say as we wove and merged with the flow at a steady 110. I was glad I hadn't driven. I sat back and relaxed. I was still

looking at the road ahead but not with the attention or awareness of a driver.

I saw me on this road as being a point on a line that came into existence when the origin and destination were connected. It was a new place linking two others to create a new place that was neither. The road existed to take me from one to the other but as a state of mind it didn’t exist for the sake of either. Its sole purpose was for me to move along it. Even its interchanges were designed so people travelling in one direction would never have to stop or slow down or even be aware of anyone travelling in another. Me and everyone else were like salmon swimming upstream. The only direction was forward and only thing that mattered was our base compulsion to move with everyone else and participate in this mass performance.

I became aware of clusters of apartment buildings coming into view in the middle distance and then retreating before the next cluster appeared. The buildings weren’t thinning out between market gardens or giving way to suburbia as usually happens when one leaves a city but nor were they becoming denser or taller as usually happens upon entering one. The scenery was forever changing but there was no discernible pattern or logic to it. It wasn’t changing into or away from anything and so there was no sense of leaving one place behind or approaching another. I was stuck in space.

The road powered on indifferent to these buildings and the buildings, for their part, were equally indifferent in return, revealing neither a preference for turning away from the road or acknowledging it as the reason for their existence. These were no upstart constructions. Some were as high as fifty stories, well turned out and standing proud and slightly aloof like someone having arrived too early at a party. They were designed to be seen but without any concern for who or from where. They stood where they were without apology or pretense. I imagined myself on one of the balconies, admiring this mighty road. Before I knew it, the sun had set and the physicality of lorries, taxis, buses and cars was transformed into red taillights moving at speed along the yellow road. Materiality disappeared and, for a while, so did time and I was in some third place where only the present existed independent of the past and its regrets and the future and its anxieties. It was a moment of exquisite calm.

“Sorry,” the driver interrupted as he braked to avoid a car cutting in front of us. We exited onto a cloverleaf that led to an eight-lane carriageway and then exited again, this time onto a feeder road with grassy verges dotted with poinciana trees and frangipani. Whatever lay beyond was concealed by hedges of bougainvillea. The highway had been grand and open but this world was finite and managed. The driver pulled into the driveway and slowed to anticipate a speed bump. I lowered the window and let in the night air heavy with the perfume of petunias just watered. The poinciana trees were alive with the sound of birds stopping over en-route from West Asia to East Africa for the winter. I paid and thanked the driver and wished him a good night. The doorman smiled as he made an ever-so-slightly florid yet welcoming gesture towards the entrance, courteously activating the motion sensor for me. I was directed across the lobby and towards the pool terrace where I recognized my friend. A lifeguard in his elevated chair was watching two children splashing in the pool that, as it was only the middle of October, would still be chilled to twenty-eight degrees. On the distant bank of the artificial lake was the theme building that began to cycle through its light show at the same moment as the sounds of a live band beginning their first set for the evening could be heard.

Small circular ripples like raindrops revealed the presence of carp in the lake that provided something for the people in the hotel rooms, serviced apartments and short-term stay apartments to look over. It made a place. It was something there, something to prevent there being no there there. It also made an "over there" on the other side for people to be curious about. I found it more and more difficult to hold on to thoughts like these. I let them go. There was probably no there there. Wherever it was, was quite fine without one. And nobody including me even cared if there was or not. At last I relaxed and could enjoy being in precisely this time at precisely this place.

A waiter had wheeled out an evaporative cooler and was positioning it a comfortable distance from where my friend was sitting smoking and picking at a plate of strawberries dipped in the chocolate fountain. I sat down and, after a professionally discreet interval, the waiter came over and greeted us, enquired how we were and, upon seeing the strawberries, suggested we might enjoy two Brandy Alexanders. My friend and I were momentarily confused. We couldn't see what needed complementing or enhancing. Everything was already perfect. Nothing could be done to make it any more so. So we ordered Hemingway Daiquiris and drank to the end of times.

In Dubailand, © Graham Brenton McKay