Travels from the Seat of a Plane

I am thankful that despite their best efforts, the vastness of the landscape outside Dubai dwarfs the ridiculous, glittering skyscrapers. The quiet, matte desert stretches out and then wrinkles up into mountains. A few skewed roads run through valleys between. Light and shadow create the only changes in tone—the unvegetated sand is a consistent non-color. Then, from time to time, without explanation, a valley holds dusty greens in agricultural squares.

A few hours and a few thousand miles later, the earth is a watery, snowy swirl. The air is clear, the shapes below are sharp. Vastness here, is cold and deep, blues and whites marbled together. There are no signs of people, of paths, or even of life. The world below is elemental and inchoate.

After this, the temperate Pacific Coast is generous and nurturing. Breaking white waves stitch the ocean to the cliffs in Mendocino. Small-scale towns blend in and out of hills and forest. I search for landmarks—Sea Ranch, Jenner. The geography of weekend hikes is suddenly clear as Point Reyes, Tomales Bay, Muir Beach, and Mount Tamalpais form a map below. Colors vivid with life—dark green oaks on grassy yellow hills, that big red bridge, pastel houses that chase up San Francisco streets—welcome me home.

The physical bravura of a sixteen-hour flight in a huge jet only heightens the resonance of the view below. These views that feels so precious and privileged are part of a twice-daily journey for one of many airlines on this route.

The scale and the glory of our earth and the silence of landscape, both precise and abstract, overwhelms.

ps I'm sad to say I didn't take these photos myself, and they're not exactly what I saw out the plane. I wish I'd taken photos, but it was pretty nice just looking out the window too.

Jellyfish on the beach are disgusting puddles of slime. In the water, they're some of the most sublimely graceful and elegant forms I can think of. It's all about the medium: in water, there's no gravity, no need for rigidity; life is all about flexibility, transparency, ethereality.

I read a book about oak recently. Oak has been the favored wood for the European shipbuilding tradition. The author argues that the classic sailing ships developed out of how Europeans constructed wooden buildings: they're based on a solid, rigid frame of ribs, covered with a non-structural plank skin, much as one would build a timber-framed house to resist the force of gravity.

Certain other types of boats, however, are more analagous to the jellyfish. Viking longboats were a monocoque of planks riveted edge to edge, with no internal frame. This allowed them to twist and flex with the motions of water, giving them a remarkable combination of speed, agility and durability.

The inuit kayak is another example of boatbuilding in a fluid medium. The flexible skin and lashed skeleton create a dynamic, moving form. This is "boat" stripped down to its essence.

With the Oru, I'm interested in ways of making boats more like jellyfish- if not functionally, then trying to capture that sense of thinness, transparency, fluidity and luminosity- the things that intuitively draw us to water.

Saturday afternoon

After Dubai, its a relief to be in a place with layers. In London you see liveliness in every inch of its urban form, not to mention in all the people bustling around. Eccentric lanes, new additions added crookedly upon old, lines of desire through city squares.

Top to bottom: I never tire of these urban additions, wherever I find the little space invaders; Oxford Circus sparkles; diagonal tiles make it all better; almost a real-life Rachel Whiteread; I love depth in cities.

London calling

The brief walk to work!

Ski Dubai

The closest place to walk from our hotel is the Mall of the Emirates, which contains the famous Dubai ski slope, a blue-lit recreation of an Alpine environment, complete with lonely penguins and chalets serving hot chocolate.

The soukh

Its quite interesting how hard it is to find an 'authentic' experience in Dubai—and more than anything it makes one think about the meaning, and value, of authenticity. I think the glossy skyscrapers and dusty mirrored surfaces are probably more authentic than the soukhs —but somehow we connect authenticity to a certain rusticity or 'commonality' and its hard to shift to a conception of authenticity meaning a form of the zeitgeist.

The gold and spice soukhs in Dubai are probably easily reached by car, but for a more 'authentic' experience we took an abra—a pretty great type of old boat similar to a gondola but I presume less precious. Our abra held about 25 people heading up Dubai Creek to the soukhs. We started from the center of Dubai on the Deira side of the Creek—quite possibly the oldest part. It was hot and humid, and we parked near a huge Bollywood movie theater, and made our way through an all-Indian crowd to get to the abra queue.

The soukhs are, well, soukh-ish, and I was struck by how similar they are to back-alley markets all over Asia, with hawkers and touts shouting.

No pictures of the counterfeited-goods stalls (not allowed) hidden upstairs in half-stories above and behind the gold stalls. "GucciFendiChanelLouisVuitton...come with me..."

Dubai Calling

Alas, these aren't the dramatic roadways lined with skyscrapers, or the ostentatious hotels sprawling out of the city along the palm-tree shaped beaches. But Dubai is surreal for more reasons than just wretched excess and questionable architectural bravado.

For example:

1. All sorts of ill-placed, negligible-impact attempts at sustainability—recycling containers adjacent to air conditioned bus stops, on the side of roads clogged with SUVs all day, in the midst of near-empty hotels with pyrotechnic lighting displays and heli-pads. Its almost humorous to see recycling containers in a city that drinks up water and resources in the midst of a desert.

2. The brand new metro is quite beautiful—interesting, maybe even well-detailed organic forms (haven't gotten close enough to really inspect any details), consistent across the system—but the shiny form is coated with a thick layer of sand dust, and there's only one rail line, that noone rides...so far.

3. The speed of building has led to hilarious trip-ups: an ATM built just a bit too high for pretty much any user (even tall ones) had to be retrofitted with a set of steps below it.