Creative license

Selina Denman, Editor.

There are countless impediments to creativity. Time restraints, budgetary constraints, inexperienced clients, restrictive brand standards, cultural sensibilities, social expectations... when faced with all of these obstacles, it’s little wonder that creativity so often falls to the wayside.

Which makes it all the more enthralling when you come across interior design work that takes its creative obligations seriously.

That’s one reason why, this month, we’re joining the rest of Dubai in getting excited about the Metro. Or most of Dubai, anyway. We musn’t forget the taxi drivers. Or the standard chorus of cynics who, as ever, have it on good authority that the whole project is doomed to failure.

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From an interiors point of view, the Dubai Metro is exciting for many reasons. For one, most of the world’s great metro systems had to be designed with one over-arching theme in mind – they had to be entirely vandal-proof. That guided most design decisions, and made for a lot of cold, hard, characterless metro stations across the globe.

Dubai, as a largely crime-free city, armed (one can only assume) with a larger budget than most, had the luxury of doing things differently. The result is stations that are rich and colourful and vibrant – and unlike anything that’s been done anywhere else in the world.

When KCA International first started work on the stations, an engineer questioned the need to make them quite so visually striking. People would be rushing through with their heads down, too busy trying to get to their destinations to take in the elaborate light fixtures and intricate colour schemes, he insisted.

“But why not make them look up?” asks KCA’s John Carolan in an exclusive interview on page 25. “People do walk around with their heads down all the time; but when you look up, your whole world changes.”

Cynics take heed.