Simon Crispe remembers his first sight of Dubai clearly. It was November 1993 and the young architect from New Zealand, who had just flown in from London, was being driven across the Al Maktoum Bridge.
"The only thing that dominated the skyline was the Dubai Trade Centre," he recalls. "The guy sitting next to me said, 'That's the tallest building in the Middle East.'"
Not for long.
Though a bold venture in its time, today it is hard to imagine the 149-metre Dubai World Trade Centre, completed in 1979, dominating anything, dwarfed as it is by the surrounding forest of diverse buildings that has sprung up since. Only on the back of the Dh100 bank note does the 33-storey icon still stand, frozen in time, in splendid isolation.
But two photographs, both seemingly taken from the top of the Trade Centre but separated by barely 20 years, together tell the story of the extraordinary transformation that was about to seize Dubai - a metamorphosis not only of shape and size, but also of destiny and fortunes.
In the first picture, taken in the 1980s, a simple two-lane road cuts through the desert, heading south towards Abu Dhabi. The dead-straight blacktop seems tenuous, a hopeful line in the sand no more than one good shamal away from reclamation. It will be another decade before work even begins on transforming the simple two-lane ribbon of tarmac, which first linked the two cities in the late 1970s, into the multi-lane Sheikh Zayed Road, and 1998 before that work is finished.
In the 1980s, a handful of cars and lorries roll along it and dozens of tracks cut away from the road, criss-crossing the empty sand. The half-dozen modest modern buildings along the road seem incongruous, as if thrown up in error here in the middle of nowhere.
Crispe remembers the wide open spaces, but "it wasn't a perception that there was a great opportunity to build lots of things; it looked like a fairly sleepy town".
In the second photograph, shot in 2005, those original buildings can still be seen - just. All about them now, however, are giants, including the Emirates Towers, on which work began in 1996 and which was completed in 2000.
In less than two decades, a sheikh's vision had become a towering reality. But one building started it all: the Burj Al Arab, a startling tower conceived in the early years of the 1990s and unveiled in time for the new millennium. Planted just off the shore, on what would become the first of Dubai's manmade islands, it was raised as a flag around which the emirate's extraordinary ambition and rapid growth would rally. This was the building Crispe and his colleagues had come to create.
Almost incidentally a hotel, the Burj Al Arab was iconic in both intent and effect. To this day - despite the astonishing engineering achievement that is the Palm Jumeirah, the towering presence of the Burj Khalifa and the rapid expansion of "New Dubai" that has left the Burj Al Arab standing no longer at the edge but in the middle of the city sprawl - it remains the predominant symbol of Dubai, and the entire UAE, recognised around the world.
And, once the world's tallest hotel (although today it holds no records), the Burj Al Arab - and the vision that inspired it - can be said to be responsible for the fact that, of the four hotel buildings that now overshadow it, three are in Dubai.
Crispe was the leader of a group of young architects and engineers summoned to Dubai by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the younger brother of Dubai's then Ruler, Sheikh Maktoum, who had acceded to the throne upon the death of their father, Sheikh Rashid, on October 7, 1990.
The 1990s were to be Dubai's decade. Much had been achieved in the emirate by Sheikh Rashid, including the development in the 1970s first of Port Rashid, then the emirate's main trading port, and in the 1980s its gigantic successor Jebel Ali - both natural extensions of Dubai's history as a key Gulf entrepôt. In a sense, says Crispe, Jebel Ali was Sheikh Rashid's Burj Al Arab, "but 20 years earlier - a hugely visionary thing, to build the largest manmade port in the world, in a place that was tiny and nobody even knew how to spell the name of".
But if Sheikh Rashid laid the foundations for the future, it was Sheikh Mohammed who was to build upon them, raising a skyline and a profile for Dubai that would capture the attention of the world.
Sheikh Rashid began relying upon his younger son in the 1970s, when Sheikh Mohammed was given responsibility for the airport his father had opened in 1960. At the same time he was also put in charge of the emirate's oil industry, a portfolio that embraced two of the nation's most important economic pillars and together gave Dubai's future Ruler an invaluable insight when it came to drawing up his road map for the future.
After his father fell ill in 1981, Sheikh Mohammed took on even more of the day-to-day running of the country. It was a crucial time for Dubai. Towards the end of the 1980s, the development of longer-range aircraft was threatening the city's role as a refuelling stop. It became obvious to Sheikh Mohammed that Dubai's nascent tourism industry needed to be developed to turn a transit stop into a destination in its own right and, as his own website recalls, "he adopted an open-skies policy and worked to lay the foundations for a tourism industry that would burst into life in the 1990s".
