Reflections
On the Chromed Columns Abu Dhabi
Photography has long played a salient role in my art. The genesis of my three-dimensional works, be they drawings, models, sculptures, or larger installations, almost always begins with photographic documentation of my surroundings—in most cases, the urban spaces through which I move in on a daily basis. I integrate some of these photographs into my exhibitions, where they are typically small and inconspicuous next to the larger sculptural works, even as they often encapsulate the leitmotif of an exhibition and illuminate the development of a particular work. In the present book, the relationship between photography and sculpture is, so to speak, reversed. This book is a reflection on sculpture via photography, and each of the photographs presented within it depicts one or more of the chrome-plated reflective columns that are a characteristic feature of the urban landscape of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and which appear especially often in downtown Abu Dhabi. The columns shown here may be architectural details—but it has since my initial encounters with them become clear to me that they can also be experienced as sculpture.
Reading books about Abu Dhabi is one thing. But as soon as one walks out of the airport, one is welcomed by a hot and humid climate, the air saturated with the scent of oud perfumes. Only during the winter months, beginning in mid-November, is it pleasant to spend time outdoors. For half a year, beginning in mid-March, life moves into air-conditioned indoor spaces. The summer heat is compounded by very high humidity on account of Abu Dhabi’s location on an island on the shore of the Arabian Gulf. The city forms the northern border of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, most of which is a vast desert. Its neighbors are Saudi Arabia to the south and west and Oman to the east. The many green spaces in the city owe their existence to the vision of Sheikh Zayed, the founder of the United Arab Emirates (in 1971), who created Abu Dhabi as a garden city.
In 2014, I successfully applied for a professorship in art at New York University Abu Dhabi. I arrived, from Berlin, in July, which is to say, during the height of summer. My first contact with the city was with the hotels and their lobbies, restaurants, various shopping malls, and museums. As urban infrastructure, all these public spaces, including the airport, are perceptually similar: they are transitional spaces in which most of their users spend limited time. The commercial offerings, too, are uniform: the malls have stores that sell major brands as well as cafés and restaurants that are branches of chains found all over the world. In these environments, hotels, restaurants, and shops with an individual touch are comparatively rare.
Having spent the first few months staying at a series of hotels, I eventually found an apartment on the thirty-fifth floor of the World Trade Center (Residential Tower) in the old city center, in downtown Abu Dhabi, close to the Corniche facing the Arabian Gulf. It is the city’s tallest building. Its footprint has a gently undulating circular outline, and its facade is correspondingly defined by convex and concave segments. The building’s top is sloped, so it looks a bit like a calligrapher’s bamboo quill. The facade is entirely glazed from top to bottom.
To familiarize myself with new surroundings, I like to go for long walks and document what I encounter. Taking photographs facilitates a gradual approach to the unfamiliar. In Abu Dhabi, however, I could not initially experience the city in this way: even in September, it was still too hot to spend any time outdoors. Moreover, I had been warned that taking pictures of government buildings was prohibited. At first it was not easy to distinguish which buildings I was and was not allowed to photograph. So, for the first several months, I concentrated on just walking and observing the urban scene.
Prior to the 1960s, no more than a few buildings stood on the island of Abu Dhabi. Electricity, sewers, and roads were largely nonexistent. People made a living by fishing, diving for pearls, and growing dates. Oil was discovered in 1958; its extraction began in the 1960s; and Abu Dhabi was developed into a modern city under Sheikh Zayed after he became its ruler in 1966.
Two architects, first Katsuhiko Takahashi from Japan and then Abdulrahman Makhlouf from Egypt, were commissioned to draw up a master plan for the transformation of historical Abu Dhabi and its surrounding islands into a densely populated contemporary metropolis. The designs were modeled on cities in the United States, as the scholar Khaled Alawadi has documented in his studies of urban planning in the UAE.
