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Think of contemporary architecture in the Gulf and you might think of gilded towers rising from the desert, eye-popping “iconic” museums, and artificial islands carved into ever more fanciful shapes. But, sandwiched between the petrodollar glitz of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, there is an enclave that has been quietly bucking the trend.
In Bahrain’s old capital of Muharraq, a place of winding low-rise streets studded with markets and minarets, a project has been under way over the last two decades that goes against the usual penchant for brash bling. It takes the form of a two-mile (3.2km) route that meanders through the densely packed city, linking new public squares and cultural venues, combining careful conservation with daring contemporary interventions. the Pearling Path shows how the treatment of a Unesco world heritage site doesn’t have to mean choosing between preserving a place in aspic, or resorting to Disneyfied pastiche.
“One of the main motivations was to protect Muharraq,” says Noura Al Sayeh, the Palestinian architect who has led the project for Bahrain’s Authority of Culture and Antiquities since 2009. “A lot of historic structures were being demolished and Unesco designation seemed like one of the only ways to protect them, while local legislation was being revised.”
The world heritage site, inscribed in 2012, consists of 17 buildings that each relate to a different part of Bahrain’s historic pearl-diving industry, along with three offshore oyster beds and a fortress on the southern tip of the island, where pearling boats once launched. The linear route stretches from the southern shore to a museum in the north, telling the story of the pearling economy, which was Bahrain’s biggest industry until the discovery of oil in the 1930s. The crumbling coral stone buildings, beautifully renovated by Studio Gionata Rizzi, range from the humble home of a pearl-diver to the lavish mansions of the wealthiest merchants and ship-owning families, with their exquisitely ornamented reception rooms.
Forming an architectural breadcrumb trail, the route is marked by distinctive lamp-posts made of concrete flecked with mother of pearl and topped with pearl-shaped globes. They link a sequence of new public spaces where groves of trees shade benches and drinking fountains, providing welcome oases that come alive every evening. “They were conceived as small living rooms in the city,” says Al Sayeh. Muharraq is home to a lot of migrant workers, who live together in cramped conditions, and these squares give them space to breathe, call their family and have some time to themselves.
Al Sayeh joined the project as a young architecture graduate from EPFL university in Switzerland, and she was trusted with recommending architects for the Pearling Path’s contemporary additions. The result reads like an outdoor museum of fashionable Swiss, Belgian and Dutch firms, each given space to do their thing – and, on occasion, perhaps a bit too much free rein.
One of the first projects was the Dar Al Muharraq, a performance venue designed by Belgian firm Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen. Its three floors are draped with a chain mail mesh veil, hoisted up like a theatre curtain to allow the open-air fjiri performances – folk music of the pearl divers – to spill out on to the street. The same architects also worked on the squares, with Bas Smets (mastermind of the landscape plan for Notre Dame Cathedral, where they brought a similar theatrical sensibility, creating charming urban stages, where kids play ballgames while their grandparents gossip over tea.
A few blocks away, the architectural volume is cranked up by Valerio Olgiati, a cultish Swiss figure courted by the likes of Kanye West and Travis Scott. His monumental Pearling Path visitor centre stands with the imposing air of a pharaonic funerary complex, hemmed in by high, faceted concrete walls. A forest of minaret-like towers holds a vast concrete canopy 10 metres aloft, while an enigmatic bunker houses an exhibition space – a raw, dark concrete room with a sepulchral air.
“The brief was just for a small visitor centre within the larger archaeological site,” says Al Sayeh. “Olgiati came with a proposal that covered the entire site, which was not what the brief asked for. But he was right: the project needed a larger gesture, at the scale of the city.”
His huge canopy notionally covers the ruins of some old warehouses, but large cutouts in the roof mean it gives little protection from the elements. Instead, it provides a dramatic frame for what is essentially a vast outdoor room for events. During the recent Muharraq Nights, an annual festival of music, art and food, the space was heaving with families, who had come to marvel more at Olgiati’s sci-fi edifice than the ruins beneath it. They goggled and gawped, as if momentarily transported to a film set from Dune, while a band filled the air with boisterous beats.
