Description of project by Rem Koolhaas
Why did Doha escape the fate of the generic, which applied to almost every other city that emerged out of ‘nowhere’ in the last quarter of the 20th century? Our ‘age’, when cities were no longer the outcome of political, ideological, or aesthetic principles but were by ‘definition’ left to the forces of the market.
Doha was different. From the early seventies, a sequence of informed rulers engaged intimately in a complex process of modernisation. Social and political ambitions were pursued in direct connection with the building of the city itself. Doha is the record of their successive priorities.
From 1916 to 1971 Qatar was a British protectorate. In fifties English propaganda, Qatar is systematically presented as ‘a place where there was nothing…’, suddenly transformed by the discovery of oil, which then enabled the insertion of the launching elements of the modern age such as infrastructure—the airport, hospitals, schools, stadiums, and ministries, which allowed the creation of a proto-functionalist urban condition.
In reality the more drastic change was that from a traditional mentality to a contemporary mindset, triggered by Qatar’s independence in 1971. Beginning with HH Sheikh Ali Bin Abdullah Al Thani, the leadership of the new state was able to present this transformation as a collective adventure. Among the local population it found the agents, often educated abroad, who were able to channel the fluid and oral procedures of Arab tradition over time into a coherent framework of stable terms as the foundation of a municipal bureaucracy that could begin to ‘plan’, an entirely new concept in a culture used to organic growth. Typically a learning curve eventually flattens out. By relentlessly placing tremendous challenges before itself—a major airport, the World Cup, the Olympics, new cultural institutions like Qatar Museums, and Education City—Qatar put itself in a situation where the curve constantly became steeper.
What is most striking in Qatar’s priorities is the insight that education comes before everything else and how that same insight shaped both the population and the city. Through this commitment, local intelligence could be mobilised to handle the increasingly complex and demanding issues of planning and construction. The near absence of the commercial developer in Doha’s shaping meant that most building is a response to specific needs and ambitions instead of the approximation of speculative demand.
After putting in place the conditions of planning, Qatar was lucky in the choice of architect/architectural thinking it invited, from the rich diversity of global movements of the seventies and eighties. Qatar offered opportunities and was able to collaborate with a wide range of both Western and non-Western architects who responded passionately to the opportunity of contributing to the identity of a new country. Later in the 21st century, (star) architects responded gratefully to opportunities for seriousness and relevance that were quickly disappearing from the market-driven territories of the rest of the world.
It is ironic that the average critic has not captured the emergence of Qatar’s unique condition. Still referring routinely to the ‘nothingness’ of Qatar’s beginnings, they have not yet deciphered the values that are manifest here.
