NBK Headquarters: The New Skyscraper

By Hessa AlHabshi
Photos Courtesy of www.skyscrapercity.com

A new skyscraper will be marking its spot alongside those in Kuwait City, making a great addition to Kuwait’s skyline. I, for one, am excited to see a new architectural landmark in Kuwait. I mean, I can’t be the only one sick of seeing instagrammers post a million photos of Al Hamra tower but in different angles.

The new building that will be following the lineup, is NBK’s (National Bank of Kuwait) headquarters, which will be located in the heart of Kuwait City. It will consist of 60 floors, will be 300 meters long (as tall as AlRaya Tower) and 120,000m2. The international design consultants of the projects are Foster + Partners, and the local tower consultants are SSH.

The tower’s design originated from the shape of the pearl's shell which is highly symbolic of Kuwait’s history and heritage, culture and economy.  it is also environment-friendly. This green building will contain cutting edge technology and is Gold LEED certified.

The new headquarters building will not only be a place that will act as a financial centre, but it will also have an archive museum that will display historical items from the bank and Kuwait.

Urban Amnesia

By Ali Al Yousifi

About a month ago, Kuwait came under a heavy sandstorm. Just like any other sandstorm, visibility dramatically decreased, so much so that the tops of skyscrapers started to fade into blank greyness. Looking across Kuwait City revealed a view with buildings ominously disappearing into the dust.

It was as if the dust was slowly erasing our urban landscape. I felt that I might wake up the next day and find that Kuwait City’s skyscrapers have vanished into thin air; maybe all I’ll find is a desert, a blank slate that we’ll have to rebuild all over again.

           But would that be a bad thing?  What if the next sandstorm did take all our buildings with it, would we rebuild our city better? Are we proud of what we already built? Do we want a chance to start over? If this idea of completely rebuilding a functioning city seems strange, it shouldn’t! Because Kuwait already did that in the 50s and 60s. We completely destroyed our mud city and built a concrete city.

Can we do that again? Do we want to?

T-Print: Issue One

By T-Square

T-Square has just started a new newsletter-type publication: T-Print. The newsletter consists of a single A5 page containing an image and a short article. T-Print issues will be distributed in printed form in the 5KH building in Kuwait University’s Khaldiya campus, and they will also be published on this blog.

This newsletter was inspired by the AA’s Fulcrum weekly publication. This is the first issue of T-Print:

(click on the images to enlarge)

Front

Back

What is Street Art?

By Hessa Al Habashi

Street art is in fact - and I know this will come as a surprise to many of you - art on the streets. Now when does street art stop being "art" and tread on the surface of vandalism? This is a question that many have different answers to, but I'd say that whatever is easy on the eyes is more art than vandalism in my book.

Faking Nature

By Ali Al Yousifi

If you’ve visited the Grand Avenue in the Avenues Mall, you might have noticed that the palm trees lining the boulevard are all fake. What does it mean to ‘plant’ a fake plastic tree?

I was also walking along Damascus Road the other day, when I noticed that the grass between the two sides of the road was greener that usual. It turned out that it was fake. It’s like the plastic grass used in the small football fields popping up all around Kuwait.

 I can’t deny that it looked elegant, especially with the white pebbles bordering the patches of grass. But I’m not sure I like the idea of fake grass. I can’t help thinking that vegetation needs to be alive: it has to live and die and change with seasons.

On the other hand, it does look beautiful. And if I hadn’t learnt that it was fake, I would have been even more impressed with the way it looked. So does it matter whether these green blades are made of plant cells or recycled plastic? 

Streets of Chaos: Kuwaiti Style

By Ali Al Yousifi

A pink house!

Walk (well, we all know that’s not going to happen… just drive then) down any residential street in Kuwait and witness the shocking chaos. Compare any two houses on that street and most probably the size, shape, and color of each house will be completely different from the other. Even the sidewalks will be different; some houses will have parking spaces, some will have palm trees, some will have Conocarpus hedges, some will be paved, some won’t, and some will even have random piles of sand (What’s going on with these piles of sand in front of houses?).