The future-primitive aesthetic continues in the renovation of the nearby Qaisariah souq, built with the elemental look of something from the Flintstones. Its simple slab roof is held up by rows of gnarled concrete boulders, which were formed by part-filling the moulds with piles of sand. It is the work of Anne Holtrop, a Dutch architect who now runs his studio from a converted warehouse nearby (and is married to Al Sayeh). He took a similarly geological approach to an office building a few streets away, where the concrete walls and floors were cast directly on to the earth. It features gigantic aluminium window shutters, similarly cast on to rough beds of sand in a foundry in the Netherlands, which make it feel like heaving a tectonic plate each time you close the blinds.
“I am inspired by Richard Serra,” says Holtrop. “I like the idea that architecture can be a pure sculptural act, without any drawing.” His studio is certainly more like that of a sculptor’s, a wunderkammer of material experiments filled with slabs of baked glass, lumps of bronze, and a marble model for a house, which weighs more than a tonne. “I’m particularly interested in the act of forming matter using another matter,” he adds, “in the way that float glass is cast on to molten tin. I cast concrete on to sand or earth, without predetermining the form.”
Most recently, Holtop has brought his alchemical touch to the Siyadi Pearl Museum, housed in the former residence of a wealthy merchant family. As well as restoring the historic property, the project includes a new block with rough textured plaster walls inside and out, giving it a semi-ruined look. “I asked the workers to throw plaster at the walls, then scrape it with the biggest beam they could find,” says Holtrop, who clearly revels in the ad-hoc possibilities that Bahrain’s informal construction culture allows. He had one of the galleries lined with silver leaf, then cooked pots of black salt to accelerate its oxidation, lending the space a dark, inky shimmer – a fitting backdrop to the lustrous pearls on show.
The Pearling Path generally manages to tread the fine line between conservation and intervention, with the tough heft of the new additions mostly complementing the earthy fabric of Muharraq. But its final element, completed last year, feels like a step of architectural hubris too far. Dotting the length of the route are four multistorey car parks designed by Swiss architect Christian Kerez, who seems to have interpreted the brief as an exercise in pushing the acrobatic limits of concrete to an absurdist conclusion.
The slabs of his parking structures ripple and billow, like the leaves of a huge filo pastry, as if some slices of baklava from one of the local sweetshop windows had been inflated towards the sky. Standing like stacks of skateparks connected by corkscrew stairs, they were fiendishly complex to build, necessitating the drawing of 75,000 cross-sections to cut the wooden formwork moulds on site.
Given that the Pearling Path celebrates the joys of walking along a pedestrianised route, it seems anathema to build these extravagant temples to the car. And many drivers appear hesitant to take their expensive SUVs on Kerez’s undulating rollercoaster ride. The structures were designed to double up as multipurpose events spaces, but it’s hard not to think that, if so much parking was essential, it would have been a better idea to bury it underground.
These extravagant automotive sculptures also add yet more concrete to the bill. For all its architectural merits, the Pearling Path can look like a gratuitous advert for carbon consumption. Were more sustainable materials considered?
“There are few alternatives here,” Al Sayeh insists. “Any timber has to be imported from thousands of miles away and it doesn’t fare well in the hot, humid climate. Coral stone is now protected, and Bahrain’s only stone quarry got depleted a few years ago. Our challenge is to make the concrete more environmentally friendly, using recycled aggregate and being economic with the formwork.”
The project, overall, is an admirable achievement, balancing the pressures of tourism, preservation and local amenity with rare craft and panache. For future commissions, now that Muharraq is on the architectural map, the ministry might do well to think outside the white male European stable, and use its powers to give a stage to talent closer to home.
