Dubai’s Twisting Tower Designer’s Past in Question

You might remember us talking about the Dynamic Architecture project, with its 80 story twisting buildings, around this time last year. We initially thought it was really cool and, unlike most of what gets built in Dubai, not entirely insane. But now that it’s making the rounds again, circulating on nearly every available blog, we found it interesting that people are looking into the designer behind the project, one Mr. David Fisher. Turns out that he has something of a questionable past:

In a biography he had been distributing for months, he said he graduated from the University of Florence in 1976, came to New York in the mid-1980s and later developed hotels and ran a company that specialized in stone and prefabricated construction materials.

The biography also said he received an honorary doctorate from “The Prodeo Institute at Columbia University in New York.” No such institution exists, however, and Columbia said it had never awarded Fisher an honorary degree.

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