At the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale OMA-AMO’s exhibition, The Gulf, presented the Arab Gulf states to the world. Depicted as a promised land for contemporary architects, OMA argued that the Gulf was the “final tabula rasa on which new identities can be inscribed.” The promotion of the Gulf countries in the exhibition emphasized their position as client states in the global architecture market, with several millennia of civilization (and architecture) dismissed in favor of promoting new cities, new urbanism, and new architectural repertoires.
In the two decades since, the contender for most spectacular set of architectural projects in the region has not been the product of new financial capitals, but a set of urban and architectural commissions within the historic city of Muharraq in Bahrain. Works by Christian Kerez, Valerio Olgiati, Office KGDVS, Atelier Bow-Wow, FormaFantasma, Leopold Banchini, and Studio Anne Holtrop have regularly placed the small island nation in the spotlight of architectural media—all part of a plan to promote the Pearling Path and the narrative of the historic pearl trade in Bahrain.
The official UNESCO listing for the Muharraq Pearling Path is “Pearling, Testimony of an Island Economy.” The testimony in the title refers to the initial question of how to tell the story of the Bahrain pearling trade through an architectural narrative. Bahrain has exported pearls since antiquity, but the trade peaked between the 19th and early 20th centuries when pearls that were previously sold regionally found access to European markets through the British Empire’s control of the subcontinent. The industry boomed in Bahrain’s former capital of Muharraq where many of the tawaweesh, or pearl merchants, were based. During the 19th century, Bahrain’s pearling fleets made up the majority of pearling vessels in the Gulf and pearls were Bahrain’s primary export until the 1930s: The industry collapsed due to both the advent of Japanese cultured pearls and discovery of oil. This hastened Bahrain’s transition away from its pearl-centered economy toward a modern financial capital with oil-centered infrastructure. The construction of highways and new towns pulled people out of the old city, and moved to new suburbs. The cramped alleyways and traditional courtyard homes were abandoned in favor of newly built cities like Isa Town and Hamad Town. Finally, in 1977, Muharraq’s core was encircled by a new ring road, cutting it off from the sea.
Securing UNESCO Status for Muharraq Pearling Path
Over time the city center became a heterogeneous combination of historic coral buildings with new concrete apartment buildings, shops, garages, and cars cramping whatever space was left over. Interspersed between the older buildings were new apartment buildings, shops and garages, and cars cramping whatever space was left over. It was in response to this changed urban fabric of Muharraq that in 2002 Shaikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa decided to establish the Shaikh Ebrahim Center for Culture and Research in Fareej al Shiukh, a district in the heart of old Muharraq. Shaikha Mai became undersecretary at the Ministry of Information and Culture later that year and Minister of Culture in 2008 (the Ministry of Culture would branch into the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities, or BACA, in 2015, the current cultural authority in Bahrain). There was an interest in countering the increasing abandonment that pervaded Muharraq by bringing in cultural programming and renovating the neighborhood’s dilapidated homes, and the nonprofit cultural center initiated the first pilot project, renovating five properties with local architecture firm Gulf House Engineering. With her appointment as Minister of Culture, Shaikha Mai advocated for a UNESCO listing for Muharraq as a way of protecting parts of the Muharraq fabric and expanding the restoration efforts beyond the scope of the nonprofit. Using a strategy similar to Bahrain’s first UNESCO listing from 2005, the Bahrain Fort, a nomination dossier was prepared for Muharraq by Dr. Britta Rudolph five years later. By 2012, the World Heritage Committee approved the Pearling Path, giving Bahrain its second World Heritage Site.
The Pearling Path was never a defined route through the city, but a rather loose circuit about 3 kilometers long. The route connected sites including three hayrat (off-shore oyster beds), a portion of Muharraq’s shoreline, significant houses, merchant stalls, warehouses, mosques, and a fort. In addition to restoration, the Pearling Path plan defined a larger, protected buffer zone around the path—protecting the core neighborhoods through new building codes and facade regulations. The Management Plan emphasized “architectural conservation, urban upgrading, historical and anthropological research and the creation of visitor and interpretation facilities.” The Management Plan set in place a cultural and urban strategy—specifying nodes within the urban fabric and a path that connected them as well as which buildings to renovate and which public policies to employ, but there was not a design language driving the project.
In 2010 a design competition was organized by the Ministry of Culture to define the urban strategy for the Pearling Path, including signage, wayfinding, lighting, and paving. But the competition was deemed unsuccessful: The entries were seen as “intrusive” by the committee. That same year marked Bahrain’s first participation in the Venice Architecture Biennale, where it won the Golden Lion. Biennale curator Noura Al Sayeh, an EPFL graduate who had joined the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities (BACA) the year before, was then asked to recommend architects for projects in Muharraq and elsewhere in Bahrain. Al Sayeh began by recommending Office KGDVS, recipient of the Silver Lion in Venice that year, to propose a design for the Dar Jinaa building, a performing space in the southern portion of the Path. After that design, the studio also issued a proposal for the Path’s urban strategy.
It was Office KGDVS’s collaboration with Bureau Bas Smets that first defined the Pearling Path as a route, creating sixteen public parks (Pearl Squares) and oyster-shell terrazzo light poles that weave through the dendritic streets of Muharraq. The selection of architects for the Pearling Path continued to be spearheaded by Noura Al Sayeh, who would become directly involved with the Path in 2015 as the Head of Architectural Affairs at BACA. The driving interest was to commission architects who “had a generous understanding of publicness and whose work could play a flexible role in the city,” Al Sayeh told AN. When asked about the appropriate formal language for integrating into the city, Al Sayeh also spoke of allowing the newer concrete buildings to establish a rhythm alongside the older coral buildings: “The seriality between the buildings, parking structures, and squares has brought a kind of identity and legibility to Muharraq.”
