Kuwait City, Kuwait
This chapter explores the urban identity of Kuwait City in light of the proto-globalised architectural figure of Frank Lloyd Wright and his mythical projects in and around the Persian Gulf. It might seem curious to use Wright’s influence within the Gulf region as a starting point, but as this chapter will show, he was someone who claimed to respect the architecture of the region even if he often muddled his way between Arabian and Persian precedents. For instance, in his 1937 book, Architecture and Modern Life, he mused: ‘the opulent Arab wandered, striking his splendid, gorgeous tents to roam elsewhere. He learned much from the Persian; the Hindu, learning from the same origins.’1 In addition, Wright frequently quoted his admiration for The Arabian Nights tales, and indeed within Wright’s home in Oak Park, Chicago there was an illustration from ‘The Fisherman and the Genii’ in his children’s playroom. Wright was so captivated by these tales that he identified himself as ‘the young Aladdin’ in An Autobiography.2 Wright therefore equated his own powers of creativity with Aladdin’s, and the idea of the rubbing of the lamp became a symbolic expression of his imagination.3 So when Wright was invited to Iraq to design an Opera House for Baghdad in January 1957, it was his chance to prove, unequivocally, his creative genius. The brief for the Opera House was typically inflated by Wright into the need for a much grander ‘Cultural Quarter’ for the city – an unrealisable personal fantasy, but also prophetic of the fantastical projects and the search for cultural identity currently being undertaken on a lavish scale within the Gulf States.
As is well known, Kuwait has experienced a remarkable growth since the Second World War due to its natural oil wealth; indeed, the country changed beyond all recognition from the original settlement dependent on sea trading and pearl fishing. Kuwait City serves as its capital and by far the largest urban conglomeration, possessing in 2012 an estimated 2.38 million people in its metropolitan area (around 90 per cent of the total population). Only a half of the population are Kuwaitis, although most of the non-resident workers come from other Arabic countries and so the ethnic divisions are not as noticeable as in, say, the United Arab Emirates. In this chapter, a brief historical overview will first provide a regional context that considers the influence of Islam, globalising European empires, and post-colonial nation building. Questions will be raised about ‘orientalist’ perceptions of the region as captured in a number of colonial literary texts that portrayed an imagined and exotic Middle East. The mechanisms for planning rapid urbanisation that were adopted in Kuwait will then be discussed and local reactions considered. The relationship between place, culture and architecture within the domain of globalisation will be at the heart of the discussion throughout.
3.1 Postcard of Kuwait City
The later text in this chapter is organised around a number of taxi journeys to specific sites which provided me with a narrative about Kuwait and Frank Lloyd Wright’s influence. My research involved conversations with academics, residents and expatriate immigrants alike; I also collected souvenirs and wrote postcards home, and visited sites in the city centre and in the peripheral suburbs. The act of journeying has long been an inherent part of inspiring and constructing architecture, and in this spirit I will reflect upon my own experience and Wright’s recollections. My observations can only be preliminary and speculative, yet they shed a different view to the contemporary bombastic architecture in so many cities on the western coastline of the Persian Gulf.
THE ARABIAN PENINSULA
Situated at the centre of the region named the Middle East by Eurocentric nations, the Arabian Peninsula was the home of several ancient civilisations and trading routes that helped to foster early global encounters. Lying to the north, the cities of Mesopotamia and Babylon were part of the ‘fertile crescent’ that linked the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, and there was evidence of an advanced Mesopotamian civilisation on Failaka Island, near Kuwait, around 3,000 BC.4 The Arabian race as such were first noted in 850 BC by Assyrian writers, who described them as a ‘nomadic people of the North Arabian desert’; these were of the Adnanais stock, whilst there was also another fairly settled grouping called the Qahtanis to the south and west of the peninsula.5 Alexander the Great famously expanded his Greek Empire eastwards during the 3rd century BC, establishing a fortress on Failaka. The Romans later took command of the whole region at the start of the 1st century AD, and they remained dominant over the next three centuries, protecting their pre-modern trade route – the ‘Silk Route’ – which linked Asia and Europe. The Roman Empire was succeeded in turn by Byzantine and Persian dynasties, with the latter of course predominating on the eastern side of the Persian Gulf.