Part of this was the creation of Dubai's own airline; Emirates took to the skies in 1985. Before 1990, as the sheikh's website records, "Dubai International Airport was always busy, but the majority of passengers were in transit". By the end of the decade, that was no longer true. The world was no longer passing through Dubai, it was coming to stay for weeks, even years.
Sheikh Mohammed would not be appointed Crown Prince of Dubai until 1995. Eventually, upon the death of his brother in January 2006, he would become the Ruler but, as a BBC obituary of Sheikh Maktoum made clear, "while Sheikh Maktoum was the Ruler of Dubai, his younger brother Sheikh Mohammed was the driving force behind the astonishing pace of ongoing developments in Dubai".
And the decision to build the Burj Al Arab was the starting gun for that race to the future.
Crispe worked for Atkins, a British engineering firm that had been operating in the Gulf since the early 1970s. Based originally in a small site hut in Umm Al Qaiwain, where its first project in the UAE was some dredging work in the port in 1972, the company had expanded to take on projects, and office space, in Oman and Dubai.
Until the early 1990s, Crispe recalls, Atkins had concentrated on "ports infrastructure and architecture of relatively modest building projects - so ground-plus-10 [storeys] would be the sort of scale of the jobs we were doing; lots of villas and small office buildings."
That was about to change.
"We were phoned up by Barry Chapman, the then resident director in Dubai, who'd been here for about eight or nine years. He said, 'We might have a little job for you out here; the sheikh wants us to look at a rather serious hotel up at Chicago Beach.'"
The Chicago Beach Hotel was a thriving but rapidly decaying tourist resort - Dubai's first - built in the 1970s and named after the Chicago Bridge & Iron Company, which in the late 1960s had used the site for the construction of vast underwater oil storage tanks.
Oil had first flowed from Abu Dhabi in 1962. Dubai's reserves would be tapped seven years later but, as fate and borders would have it, the emirate possessed far less of the precious liquid than its neighbour. If Dubai was to survive and evolve, it would need an alternative strategy, as Sheikh Mohammed realised. Later, he was to sum it up in an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, published on January 12, 2008: "Our plans do not flow from mere ambition; they are a necessity. Consider that only 3 per cent of our revenue is from exports of diminishing crude-oil reserves; 30 per cent is from tourism."
To help to achieve this, as Crispe recalls, Atkins had been given a simple but imposing brief: "To build an icon for a country."
What Dubai needed, the sheikh had realised, was a "Sydney Opera House, a Tour Eiffel; that was the terminology ... Something that would create an identifiable link, for people around the world, with a wonderful place, the United Arab Emirates."
To win the contract, Atkins sent out an advance guard led by Tom Wright, the concept architect and design director for the project. The team checked into the Chicago Beach Hotel and began sketching ideas for its replacement. In the process, Wright gained a fascinating insight into Sheikh Mohammed's dynamic and visionary plans.
The construction of the original hotel had been flawed by the use of corrosive sand in the concrete, and "the reason Sheikh Mohammed wanted to redevelop it", recalls Wright, "was because the Chicago Beach Hotel had 80 per cent occupancy, throughout the year, which was unheard of in the Gulf. He realised that there was a tourist market if he could tell people about it."
Much has been written about the moment Wright came up with the distinctive shape of the Burj Al Arab, including the seductive tale that he sketched out the original design on a napkin. That's not quite how he remembers it. In fact, the first representation of the Burj was not drawn at all - it was created with scissors and virtually by accident.
At the time, says Wright, he was much taken with Le Grand Arche, completed in 1986 at the heart of the La Défense business district in Paris, which had been designed by the Danish architect Johann Otto von Spreckelsen as a kind of modern echo of Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe.
"In my early design book on the Burj I had a picture of that and, through a process, we said, 'Well, let's do a big arch.'"
The next question was "should it be an Arabic arch? So I got a square piece of paper, folded it in half, cut out an Arabic arch, opened it up and said 'Well, it could look like that.'"
But Wright found himself considering not the arch but the piece of paper he had just cut out and put to one side. "I folded it in two, stood it up, and it was the Burj. And I got a feeling. We went, 'Wow, that could work' ..."