A bright-yellow house!

The bottom line is that here in Kuwait, we don’t really care about architectural unity in our residential streets. Kuwait’s municipality gives freedom to every home owner to design the outer appearance of their house as they wish, with very little restrictions. Compare this phenomenon with other cities around the world that place strict rules on the building aesthetics in order to create visual unity. One example of this is the Greek island Mykonos, where all the houses are of about the same size, they’re all rectilinear in form, and they’re all painted white. 

A purple house with red window frames!

In fact, we don’t even need to review examples from around the world; let’s just take Kuwait City, but sixty years ago. Most houses were a single story high (maximum two), they were all rectilinear in form, and they were all built with mud. Walking down a Kuwaiti street before oil revenues allowed us the luxuries of concrete houses and asphalt roads revealed a visual unity that we have long lost. 

A house with green and blue stripes!

The question here is: should we attempt to create visual unity in our residential streets? Should Kuwait’s municipality place rules on the shape and color of houses? Or should people have the freedom to choose exactly how they want their houses to look (as ridiculous as those choices may be)?

An orange house!

I’ve thought about this questions many times, and I still can’t decide what I’d prefer. Yes, having our streets lined with houses of a similar aesthetic would give our neighborhoods an elegant beauty, but I can’t deny that I sometimes enjoy the randomness of our streets. There’s something quite honest and authentic about having each house reflect the personalities and preferences of its inhabitants. Also, we can see it a physical manifestation of democracy and personal freedom, where every individual is able to express his ideals on the façade of his home.

A dark-brown house!

But what do you think? Should people be allowed to design their houses however way they want, or should Kuwait’s Municipality place restrictions?

Another pink house!

Successful Vs. Unsuccessful Public Housing

By Hessa Al Habshi

Collapsing Pruitt-Igoe Buildings (source)

"Public Housing is a form of housing tenure in which the property is owned by a government authority, which may be central or local." (Wikipedia)

In Kuwait, as soon as you mention public housing, people's thoughts immediately go to AlSawaber complex, if they have ever heard about it (God knows I hadn't before the start of this semester).  AlSawaber is a Kuwaiti housing project, located in the center of Kuwait City, that was built in 1976. It was supposed to be a beautiful complex but now it’s a breeding ground for vandalism and crime. The economy has deserted it, and now some of the buildings have not been maintained by their residents, leaving it ‘unfit for living’.

AlSawaber (source)

Another failed public housing project is the infamous Pruitt-Igoe, which was supposed to put the modernist ideals of Le Corbusier into action. They knocked down the houses in the ‘slums’ and replaced it with thirty-three buildings, eleven-storeys each and arranged them in the poor Desoto-Carr neighborhood in St. Louis. They wanted a place for all the poor people living in the area.  Although it was a success in the beginning, when it had been constantly maintained by staff, it soon declined. 
            It had been such an upgrade for the people living in it, one woman went as far as to call it the ‘poor man’s penthouse’, and everyone was finally liberated from the slums. But then everything went south when, like AlSawaber, the government abandoned it and no one was taking care of their building. The elevators broke down repeatedly and it was a prime place where people got mugged. The hallways were in disastrous states, and in buildings that were unsafe and unsanitary, slumlords were able to jam a large sum of people in small apartments. The area was notorious for violence, vandalism and chaos. Even though many, including the architect, Minoru Yamaski, thought that the project might bloom, it did the opposite and finally was put out of it’s misery and went boom! The buildings were demolished except for the school, Gateway Institute of Technology.

