A friend tipped me off about this strange structure out in the desert a short drive from Dubai. I tried to figure out what it was on Google Earth before driving out to discover a mysterious, disused, concrete amphitheatre.
None of my subsequent enquiries have revealed the history of the structure (maybe a reader will enlighten us?)
A nearby facility is used for various equestrian activities, so I suspect the amphitheatre was intended for similar, competitive use. It has been suggested that it may have been constructed for a single event and an ongoing use for it has never been found.
I’m currently back in my hometown on the England/Wales border, restoring my 400 year old cottage and weighing choices every day regarding the eco-credentials of various building materials and methods.
At times it seems almost comical to be doing this when elsewhere in the world people are building such outlandish structures as this amphitheatre for one-time use.
Here are the coordinates if you’d like to check this out for yourself: 24°49’36.25″N 55°13’53.17″E.
Note from the editor: this photograph is part of a series called “Consumption” that seeks to document consumerism’s impact on the environment. From resource extraction and commodity production all the way down the supply chain to retail stores and waste processing facilities, Richard artfully examines what nature has come to mean in a world that depends on buying stuff.
Author: Richard Allenby Pratt
Richard is a British photographer living and working in Dubai, UAE. His concerns about the sustainability of the way we live and our economic systems only really became urgent after the birth of his son in 2008. As a landscape photographer he found the obvious way to express these concerns was by making photographs of the places impacted on by human activity, and particularly those places that best display the terrifying scale of our consumption. His basic method is to study google earth and then visit the most intriguing and inexplicable places thereby discovered.
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