The design was worked up into a drawing, then into a foot-high cardboard model. Wright still has them both. And he still talks with a kind of wonder about what happened next, when they presented the model.
"I think it just caught Sheikh Mohammed's imagination. He walked out of that meeting, turned round and said, 'Let's build it.' I said, 'What does he mean?' and they said, 'Well, what he means is, let's start building it.'"
With the contract secured, Wright and Crispe, the team leader, moved to Dubai in January 1994, and the rest of the team followed. "It's fair to say that all of these core families lived and breathed this project for seven years," says Crispe.
The sheikh and his team had liked their design, says Crispe, but the thing that clinched the contract for Atkins "was the fact that we were prepared to come here. The condition was, 'We want our architects to be in Dubai. It's no good being a flying squad from the UK - not acceptable.'"
That suited the Atkins men. The bulk of the team - a small community of families with children - took over eight new villas along Al Wasl Road. Crispe recalls the UK "was quite constrained and recessionary at that time; 50 per cent of architects were out of work, and here we were with our families exploring this whole new world and this fantastic opportunity to design the project of our lifetimes."
Wright, who moved into a small villa in Satwa with his wife and young child, stayed almost five years; Crispe, now commercial director for Atkins in the Middle East, is still here.
The project would prove to be life-changing for all concerned. "It was an incredibly young team," recalls Wright. "I think our average age was 32." At the time, Atkins "didn't have an international reputation and the work we were doing was just solid engineering work; it was nothing sparkly or particularly international in its flavour. So there we were, in our early 30s, none of us had done a hotel, none of us had done anything more than 20 storeys."
Just how vital this project was to Dubai was reflected in Sheikh Mohammed's hands-on approach. Wright recalls that "we worked together quite closely ... He was actively involved in the design process, down to 'Let's choose a door knob, shall we, today?' For all the architecture, talking about where it was sited, should it be on the land, how big it should be and what was inside it, he was there; we used to meet about once every other week."
The sheikh was, in fact, behind one crucial decision, recalls Wright - and, in light of the later development of the Burj Khalifa, a fascinating one.
"I had an interesting conversation with Sheikh Mohammed very early on. Initially the building was going to be 450 metres. That would have been the tallest building in the world, and he said 'No, I don't want the tallest, I want the best.'"
Sheikh Mohammed, recalls Wright, was not involved only with the design process. "Even while we were designing and building the Burj, Dubai started to appear all over the place in the UK media. He started this campaign, saying 'Here it is, come and see,' while at the same time he was building the Burj, which he knew - or hoped, much as we all did - would become an iconic landmark. Sheikh Mohammed is quite a visionary."
But at the time, not even Wright and his colleagues quite appreciated the scope of that vision. The Burj Al Arab "used to stand at the very end of Dubai, and now it's right in the middle, which was part of the great plan which I hadn't really got my mind around. In fact, I'm not even sure Sheikh Mohammed had got his mind around how big his dreams would be. But we always wondered why it was 15 kilometres outside the town centre."
For Crispe, the Burj Al Arab was a flag of intention, designed to attract attention and rally the forces of expansion. "It absolutely was. It said to the other national developers, 'Hotels and leisure are important, welcoming the population of the world is important, so please build hotels here.' "
And they did. "After we'd finished the Burj Al Arab and Jumeirah Beach projects, you saw this set of major high-quality hotel properties being constructed up that beach."
One of the local firms involved with the construction of the Burj Al Arab was the Sharjah-based Arabian Profile Company Ltd, part of the GIBCA Group founded by Sheikh Sultan bin Saqr Al Qassimi in 1975. Specialising in panel cladding for roofs and facades, APL designed, built and installed the 305 striking internal balconies that line the hotel's vast atrium.
GIBCA's slogan is "Helping build a modern nation" and, while APL alone - just one of dozens of its companies - has since been involved in many key projects, including Dubai Mall, it is the Burj Al Arab that remains the most totemic of that aim.
It was clear from the outset, recalls Sheikh Sultan, now 57, that the Burj Al Arab was a landmark project: "It was very special ... People did very quickly realise that we were embarking on something which was not the standard [type of] building that we were used to."
Everyone, he says, was proud to play a part: "There was a big sense of commitment from everybody who was involved". There were also big challenges: "Of course, things were different in the mid-nineties than we've experienced in the last 10 years, with availability of material and know-how."
APL tackled the technical challenge of the balconies in a purpose-built on-site factory, in the process halving both the expected production time and the weight of the units.
