12/5/2023 0 Comments Scott wilson mnml![]() ![]() These segregated towns were the start of the ‘single-male-labourer’ housing model in the Gulf region today. The lead architect, James Mollison Wilson, had worked with Edwin Lutyens in India during his youth, and it was this, perhaps, that made Al-Ahmadi a hybrid of a British New Town and a British-Indian colonial town. The town was split into 3 sections, with Brits and Americans in the northern section, Indians and Pakistanis in the middle section, and Arabs and Iranians in the southern ‘Arab Village’. It introduced the detached villa to Kuwait, which is today almost the only housing typology for locals.Īl-Ahmadi was also racially segregated like Aramco’s Saudi and American camps, Anglo-Persian’s earlier oil-town in Abadan, Iran, and Corbusier’s contemporaneous masterplan for Algiers. This was designed as a more sprawling version of an English Garden Suburb, with winding lanes, grassy front lawns, pitched roofs and fully functioning fireplaces and chimneys. KOC then appointed the British firm Wilson Mason & Partners to design the town of Al-Ahmadi. In 1934, the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later British-Petroleum) and the American-owned Gulf Oil created the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) as a joint venture. Aramco job ads of the time stressed that the nascent cities were more American than America, with imported turkeys for Thanksgiving and one memorable ad containing a photograph of four blond boys playing baseball, with the caption ‘Jeffrey of Arabia’. Dammam is where Aramco’s headquarter is located today, and one of Saudi Arabia’s largest cities. An image of Texas in Arabia.Īramco, currently the world’s largest company, then masterplanned the cities of Ras Tanura, Abuqaiq, Dammam, and Khobar. This was the Gulf region’s first western piece of urban planning, consisting of an orthogonal gridiron street network and detached villas with pitched roofs. ![]() In 1938 the California-Arabian Standard Oil Company (a subsidiary of Standard Oil of California and later renamed the Arabian-American Oil Company, or ARAMCO) built a ‘Saudi camp’ and an ‘American camp’ for its workers in eastern Saudi Arabia. Cain’s concept of ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’, where the first modern institutions established by the Political Agents were typically those of finance and coercion: the banks and police. Each new state followed a familiar pattern of development that tracked closely with Peter J. The term “British quality” was often used in Foreign Office memos, and appeared in the pamphlet “Hints to Business Men Visiting the Persian Gulf,” issued by the Board of Trade in 1960. Teams of political residents and agents were dispatched to the Arabian peninsula with the goal of protecting British oil interests, removing threats to those interests, guiding local rulers, and perhaps most importantly: to ensure that oil revenues were used to purchase products and services from British companies. The historian Elizabeth Monroe referred to this period as ‘Britain’s Moment in the Middle East’. ![]() This all took place while much of the region was still formally (with the exception of Saudi Arabia) under British protectorate status.Īramco job ads of the time stressed that the nascent cities were more American than America Oil was discovered by British and later American oil companies, and new cities were masterplanned by British and American planners. In the Arabian peninsula state formation, oil discovery, and urban planning were all inextricably tied together by the hand of Britain’s imperial political agents.īetween World War One and 1970 these states were formed according to British political goals, their earliest institutions created with British oversight. So did the masterplans of Doha, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Dubai. But the masterplan for Kuwait did precisely this. The British New Towns could not up-turn the culture, social relations, living standards of Britain on a national level. In the words of the planner Sir Anthony Minoprio, the British New Towns were “great social experiments.” His firm would go on to design Kuwait as we know it. But the Arabian peninsula figures neither in the discussion of British New Towns, nor in discussions of Modernism, nor British colonial architecture. They may also discuss neighbourhood planning projects based on Modernist principles such as Karl-Marx-Hof, Pruitt-Igoe, the Barbican, the Bijlmermeer, etc. What if I told you that Kuwait is the cousin of Crawley and that Doha is the sibling of Milton Keynes? There is an Orwellian memory-hole in the architecture community, and it relates to 20th century western design and planning in the Arabian peninsula.īooks and exhibitions on modern and Modernist city planning typically discuss famous case studies such as the City Beautiful movement, Garden Cities, Ville Radieuse, the New Towns Act of 1946, and the Voisin Plan.
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