Architecture: A skyline on crack
Nick Tosches, wonderful Vanity Fair (June 2006) feature "Dubai's the Limit" is full of brilliant craft and humour. The city he is describing obviously lends itself to awed description but his use of metaphor, language and rhythm is none the less outstanding.
The Dubai skyline is like no other. Silhouettes of cities come into being over the course of centuries. Here, where a few buildings rose from the dirt 15 years ago, countless structures now crowd the land and gasp for what space remains. Here there is no sense of accrued form, no sense of architectural strata, no sense of past become present. Here there is no sense, period. It changes every day, every night. Looking out one evening, I see Manhattan. The next night, it's a boundless industrial fantasia, a tenfold Newark-by-the-sea. Then, another night, it is what it is: Dubai, shapeshifting, hammering, and grinding madly, and somehow silently, toward the sun and stars. There is no architectural rhyme, no cohesion of design, no defining style. It is the visual equivalent of a bunch of speed freaks babbling incoherently to one another. Las Vegas is a sputtering 20-watt bulb compared with this fire in the desert. Forget about babbling speed freaks. Forget about everything. This is a skyline on crack.
The piece can be analysed for its creative word choice (structures "gasp" for what space remains) or its analogies (a tenfold Newark-by-the-sea) but what really makes the pieces work is that the rhythm of his short clustered sentences creates something of the hyperbolic excitement that he is describing.
His sentences are short, sharp staccato. he groups his descriptors in rhythmic packs of three that hammer home his point: "no architectural rhyme, no cohesion of design, no defining style."
