More striking than the sheer excess of Dubai is the extent to which paradox itself is a part of the city’s fabric. What seems incongruous to an outsider—robes of piety worn alongside couture cocktail dresses, for example—somehow works. The latest addition to the city’s countless architectural showstoppers plays on this inherent contradiction to impressive effect. Concrete, the almost 6,500-square-foot arts venue built by Rem Koolhaas and his Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) within the Alserkal Avenue arts district is aesthetically understated for both the city and the architect. Where it makes its mark, however, is in the manner in which it was developed and in the technological achievements it boasts.            Noting that there are people from 170 countries living in Dubai, Koolhaas’s sense of achievement is evident. “This building is totally produced in Dubai. It’s produced by contractors from the Middle East and it was produced on the spot,” he explains to a crowd gathered within the space amidst last week’s opening. “It’s not that we imported a foreign idea,” he says, “but we were able to develop this almost from the inside out in a continuous discussion with the thinkers and makers in Dubai and that, I think, is representative of an opportunity that is very significant.”            Commissioned by Alserkal Avenue as a place for the Avenue—founded in 2007 by Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal—to curate programming across art, fashion, film, design, and performing art, Concrete is OMA’s first building in the Emirates. It joins galleries such as The Third Line, Grey Noise, and Leila Heller in the district, which is also home to the Jameel Foundation project space, the Jean-Paul Najar Foundation, and the studio of French-Tunisian artist el Seed. In conjunction with the opening of Concrete, Alserkal Avenue also announced a residency initiative, which will bring artists from the region to the city.            Describing the ways in which Dubai and the Concrete commission have influenced his architectural practice, Koolhaas explains: “When we first came to Dubai, it was almost a festival, or an embroidery, of forms that became more and more eccentric. And when I looked at what we so-called important architects were producing, it was also a festival of forms—more and more eccentric. So in a way, when we came here I began to realize that the development of shape is really not a very productive future, which made it possible for the office to switch to a greater concentration on performance—on how buildings work rather than on how they look.”            While the exterior of Concrete retains the general form of the warehouse-style building which was constructed as part of an extension of Alserkal Avenue in 2014, the interior is one of—if not the—most flexible OMA-designed building in existence. Moveable walls within the space, weighing up to nine and a half tons each, can slide and rotate, allowing Concrete to function as one sweeping unit or as several discreet spaces. According to Kaveh Dabiri, the project architect, the goal was to be able to have “a rock concert in one space and a lecture on the other side.” In order to achieve this, the walls, which can lock together as needed, are specially enforced with acoustic lining. And depending on the intended use of the space, natural light flow from two large skylights, or be blocked entirely. The polycarbonate pivoting doors, which open onto a large courtyard, stretch the entire height of the building—almost 30 feet. “It’s about being able to open the whole space to outside,” says Dabiri. “We may merge two exhibitions, or we may do an event which goes from the yard to the inside, or you may close the doors.”            For the inaugural exhibition, Concrete invited the Atassi Foundation, which began as a gallery in 1986 in Damascus, to present “Syria: Into The Light,” a selection of works from their collection of Syrian art made between 1924 and 2016. “It was important to us to work with someone from this region because that’s always been part of our mandate,” says Vilma Jukurte, director of Alserkal Avenue. With more than 60 works by 4o artists, the exhibition highlights the history of portraiture within the country, with examples including 20th-century formal portraits by Tawfik Tarek and Louay Kayyali’s Nap, from 1975. Among the most recent works included are Hiba Al-Ansari’s fabric portraits made from black ISIS hoods. “She represented them as women because ISIS uses women as slaves, and she decorated them with the most feminine beads,” explains curator Mouna Atassi. Al-Alsari’s works are another paradox exploited to its greatest potential.  Read more