Abu Dhabi is based on a checkerboard plan that is further structured and given its particular character by superblocks, each of which is made up of an outer ring of buildings rising to up to twenty floors, with lower residential and business buildings of no more than six floors behind them. The superblocks are largely self-enclosed units that exist in a dynamic relationship to the larger network of the city grid. Each of them contains at least one mosque and small shops that can be reached on foot and cater to people’s daily needs, while the ground floors of the outer buildings have storefronts facing the street.
Much of the city on Abu Dhabi Island was built in the 1980s. The characteristic structures of the period are fifteen-to-twenty-floor buildings, usually on square footprints, the majority with mirrored windows and facades incorporating Arabic design elements such as intricate geometrical patterns and arches evoking traditional Islamic architecture. The natural island was soon completely built up, and land reclamation projects were implemented to create a ring of artificial islands for additional development. More recently, new housing estates have also sprung up on the mainland; some have been completed, while others remain under construction. Buildings from the 1990s and 2000s are considerably taller and have completely mirrored facades. Their designs recall the skyscrapers erected in places like San Francisco, New York, and Chicago from the mid-twentieth century on. Standing out from this mix of building types are specimens of what is known as landmark architecture: examples include Jean Nouvel’s Louvre, Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim, and the Zayed National Museum by Foster + Partners in the museum district on Saadiyat Island.
On the ground floor of buildings in downtown Abu Dhabi, there are still many small shops that have not yet been driven out of business by the large ultramodern shopping malls. Hamdan Street, one of Abu Dhabi’s oldest throughfares, runs next to the building complex known as Central Market; it connects the historic fort Qasr Al Hosn with the road leading directly to Saadiyat Island. Named after Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, it is a popular shopping street with wide sidewalks and a broad variety of stores. Hamdan Street is like a mall without a roof or air conditioning. The majority of the people one meets there are expats who have come to Abu Dhabi for work.
It took a while before I was able to “see” my new surroundings. At first, I was flooded with too many impressions and it was difficult for me to perceive an aesthetic that was foreign to me at the time. Something that caught my eye right away in the urban fabric around me were the many reflective surfaces. Most floors are polished to a shine so that they bring to mind smoothly glistening bodies of water. Windows made of mirrored glass reflect the bright daylight back into the urban space. The visual stimuli produced during the day by the many different surfaces reflecting one another are replaced at night by countless streetlamps, store lighting, lavish advertising panels, and illuminated billboards.
On my walks—at first, I stuck to the major thoroughfares—I noticed an architectural element that reappeared everywhere: chrome-plated round or semicircular columns. They are so widespread, so characteristic of Abu Dhabi’s urban scene, that they become almost invisible among the many reflective surfaces wherever one looks. In 2018, four years after my arrival, I decided to document these columns. Questions that initially preoccupied me were: Where does this element appear with particular frequency? What is the specific quality it adds to the urban experience in Abu Dhabi? How does the mirrored surface interact with the other reflective materials, like the floors and the mirrored glass facades? I also find it fascinating that the mirrored column, which made its debut in the architectural vocabulary in the 1980s, has remained integral to the local architecture and is also present in recently completed large complexes on Reem Island and elsewhere.
At first, I assumed that the columns might be meant to signal to people that they were in the city center—although Abu Dhabi does not have a city center properly speaking. Like many other modern metropolises, it has various centers for diverse activities and demographics. The columns are sometimes load-bearing and sometimes decorative. They often appear on office and commercial buildings such as hotels, banks, shopping malls, and chain restaurants, though not only there. Small shopkeepers, too, integrate round, semicircular, or occasionally angular columns plated with chrome into their storefronts. Architecturally speaking, the columns belong to both the structure and the sidewalk. In other words, they exist in a zone between the building’s interior and the public streetscape. Some of the columns reflect what is arrayed for sale on the shelves of a shop, resulting in a decontextualization and superimposition of the object or commodity and the activities in the street; others produce distorted images that absorb the motion of passing pedestrians and cars and project it back into the urban space.