The Prophet Mohammed was born in 570 or 571 AD in Mecca, and as a result, the peninsula came to have a lasting religious and cultural impact on the surrounding region, and globally. The Prophet established the Islamic faith, which Muslims believe to be ‘the ultimate faith, which completes and perfects the two other heavenly religions – Judaism and Christianity’.6 Islam propagated quickly and by the time of his death in 636 AD, the Prophet Mohammed ‘had succeeded in welding the scatter and idolatrous tribes of the peninsula into one nation worshiping a single, all-powerful god’.7 Thereafter, various caliphates expanded the Islamic faith, and by 711 AD its dominance extended from Spain to Persia. Grube identifies two general concepts that epitomise Islamic architecture: a concentration on the design of interior space, and the absence of specific forms for specific functions.8 He notes, consequently, that ‘Islamic architecture is given to hiding its principal features behind an unrevealing exterior.’9
Similarly, a number of scholars have identified the internal spatial concentration within Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, especially in his non-residential designs, most of which was derived from Japanese architecture.10 However, Wright also at times used thick enveloping masonry walls to separate occupants from the city, and to define the internal spaces, and in this regard there are obvious spatial similarities to traditional Islamic architecture – even if Wright never acknowledged any such link. Nonetheless, when reflecting on past ages of architecture, Wright plotted a history of masonry construction in which he expressed his admiration for the ‘low, heavy, stone dome’11 found in Byzantine architecture, and in particular the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.12 He proceeded to note that in ‘the domed buildings of Persia we see the Byzantine arch still at work’.13 What pleased Wright so much was that these domes managed to resist their outward thrust without the need for concealed chains or a corniced ring beam. He remarked approvingly that their ‘masonry dome was erected as an organic part of the whole structure’.14
Defeat at the hands of the Crusaders in the 11th century, and later attack from Mongols to the east in the 13th century, made Arabians withdraw into a period of comparative ‘retreat and isolation’.15 However, another great Muslim empire, this time founded by Turkish warrior princes, was begun in the 13th century and conquered the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire before proceeding to annex Persia and the coastal Arabian states. For Arabians, the four centuries of Ottoman rule were doubly disappointing, since they had lost their status as rulers of the Islamic world and Arabic culture was no longer seen as dominant.16
A number of ‘orientalist’ narratives emerged during the 19th century as European empires sought to justify their own expansionist agenda in the Middle East. As noted by Edensor, ‘the exotic remains tethered to those consistent themes that emerged under colonial conditions, an imagined, alluring non-Western alterity embodied in styles of clothing, music, dance, art, architecture, and food.’17 This confrontation between western and Ottoman cultures propagated the supposed ‘otherness’ of the region, with Sir Richard Burton being a prototypical example of a colonial adventurer whose roles included those of ‘explorer, spy, linguist, sexologist, translator and a writer.’18 In addition, Burton was responsible for translating and compiling The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, thereby transplanting into the minds of millions of children (such as Frank Lloyd Wright) the mythical world of Aladdin and his Genie. Other colonial writers such as Gustav Flaubert contributed to the exotic perception of the region; nowadays he would be regarded as a predatory sex tourist. T. E. Lawrence originally set out as an archaeologist to survey a number of Crusader castles in the region, but his mapping and linguistic skills made him an ideal British spy and leader of the Arab counter-insurgency against the Ottoman Empire in 1916–1918. Again the colonial script of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Revolt in the Desert was the basis for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), a later iconic film that only embellished the myth.19 Finally, Wilfred Thesiger travelled extensively in the Empty Quarter of the Arabia Pensinsula, documenting the vanishing life of the Bedouins in his book, Arabian Sands (1959); in doing so, he confronted the colonial legacy that was increasingly commodifying the region by recording the traditional everyday activities of desert dwellers.