Aerial view of Pruitt-Igoe (source)

Harlem River Houses (source)

But not all public housing projects were failures. An example of successful public housing is Harlem River Houses, which are actually said to be the most successful public housing in all of New York City.
            The thing is I don't think AlSawaber should suffer the same fate as Pruitt-Igoe. I don't think that it should be demolished... AlSawaber was, and still is, a great idea. If it's maintained, it would be just as successful as the Harlem River Houses. I wouldn't mind living in an apartment, unlike many people in this country, and I can't be the only one.

Architectural Mixed Signals

By Ali Al Yousifi

               Have you ever walked into a building and thought: what is the relationship between the building’s form and its function? Does the shape/aesthetics of the building mean something? To be honest, I usually don’t. I walk in and out of countless buildings barely noticing how they look. But this is understandable for users of architecture, because contemplating the relationship between a building’s form and function/meaning can’t compete with other pressing issues we have to accomplish: like complaining about the burning weather, or ‘unfollowing’ those who didn’t ‘like’ our Instagram post.

               On the other hand, the architect has many hours and days to design both how a building looks and functions. Due to that, I think it’s fair to expect the architect to have some sort of connection between the forms and functions that he produces. So although I excuse the casual visitor from analyzing the relationship between architecture’s form and function, the architect has no excuse at all.

               Being a resident of Kuwait, I naturally face many bizarre sights regularly. These sights can range from confusing to hilarious, but what they have in common is my inability to explain the relationship between their forms and functions. I’ll now share three:

               This building is in Shuwaikh Industrial. What I find confusing is the way the façade looks like its falling apart. What is the architect trying to say? That the business this building houses is collapsing? That they’ll soon be bankrupt?

                This mosque is in Kuwait City. It’s normal except for the curvy top part of the minaret. It looks weird and out of place. I’m not saying I don’t like it, but I really want to know what the architect was thinking. It can’t just be a random shape, it must have some significance.

               Finally, this duck/goose I found in Adailya. I realize this is not a building, but nevertheless, it’s part of our physical environment. Just think about this, someone woke up one day and said: I want to put a ceramic duck/goose in front of my house. Why? 

The Cobra Tower

By Hessa Al Habshi

Whilst skimming through loads of photos at a time on Pinterest (“A pinboard-style photo  sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies” - Wikipedia) I jadedly typed in ‘Kuwait’ on the search bar of the app on my phone, I was curious to see what other people around the world were posting about my hometown. 

             Most of the photos were of old Kuwait (a camel or two, a desert, an old woman in a abaya), and there were photos of the Kuwait Water towers and Al-Hamra tower. But the gallery of photos ere mostly made of this so-called ‘Cobra Tower’. 

             It struck me as odd that there were a lot of photos of a tower that I’ve never seen. So, I went on Google and searched ‘Cobra Towers Kuwait’. A lot of websites came up, and I saw that a lot of foreigners, who have never been to Kuwait, assumed that the Cobra Tower exists. 

             A lot of sites have confirmed that this building exists and is used by the company Infosys. This building does not exist, and is merely a computer generated concept. There are no further details about it being created, nor is it under-construction.

Street Art: The Three Ladies and their Men

By Hessa Al Habshi

For the past month or so, I've grown a bit obsessed… obsessed might be too strong a word for it… maybe ‘fascinated’ by street art around Kuwait. It started when I went to Dahia to take a photo of graffiti on the back wall of their supermarket... 

As I was about to leave, I saw something in the distance that caught my eye. It was a silhouette of a woman on the electric transformer (?). When i moved closer to it, I found that on every side of the "electric transformer" was the silhouette of a woman and beside them was a saying.

             A few weeks later when I was at Starbucks Nuzha, a place I actually visit quite frequently, I saw something that I don't recall ever seeing; on the electric transformer (المحول) outside was some street art. Unfortunately, someone had ruined them with paint (that same someone should be pushed in front of a car or something)... It was the men version of the graffiti. I'm not sure which of them came first, the men or the women but I like to pretend it was the women who were drawn first.

I Dreamed That God Would Be Forgiving

I Dreamed Our Love Would Never Die