It is, says Sheikh Sultan, important to remember that the Burj Al Arab "was not a standalone building"; it was the total development - the combination of the Burj, the Jumeirah Beach Hotel and the Wild Wadi water park - "that has contributed a great deal, especially to the development of tourism in Dubai ... the excellent marketing they were doing, and the Burj Al Arab put Dubai very much in everybody's mind and, with that the UAE also started becoming a destination."
To maximise the PR impact, the project had to be handed over in time for the millennium celebrations at the end of 1999, which added to the pressure, says Crispe.
"We handed it over on September 30, 1999, in time for the millennium, but everything about the project was a pressure and a challenge. The project changed people. You were either able to deal with the pressures and the strains and stresses of working on it, or you faded away and left."
Those who were left at the end, he says, "were extraordinary people; they have all gone on to do interesting things, whether within Atkins or outside". For those involved, as well as for Dubai and the UAE, the Burj Al Arab, "the first mega-project in the Middle East ... was a seminal, formative exercise".
In the first few years of the next decade, Dubai was to change beyond recognition. In 2000 the Emirates Towers - now the Jumeirah Towers Hotel - gave Dubai's downtown skyline a new signature profile. It would be followed in rapid succession during the early years of the new century by Internet City, Dubai Media City, Knowledge Village and, in February 2002, by Dubai International Finance Centre.
Sporting attractions would add to Dubai's lure for tourists - major international events such as the horse-racing World Cup and the Desert Classic golf tournament.
"Dubai really started to transform itself after the Burj was finished," says Wright. "It heralded a whole series of amazing buildings and huge, unbelievably monstrous plans, which were just so large that you could hardly believe they would be done - and some of them obviously haven't been."
For Crispe, Dubai has matured into a city with a good sense of "place", a state of being for which the Burj Al Arab set the tone.
Architects, he says, "must create places, not just things, and it's important for us that the Burj Al Arab was one of the first 'places' that was built".
Atkins has gone on to contribute much more to the landscape of Dubai and the region, but the company's greatest contribution will always be the Burj Al Arab, as is tacitly acknowledged by the fact that the building still takes pride of place on its website - and Wright's. It remains the symbol not only of a decade, but of the nation - a gatekeeper that ushered in the future.
Wright certainly doesn't see the icon as a creative ball and chain, but being the man who gave the world the Burj Al Arab does have its drawbacks. "The tough thing is not trying to repeat it, but when clients come to us now they always want something that is - a horrible word - an 'iconic' landmark building. And then in the next sentence they say 'but we've only got a normal budget', and these things are diametrically opposed in the architectural world."
Of all the buildings he has designed, is it his favourite? He pauses for a long time before answering. "I think it is, actually. It's a tricky one. There are lots of buildings I have done, but I think maybe none has seemed to have been quite so fit for purpose, with such an unusual brief. So when I look back on it I think it's done its job and that's something to be reasonably proud of, I guess."
He isn't entirely sure why the Burj Al Arab has held its own as the symbol of Dubai - as a visit to any tourist souvenir shop in the city will attest - against the obvious charms of the Burj Khalifa.
Somehow, he says, the Burj Al Arab "stands alone, it doesn't necessarily mix with the other buildings - a bit like the Sydney Opera House stands on its own. It has a language which just hasn't really been repeated and is very difficult to repeat because it is so unusual." The form of the Burj Al Arab, he says, "gets into people's heads a little bit more. It's more recognisable."
Which means, in other words, that it passes the Pictionary test. "We always say that a truly iconic building is something you can draw really quickly. If you were playing Pictionary" - the game in which players guess words from drawn clues - "you could draw it with a few strokes and they'd say 'Dubai!'. Whereas if you did the Burj Khalifa you'd lose Pictionary because it would take you half an hour to draw it."
The Burj Al Arab has also had a unique longevity for Atkins.
"Architects and engineers tend to find their buildings last for a couple of years as a marketable commodity, before they become old hat," says Crispe. "In terms of marketing ourselves, to be talking about a project that was designed in the early nineties ... jobs I designed in those years in the UK, they are old now, you wouldn't mention them."
The Burj Al Arab, he says, "took us into the future, a statement of intent as to where we were going. It was the brainchild of Tom Wright, but totally inspired by Sheikh Mohammed saying 'you need to go and look at our old architecture, our seafaring ... you need to come and live here, be in this place, soak it up and understand'. And he was absolutely right."
