Column
Paul Finch’s letter from London Celebrating universal values in the Gulf
awards are made – this year only five from a shortlist of 19. So to win one is a real achievement, and congratulations
The Gulf has been a busy place recently, architecturally speaking. The Formula 1 finale in Abu Dhabi showed off Asymptote’s splendid hotel design, recently described in these columns. Then last week Norman Foster and the Queen unveiled his ‘falcon wing’ monument to the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan to general acclaim, and also celebrated the Masdar low-carbon scheme which, whatever may happen in terms of programme changes and economic pressures, has made Abu Dhabi a symbol for thinking about a very different energy economy. Foster + Partners deserved some plaudits after the bizarre
story a week earlier suggesting that they had designed a tower in Las Vegas that was incapable of being built. This generated ludicrous headlines (as usual) blaming the architect. Anyone who knows anything about Las Vegas knows that construction costs there are 20 per cent higher than comparable US cities because of, ahem, the power and influence of ‘organised labour’. You get the picture. So how does a 49-storey tower suddenly become 28
storeys, and then a candidate for demolition before construction is completed? Let’s say someone ‘forgets’ to put the specified steel reinforcement into the foundations. So it will not be possible to building 49 storeys. What has been provided will only support 28 storeys. The client is worried about the market situation so maybe a smaller block is better. Work proceeds but the client is still worried about the market, and the cost of construction. So back to square one. The lawsuits will be interesting, to put it mildly. No doubt The Sunday Times will keep blaming the architect.
The extraordinary Wadi Hanifa Wetlands regeneration project in Riyadh is a landscape and environmental triumph
But back to happier matters in the Gulf, and in particular
Doha, where the tenth iteration of the Aga Khan Awards was presented in I M Pei’s museum, also mentioned here recently. One can only marvel at the rigour and consistency of these awards, made every three years for architecture in the Islamic world, that world being increasingly broadly defined on the basis of community rather than national boundary. The projects need not be, though could be, religious, traditional, conservationist or contemporary in approach. All are subject to technical analysis before final
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The Wadi Hanifa Wetlands regeneration programme in Riyadh was an Aga Khan Award-winner (right)
aj 02.12.10
from a British perspective to Rod Macdonald and his team at Buro Happold, who engineered the extraordinary Wadi Hanifa Wetlands regeneration project in Riyadh, a landscape and environmental triumph. In some respects, despite not being a building, it typifies the values of the award: a recognition and understanding of the past; a thorough analysis of what could be achieved in a given context; the application of the latest design and engineering thinking to the problem; and controlled delivery of a project which will be both aesthetically and practically beneficial. Buro Happold worked with Canadian landscape
architects Moriyama & Teshima on this 10-year project, which included removing 1.25 million cubic metres of construction waste; restoration of the wadi channel as part of a 20-year flood plan; and creation of bio-remediation facilities that have transformed what was a desert of mineral extraction, rubbish dumping and environmental degradation. This is infrastructure design of a very high order, covering a catchment area of 4,000,000m2
and
stretching 120km. Google Aga Khan Awards and you can see for yourself
how impressive this project is, along with the other four winners, including one from China. As ever with this programme, those gathered for the awards ceremony celebrated certain universal values in respect of architectural thinking, and an attitude to community that is essentially humanist, though prompted by spiritual values. This applied as much to a winning building by the Turkish architects EAA (a textile factory), as to the Wadi project: quite different programmes, but an underlying respect for history and the citizens who are either beneficiaries or victims of the world that architects and engineers create.
AGA KHAN FOUNDATION
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