Identifying a Local in Gulf Cities

Extract

Depending upon how you approach the matter, it is either humdrum or complicated to ask an architect how he would improve the Gulf region's built environment. Humdrum, because that is what architects do every day: say how they can improve what was done poorly before them. Complicated, because there's a frustrating modern history of experts coming to the Gulf to do just that. In the Arab Gulf countries, architecture is most often assumed to result from imported expertise, certified and purchased abroad. The foundation of that assumption rests in the late colonial British management of Gulf cities. Colonial officers, most often referred to as political agents or political residents, harnessed the built environment to visually convey the bureaucratic order that the British government was instituting where it had suppressed it in the decades before. Modern architecture served as a sleight of optics to foster economic improvement and political stability. It was less style, more content. Literally, the contents of the building: medical machines, cadastral maps, canned foods, air conditioning. In this way, the architect was perceived as a herald and packager of promised technological improvements from afar. And, in many ways, he or she still is perceived as such. And that's a problem worth touching upon.