There was also a sense of ‘orientalism’ within western architectural culture. Frampton identifies the importance of The Grammar of Ornament (1856) by Owen Jones in disseminating ‘other’ cultures to a wider audience of aesthetic thinkers and producers. The book was hence a ‘transcultural, imperialist sweep through the world of ornament demonstrated by implication the relative inferiority of the European/Greco-Roman/medieval legacy compared with the riches of the Orient’.20 Furthermore, there was a link from Owen Jones to Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright as Celtic ‘outsiders’ who ‘searched for an “other” culture with which to overcome the spiritual bankruptcy of the West’, given that it was commonly believed that Celtic art had originated in the Middle East.21 According to Frampton, Sullivan and Wright shared an ‘implicit theology of their work … a conscious fusion of nature and culture’.22 He noted that ‘in Islamic architecture, the written, the woven, and the tectonically inscribed are frequently fused together’, and indeed Wright’s work sought such an integrated ideal.23 Frampton concludes by claiming that Wright’s ‘text-tile tectonic’ was to reach its pinnacle in the layout of Broadacre City, ‘an infinite “oriental rug” as a cross-cultural, ecological tapestry writ large, as an oriental paradise garden combined with the Cartesian grid of the occident.’24
KUWAIT’S BACKGROUND
Despite the importance of Failaka Island in the history of the Persian Gulf, it is known that Kuwait City – which sits opposite Failaka on the mainland – developed separately and also much later on. Its name was derived from the Arabic for ‘a small fort’.25 In 1756, a Danish explorer reported that Kuwait City had 10,000 inhabitants ‘who live on the produce of peals and fishing’, with a fleet of 800 sailing boats.26 By the late-18th century the British were active as maritime invaders keen to protecting their emerging Indian interests, focussing on trade with Basra in southern Iraq. In 1859, Kuwait had signed a pact with the Ottoman Empire, but were somewhat wary of the latter’s power; thus in 1899 it signed a new treaty with Britain which gave greater protection to Kuwait’s sea trade.
The defeat in the First World War of Germany and fellow Axis powers led to the break-up of the already declining Ottoman Empire. Mansfield identifies two contrary trends in the following years among Arabs: on the one hand, there was desire to develop a sense of territorial nationalism to support the countries newly freed from Ottoman rule, and on the other a contrasting demand for ethnic ‘protection and unity’, particularly in light of the emerging Zionist movement in Palestine.27 Whilst Kuwait’s borders were already fairly defined and strongly supported by Britain by this point, its newer neighbours tended to consist of amalgamations of different tribes and alliances within national borders which had simply never existed previously. These new nations – Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia – had been engineered largely by the British Empire as an attempt to dilute Arab influence, a solution which unsurprisingly has not led to long-term peace in the region. As early as 1920, Kuwait came under attack from neighbouring tribes, requiring the building of a new city wall to control the access to its capital from the west. There have been three successive Gulf conflicts rooted in the contradictory aspirations of separate national identity and the concept of a pan-Arabic state. Kuwait has suffered badly in all three conflicts, being occupied by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces in 1990–1991 under the premise of creating a wider Ba’athist Arabic movement.28 A coalition of forces led by ‘Pax America’ liberated Kuwait, and, conveniently for the western powers, managed to restore the agreed boundaries and the all-important distribution of oil reserves.
Oil had been first discovered in Kuwait in 1934, but it was not commercially extracted until after the Second World War. Kuwait City had hitherto been an excellent example of an integrated desert settlement with a protective outer wall, an organically ordered town plan formed by layers of accretion, close-knit low-rise buildings with narrow lanes, and a visibly democratic city of generally no higher than two-storey structures. However, by 1950 Kuwait City’s population had leapt to 150,000, of which almost a half were now immigrant workers, and traffic congestion was becoming acute. This led the Kuwaiti government in 1951 to commission Minoprio, Spencely and Macfarlane to prepare a master-plan. This new vision for Kuwait City was based on the British New Town precedent, with a comprehensive road network, clear zoning for different uses, and a protective ‘green belt’. The British firm had recently completed the plan for Crawley in West Sussex, with Minoprio admitting: ‘We didn’t know anything much about the Muslim world and the Kuwaitis wanted … a new city.’29 Gardiner noted that the proposal ‘was primarily a road plan – [which] arose from the five gateways of the wall.’30 Or as Jamal wrote acidly in the Architects’ Journal in 1973, this first master-plan ‘was simply the imposition of western technology onto an established Arab society’.31
Kuwait City gained independence along with the rest of the country in 1961, and its urban growth continued; by 1970 the population had soared to 733,000, of which only 47 per cent were Kuwaiti. A second master-plan was commissioned, this time from another British practice, Colin Buchanan and Partners.32 However, neither the design process nor the resulting master-plan proved at all successful, given that indigenous Kuwaiti architects and planners were by now beginning to question the wisdom of bringing in foreign consultants. The debate highlighted a growing sense of cultural confrontation. In the same Architects’ Journal