Frame raises questions about stolen ideas
FEW cities on earth can compete with Dubai for its sheer verticality. Once a forgettable port alongside the emptiness of the Arabian desert, its pale sands have proved to be fertile ground for all manner of skyscrapers.
They rise as if conjured by an obsession with Las Vegas and a jones for altitude. The Burj Khalifa, the tallest structure on the planet, reaches twice the height of the Empire State Building.
Now, Dubai is about to gain another landmark. The Dubai Frame, set to open this year, is literally and figuratively a frame imposed on the overwhelming view – two parallel towers linked by an observation deck. It is a marker of how far the city has travelled, drawing the eye from the drab buildings of the old settlement along Dubai Creek to the riotous profusion of neon-draped skyscrapers stretching south to the Persian Gulf. It is a totem of Dubai’s ambitions. It may also be counterfeit. The Mexican-born architect whose initial design inspired the structure, Fernando Donis, has accused the Dubai municipality of breaching his copyright in a lawsuit filed in December in US federal court. Nine years ago, Donis won an international competition to design the building, besting more than 900 other entrants. Yet he was not included in the project’s execution and was not compensated for his intellectual property, his lawsuit claims. “It’s shocking,” Donis said. “The Frame is mine, and they don’t want to grant that it is mine. The infringement doesn’t just victimise me. They have taken something from all architects – the protection of our ideas.”
Raised as a monument to Dubai’s aspirations as a centre of international commerce, the Frame is now a physical manifestation of the crude system that erected it.
Dubai’s ruling al-Maktoum family has long pledged reforms aimed at bringing rule of law to a business realm often subject to the self-interested edicts of officials.
But the city’s entrenched system leaves outsiders vulnerable to mistreatment – from professionals sketching blueprints to construction workers laying foundations. Both tend to arrive for similar reasons, using Dubai as an opportunity to advance their fortunes. Professionals come hoping to make their names. Migrant workers descend from some of the poorest nations – Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines – seeking to support families at home.
Both are prone to similar fates. Professionals can find themselves shortchanged and lacking redress in a system in which kinship can outweigh contract terms. Migrant workers frequently fall prey to shady recruiters proffering exaggerated wages.
Donis’s lawsuit seeks unspecified compensation for damages and a ruling that his copyright was breached by Dubai, a city of 2.7 million.
The Dubai municipality has “taken the Dubai Frame as its own without paying or crediting the person who created it”, said Edward Klaris, a New York-based lawyer representing the architect. (Klaris is married to Robin Pogrebin, a writer for the New York Times.) “This is an egregious infringement of international copyright and a sad case of sovereign bullying that deserves to be corrected.”
The Dubai municipality did not respond to questions. In correspondence with Donis reviewed by the New York Times, the Dubai government dismissed his complaints, noting that he received a $100,000 prize for winning the competition. City officials maintain Donis lacked local licences needed to execute the project.
Dubai is not the only place where architects decry stolen ideas. In China, where anything of value is susceptible to counterfeits, there has been a boom in replicas of landmark foreign buildings, from the Eiffel Tower to the Tower Bridge.
“Architecture is a field where intellectual property has been extended protection in the more recent past,” said James Conley, an expert on the history of copyright at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “Monarchy states play the game by their own rules.”