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At 06:00 on the 12 June 2008 Blueprint magazine and the Office for Subversive Architecture installed a VIEWING PLATFORM to overlook the construction site of the London 2012 Olympics. This was in the spirit of opening up public engagement with architecture. The platform was approx. 400m from the Wick Lane entrance to the Greenway Cycle route, Hackney Wick, London E3.

Unlike Dubai, Abu Dhabi has started the process of transformation at a later stage and there is an existing urban fabric that may well shape future developments. One of the most striking things about the city is that there are both generic and local, or regional, influences at play. The city has a large residential population so mixed use is the pattern. There is also an earlier ‘layer’ of development strongly influenced by a late modernist aesthetic, seen clearly in buildings such as the Abu Dhabi Public Library and Cultural Centre designed by Hisham N. Ashkouri and built in the early 1980s. In a similar way, the strong Muslim outlook of the Emirate influences the urban fabric with a mosque building program that extends from the grand Sheikh Zayed Mosque to much smaller local ones that accompany housing developments. It is likely that over the next 10 -15 years the city will radically transform. What is unique with much of the newly proposed developments is that they are going to be created with an attitude and confidence that does not set upper limits on the imagination.

I spent a few days in Abu Dhabi and Dubai in March. I decided to shoot prolifically on the visit and this is one of my favourite pictures from that series. I was struck by many things in the few days that I was there. First of all is the sheer speed and scale of developments. The next thing that got me was the number of workers involved in the construction process. It seemed that there were so many more than you would see on British sites. Another thing that started to intrigue me was the way that every building site announced the arrival of the new building within with an ‘idealised’ vision of the emerging tower. This always showed the building isolated from its surroundings with clear blue skies surrounding it. This clear view was always interrupted by reality where the neighbouring towers were in competition for every available bit of the skyline.