Michael Kubo

SUMMARY: This panel will discuss the local and cross-cultural influences that led to modernization and urban transformation in Gulf cities after the 1950s. The discussion will revolve around the role of architecture in shaping the built environment of these new cities, analyzing their development at the intersection of state-driven visions and ambitions, modernist design practices and their implementation, and construction techniques and labor imported and adapted to these local contexts. Among the Gulf states, Kuwait played an early and outsized role in constructing these new global processes of exchange. One of the first Gulf states to fully nationalize its oil industry, by the 1970s Kuwait was the third-largest oil producer in the Gulf after Saudi Arabia and Iran, extraordinary figures given its relatively minute size. Beyond the state's newfound regional importance, exemplified by the creation of an unprecedented framework for lending international aid for development projects in the Arab world, the most immediately visible impacts of Kuwait's wealth were at home. Within a few years of the exploitation in earnest of the nation's oil reserves after World War II, the state embarked on an ambitious program of urban clearance and modernization that would fundamentally alter the structure of the city center. The correlated motivations that informed the processes of modernization in the Gulf states remain at the threshold of architectural theory, postcolonial critique, and studies of visual culture. Taking Kuwait as a case study for understanding these broader processes of exchange, this panel seeks to shed light on the often overlooked relationships between acclaimed modern architects from abroad and local firms and actors in the region. Unfolding the complex dynamics of these transnational relationships, the session will explore counterpoints to the binary narratives that have governed descriptions of modern architecture in the non-West, dominated by an emphasis either on "first world" influences on 20th-century architecture and urban development or on locality and critical regionalism as forms of resistance. Recent literature on Kuwait's post-oil development has focused on the social, political, economic factors that underlay the nation's modernization, and has tended to reinforce the conventional dualism of "tradition versus modernity." In contrast to such models, this panel will explore ways in which the erection of the modern Gulf city was achieved through networks of collaboration between local and international architects, contextualizing these design practices and the architectural intentions and reciprocal benefits behind these exchanges.