Bizarre superimpositions of interior and exterior spaces emerge. Especially when the columns are directly part of the facade, the boundary line of the storefront is breached, and the product seems to leave the shopwindow. In this liminal situation, the object is visually uncoupled from its place, the store, and enters into the perception of pedestrians. On an unconscious and largely passive level, they are triggered to register the free-floating object and, ideally, to want to have it: the effect is not unlike that of an advertisement intruding unasked into the visual field. On Hamdan Street, the chromed columns line up ad infinitum, putting pedestrians in a closed loop of encounters with themselves, with the mirror images of the objects, and with the reflections of life unfolding in the street.
The columns are usually set by a building’s entrances and on its corners. Larger buildings also feature them at regular intervals along their facades. The buildings’ upper floors are always covered with mirrored glazing; the shopwindows on the ground floor with unmirrored glass. By virtue of this materiality alone, the pedestrian’s view differs from that of someone inside a high-rise building. In the chrome-mirrored column, however, these different experiences are fused. Like the mirrored glass that creates a reflection of its surroundings on a building’s facade, the chromed columns project everything in their immediate surroundings back into the environment as images. At street level, they relate directly to the passersby, who are reflected in them, as is the incessant passing traffic. Now and then I spot columns that look like palm trees, an effect produced by stepped cornices at their top ends that reminds me of streets with tree-lined sidewalks.
I wonder to what extent the reflective surfaces, the chrome-mirrored columns, the reflecting facades virtualize the urban experience by failing to establish the means by which I am usually able to develop a connection with a particular place. The reflective surfaces, both absorbing the unceasing motion of the city and projecting it back into the urban landscape, offer little opportunity to experience a “counterpart” in the built environment. I have even had to admit that it is virtually impossible for me to remember many of these places because the perpetual reflections make it hard for me to recall the specificity of the urban fabric. Only the sense of flow I register as a somatic experience. The homogenization of space that I initially noticed in the airport, hotel lobbies, and shopping malls effectively continues in the reflective surfaces and in urban life in general.
When I started photographing the columns, I first took pictures from a distance and tried capturing the facades together with the columns, which typically appear in series. After initially taking landscape-format photographs, I eventually started framing the shots in portrait format so I could get closer to the columns themselves. The portrait format, moreover, emphasizes the column’s function as an element structuring the building on the level at which the pedestrian encounters it. In several pictures, I focus in almost zoom-like fashion on the mirror images appearing in the chromed columns, through which the urban space is in dialogue with its reflection.
Arriving in Abu Dhabi, I was overwhelmed not only by the culture, of which I knew little, and the climate, which was utterly unlike what I was used to, but also by the way people (do not) look at each other. Although I have become accustomed to it, I vividly remember how unfamiliar this different culture of the gaze was. For example, I do not look at men, and when I catch someone looking at me, I return only women’s and children’s gazes. Generally speaking, eye contact is kept more indirect; looking someone directly in the eye feels aggressive and disagreeable. The reflections in the columns resemble the indirect gaze; they are mediators without establishing genuine contact. They reproduce experiences that I have in the city—but I am made anxious by the ways in which their blankness precludes any dialogue.
In the course of the many months, years by now, in which I have been photographing the different columns in their various settings, I have often considered how they remind me of sculptures. Their sculptural potential was reinforced by the pictures I took. At first I was deliberately and consciously extricating columns from their surroundings when selecting a segment of a scene and recording it with the camera. But I have now reached the point where I can look at a column in the cityscape and see it as a sculptural object without isolating it from its existing context. This shift in my perception came about through my work taking photographs.
In this book, readers encounter the column as a serial object. Turning its pages, they see continually varying configurations of the same element in different locations in Abu Dhabi’s urban landscape. A kind of temporal or spatial sequence emerges, as though the beholder were walking the same streets I walked to photograph the columns. But that is an illusion: the serial quality evoked in this book does not exist in a comparable density in the streetscape. Registering a recurrent aesthetic feature in Abu Dhabi’s urban fabric, and challenging the distinction between architecture and art, the photographs instead suggest that fragmentation and reflexivity are not only at the center of my personal encounter with the city but also constitutive of the local experience of everyday life.