Have you ever seen anything like this???!!!!

[WorldFamousAuthorMolotov]

scroll down for the picture of the whole development - palm tree shaped you can enlarge the picture - its amazing!

good, isnt it? imagine a bit floated away though... i think theres a floating airport somewhere too... Japan?

hasnt the beckhams brought some of it or some building on it or something? sure i read it somewhere ?

quootie, it isn't floating. it's built on the seabed iirc.

it's amazing to look at from above, but is going to have a massive impact on the environment

Yeah, Dubai is a total nightmare, both environmentally (they've built an indoor ski resort!), and for human rights.

there was a programme on ch4 or 5 this weekend on it called Megastructures (or something like that!). It showed how it was built.

hideous!

what made me laugh (from watching this programme) was how the king/prince (not sure of title) had insisted that it was built out of natural materials so it 'blended in with the environment' so they couldn't use concrete and steel (apparently they would have been the natural choice because of their strength) - instead they had to dredge the sea bed to get sand that was suitable and blast rocks so they could get 'natural' rocks to use!!

I have to laugh at people rushing to buy property in Dubai as you can only buy leasehold and the King could change his mind at any time and throw you out and take back the land. It is also difficult to repatriate your funds when you sell.
Not to mind the architecture being bizarre at the best and also a lot of it is just a huge building site (20% of the worlds cranes are in Dubai atm) and it will be for the foreseeable future.

It's unreal isn't it?

They've also built a similar ocean bound structure in the shape of a map of the world, so you could (if you had more money than sense, go and 'buy britain', or whatever.

I watched a prog on it a while back - it looked at the thousands of migrant workers from India who lived in abject poverty as they were paid so little on these building sites and had no/little rights to healthcare etc.

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here in doha we have a similar development thats apparently shaped like a pearl/oyster shell. Obviously as I tend to see things at ground level its escaped me.

Reclaiming the sea is as old as the hills. Now out here they're talking about artifically inducing rain. That really would be clever.

ps. some of the architecture here in Qatar is astonishing, really amazing buildings. everything else is a building site tho.

This is the development HuwEdwards mentioned

it's a bit Disney isn't it but an amazing feat nevertheless

Oh the Beckhams have an apartment on the palm tree thing...it was sinking last I heard OK they stopped it before it went under...

they've also got a ski slope (Dubai not the beckhmas-thoguh they might have one too)..... totally impressed me as it's the middle of the desert...

y ou can see it really clearly when you fly in to dubai airport

more money than sense if you ask me

Oh and they built a map thingy, and a guy bought Scotland (I think he weas scottish) before it was complete he loved it so much.....

Rumour has it that Rod Stewart has bought 'Britain'.

I saw the programme about it. apparantly it is so huge it is changing the the sea moves and teh waves are now destroying the genuoine beaches because the wave patterns are different.

its a shame that we cant be happy with the natural places of beauty and instead we feel the need to build huge hideous structure slike this

I think the rationale behind the artificial islands, and the semi-sunken in the sea hotels, is to make the place a torusit attraction, Dubai doesn't have much oil so sheikh Mohammad is thinking of other ways to boost the emirates economy.