To fund the Pearling Path initiative, a portion of the costs was covered by the Bahraini government, while the rest came via a low-interest loan from the Islamic Development Bank (IDB). The loan was granted in 2014, but the IDB had several requests that would widen the scope of the Pearling Path vision. According to Al Sayeh, the IDB “had not done urban revitalization plans before, and their financial mechanisms were more suited to addressing the the contemporary needs of a city.” The IDB mandate to fund development projects meant that in addition to issuing a loan for the conservation plan, the bank was interested in the Muharraq project becoming more than the renovation project alone. The brief was expanded to tackle more urban issues, including the addition of parking structures to resolve the lack of parking in the dense city fabric. “The bank gave us the legitimacy to act on an urban level,” Ghassan Chemali, an urban heritage consultant for BACA, told AN in an interview.
Two Decades of Work in Bahrain
There are roughly three phases to the Pearling Path. The first consists of the initial pilot projects by the Shaikh Ebrahim Center phase which lasted from 2002 to 2012 and focused on small-scale renovations prior to official recognition. The second phase, from 2012 to 2018, saw the implementation of the Pearling Path as a spatial narrative and the first of the architect-designed works: Office KGDVS, Studio Anne Holtrop, Leopold Banchini, and Atelier Bow-Wow. These projects complemented the existing Pearling Path fabric with new programs, introducing architecture exhibition spaces, a library, and a cafe. By 2018, a walk from north to south would be populated by path lighting designed by Office KGDVS, and punctuated by a few shaded public squares and a handful of new projects. While a majority of the Pearling Path historic buildings were inaccessible at this time, the larger spatial moves were becoming legible, and the new commissions appeared within the city fabric. It was this urban experience that won Aga Khan Award in 2019, celebrating the “Revitalization of Muharraq.” Al Sayeh told AN that “[The Pearling Path] is not the first UNESCO World Heritage serial nomination, but it invented a way to bring together an urban site that was no longer intact.”
The third and final period that just finished this year saw the majority of Path properties completed, paving and pathlights installed, building facades around the site renovated, and larger projects funded by the IDB take shape through direct commissions: the visitor center by Valerio Olgiati, four parking lots by Christian Kerez, and the Siyadi Museum by Studio Anne Holtrop.
With the opening of the Pearling Path in February of this year under the new BACA president, Shaikh Khalifa Bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, the totality of the Path vision is now accessible after over two decades of work. The opening serves as a moment for reflection, allowing visitors to both see the Path and evaluate the efforts it required. The first two phases of the Pearling Path ran counter to the Dubai strategy, eschewing grand architectural gestures in favor of tactical interventions and small programmatic additions. But the third deployed a more ambitious scale—interventions that run the risk of “jumping the shark,” or overpowering the historic center. The four parking structures occupy key sites in the city, but also tower over the entry points to the historic district, prompting questions about whether a more innocuous strategy like underground parking—or a more ambitious direction, like converting portions of the city center into pedestrian-only zones—would have been more appropriate.
Defining the Future of Muharraq
Looking forward, there are initiatives by BACA to program some of the newer buildings, infill projects to be completed, and facade renovations to be done in the buffer zone. While the architectural and urban ambitions have been fulfilled, the long-term goal of converting Muharraq to a lively residential neighborhood and encouraging the preservation of houses by locals will be more difficult. New stakeholders like the Ministry for Housing and Urban Planning & Development Authority have recently been involved in new projects in Muharraq, meaning the future of the neighborhood and how it evolves around the Pearling Path will become more apparent in the years to come. An expert working on the Path noted that “there is now an attractive and novel quality to Muharraq, but there remains the question of how to get the community involved: It is unclear what impact the projects will have on the life of the city.”
As the community incorporates the buildings into its daily life, the top-down narrative of the Pearling Path as a set of contemporary structures with a public disposition will be reevaluated. While it garnered accolades and media coverage, the last decade of work on the Pearling Path was also conducted with a distinct lack of local or regional architects. The efforts to project Muharraq outward have been an architectural and marketing success, as European talents delivered exciting work in a new context. Yet the past decade and a half of architecture commissions could have been used as a platform to develop the local architecture community in a similar way—the last Bahraini firm involved as designers on the projects ended their participation in 2012. As a cultural strategy, the explicit goal had been to communicate the Pearling Path’s narrative coherently through architecture and urban intervention, which has been successful. Yet the Path was unable to make use of the opportunity for local capacity building—integrating the process of building the Path into cultivating a restoration and design community to sustain it. If the Path can be praised for avoiding the starchitect craze of the neighboring Gulf states, it cannot be praised for having found an alternative.
What makes the Pearling Path most exciting is not just the variety of urban strategies, or the Who’s Who list of your favorite architect’s favorite architects. Instead, it’s the vision for the Gulf city based on the consolidation of existing city fabric and strategic piecemeal development. Rather than promoting a tabula rasa condition or the novelty of new cities and future utopias, as has been so often the case over the past century of architecture media in the Gulf, the Pearling Path narrative suggests another Gulf to its audience. The Arab city here is not an empty terrain where new identities can be inscribed, but one whose identity has been built over time and can be revealed through architectural intervention.
Ali Ismail Karimi is an architect and educator based in Bahrain and cofounder of Civil Architecture. Civil Architecture completed commissions from Noura Al Sayeh and BACA. Karimi has worked with OFFICE KGDVS and Gulf House Engineering.
