DUBAI VIEW: ALSERKAL AVENUE
There is no doubt that the
Emirate’s most effervescent one is a futurebuilding laboratory where all challenges, trends and visions become true. Few visitors, beyond futuristic skyscrapers, technological and spectacular urban settlements, islands and artificial “palms”, get to know the most “soft” projects, and yet daring, people-oriented, projects focusing on both art and
recycling/sustainability. In this sense, the area of
Alserkal Avenue is very interesting, a quadrilateral old warehouses of metal sheet panels used in time to recover the necessary material and structures to build the city. It was thanks to the knowledgeable work by the Alserkal family, who for the last ten years has imagined and created a small district dedicated to creativity and intersection among artistic and industrial languages, unused storages have been recovered, transformed into wide sophisticated art and design galleries, new elegant buildings have been built with the same technique and same image of the other warehouses that contain labs, cultural activities, food services, even a private museum.
Concrete, a multicultural space by Rem Koolhaas’s opened in March. A little art village that now develops itself on almost 100.000 sq.mt. of space with about hundred reconverted or new spaces, halfway between the centre of Dubai, the Burkj Kalifa and the effervescent Dubai Marina. A retail estate and cultural project that reminds us up close the transformation of Tortona District from a former-industrial area to a creative district. A transformation in which Superstudio has actually been, since 1983 the creator and promoter.