Lots coming up, including Ann’s graduation and a visit by Lilly on that occasion. Back to posting around May 11. Also of note: finally, there have been two days in a row that actually seemed like spring here in northern Illinois.
My ambles in Dubai, under pleasantly warm late winter conditions, took me to a nearly empty plaza not from both Dubai Mall and the Burj Khalifa. Later I found out the place is called Opera Plaza. At least on maps.
Close by is Dubai Opera, a 2,000-seat performing arts venue with built-in variability, through seats that can be removed or added, and stages of various sizes that can be raised or lowered out of sight, creating different theater configurations.
If you’re a city with any pretentions to great cityhood, you get yourself an opera house, as Dubai did in 2016. Lead architect on the opera house was a Dane, Janus Rostock
From a site called Euronews, with the city of Dubai as “content partner,” meaning it’s an advertorial:
“I think the biggest challenge for the Dubai Opera project, which we did when I was at Atkins, was to create this building in the midst of, sitting next to, the world’s tallest building, the world’s biggest fountain, one of the largest malls in the world,” he [Rostock] says. “And to ask how could we create a building that was able to “compete” with these wonders of architecture?”
Design-wise, Rostock wanted to create a building shaped like a dhow, the traditional sailing boat of the region. As Rostock explains, the vessel has its roots in the very city itself.
“The Bani-Yas tribe arrived in Dubai and settled on the shores of the creek,” he says, “and it was the dhow that brought prosperity through pearl diving, through fishing and it also brought trade to Dubai… so the dhow itself is really part of that story, it is something which was deeply rooted in the Emirati culture.”
Not bad for an advertorial. If they were more readable, more people would read them. Other, less famed buildings rise over Opera Plaza, probably not taking their cues from pre-modern Dubai.
Including a tower still under construction. An international style residential development looking, probably, to attract some of that sweet international oligarch money.
With public plazas come public art. Such as this, near the shores of the Persian Gulf, some Persian art. 
“Khalvat” (2014) by Sahand Hesamiyan, an Iranian artist. Steel, stainless steel, gold leaf and electrostatic paint.
More details at ground level, halfway around the world.
Instant familiarity in a setting far from its usual North American haunts. The work of Mueller. Hydrant maker to the world, it seems.