Designing the future

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Omran Al Owais.

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Maison Al Habtoor (Images courtesy of Centimetercube).

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The M12 villas (Images courtesy of Centimetercube).

Omran Al Owais, creative director of CENTIMETERCUBE, talks about the need to look to the past to create a future history, and how local architects are going to grow in prominence in the Middle East.

How did you develop an interest in architecture?

I started as a civil engineer, studying in one of the colleges in Dubai.

My English at that time was not very good so I couldn't distinguish between civil engineering and architecture. I knew they both had things to do with buildings.

After a year or so I checked into architecture and knew that was what I was looking for. I developed my skills and drawings and technical understanding of 3D in university.

I see things and know whether they're good or not, I had the visual sense and I can apply it to architecture, photography or other visual media.

Do you have a personal style?

That's mostly what people are saying, but I see it very differently. I see the details. Each project develops a different kind of content.

My projects, if they look the same, they differ by location, by the materials, clients. I get comments that they look the same but they are not.

What do you think of some of the architecture that's beginning to spring up around the Gulf?

We are losing the identity, but the point isn't really isn't about losing identity, it's about creating a new one. I've noticed that the new growth, whenever they do a ‘traditional' building, is a memory of a building that was only 40 years old.

So whatever was around 40 years ago, they try to mimic that today and you can see this in the ‘traditional' buildings.

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