Dubai is known the world over for its obscene levels of oil-fueled luxury—they literally built three fake islands in the middle of the frigging desert—but its latest venture is...something else:
I'm sorry, but that is just a deeply weird and unsettling and disorienting building. It looks awful. It looks, honestly, like a bad Tetris board made by a complete Tetris newbie.
The exterior might be tolerable if the inside of the hotel looked, you know, normal. But it does not. Not at all:
So many right angles. So many of them in weird places. What's with the raised pool? It looks awful. Don't you just picture smacking your knees into it over and over again? What's with the weird quasi-brutalist jetty poking out over the balcony? It looks something off an urban university library from the early 1970s. This is "luxury"??
I don't know what's going on in this room and I don't want to know. The globular light fixtures contrast horribly with the sharp, angular ceiling coffer. Are those fake books situated in that random, inexplicable black outcropping from the pillar? Why? Why do the coffee tables appear to be canted at 22º angles??
This is beyond saving. Is this a bar? I sure hope so, because if I'm in this room I am going to be downing the Limoonada cocktails as fast as I possibly can just to dull the pain in my eyes. The whole thing feels like an M.C. Escher painting except they made everything hyperchromatic and oversaturated. It looks like you can't take two steps in this place without falling into either a hot tub or a dentist's chair. Is that a light fixture on the ceiling or is it an Art Nouveau stargate?!
Ha ha ha, this is getting just ridiculous. The ceiling here looks like it was made by angry bees and the layout looks like it was made by an angry child with a $4 billion budget. Nothing makes sense. It all looks like it was designed to make you trip into a seventeen-inch-deep pool of water. Try and tell me a drunk London business executive isn't going to shred his foot to ribbons stepping on one of those glass candle holders on the chaotically mismatched stairs.
Everything in this hotel is just a disaster waiting to happen and it looks awful to boot!
Next time I'm in Dubai imma stick with the Howard Johnson's, thank you!
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