The Functionality is lucky to have Sophia Al-Maria, an accomplished artist having studied at Goldsmiths in London, sending us another feature from the desert.

“It’s very Arab the way this city erects buildings and then rips them down, the towers are like tents.” – Dr. Fay Gotting author of Qatari medical history, Healing Hands of Qatar  

Here in the Arabian Gulf the present is a non-time, a portal to and from the future tense – a blinking  cursor on a screen of sand and steel grids. 

The consensus seems to be that if we are going to move forward we need to delete our past and conversely if we attempt to preserve our history and tend our high-maintenance religious beliefs, our imagined futures begin to fade from the horizon.

Type “Doha” into your Google and more renderings of never-to-be-built dream-scrapers than images of the actual city que-up.  One of the first hits is this Syd Mead (of Tron and Blade Runner fame) imagining of a Doha as patrolled by nurse-shark blimps.  Few contemporary features of Doha persevere in Mead’s vision, nothing is left of my home but a single icon on a manmade outcropping barely older than me: the Sheraton. 

It was 1979 when an unmanned alien ship landed in Doha, a dusty town about the size of Mos Eisley, the spaceport on Tatooine (a planet in Tunisia).

Image from 1982 industry-publication: “Construction of the Sheraton: Doha, Qatar”.

Qatar had ceased to be a British protectorate only eight years previously and who should they hire to sweep down with a pyramidal hospitality-craft but William Pereira - sci-fi fan boy and chief architect in the late seventies to all optimistic-futurists of the Middle East.  After a long career of dotting Southern California with atriumed ziggurats and the Disneyland Hotel, Pereira designed the Yanbu housing complex in Saudi, the Imperial Medical Center in Iran and the “Saddam” International Airport in Iraq, all of which showcased his flare for Flash Gordon.

The iconic Doha Sheraton (his final project in the Middle East) arrived in 1982 on 3000 piles and pillars, sinking its steel shafts deep into the reclaimed gravel coastline of Qatar. 

When the hotel opened its luxuriously Air Conditioned doors, astronaut Alan Shephard was the first to check-in.

The first American in orbit was also the first American to see the brightly imagined future of Qatar – and it was glorious!  Pereira’s Sheraton was constructed from a seductive Islam-ish fantasy-future of mosaiced mirrors and disco-lit elevators and Marble Queen vines cascading over the largest standing chandelier in the world: a crystal palm-tree. 

Today great follies proposing to bridge ‘tradition’ and ‘progress’ arrive in stacks from the desks of ‘starchitects’ hoping build yet another shell of a pseudo-Arab structure ‘veiled’ in ‘modern-mashrabiah’ built to over-populate our crumbling glass-and-concrete ghost town.

Take Jean Nouvel’s slick silver innuendo as example: Nouvel claims this is a tower inspired by a medieval Islamic helmet housed in the I.M. Pei Museum of Islamic Art. 

However I’ve watched it erect itself, swelling up from its foundations, chain-mail exoskeleton hardening over exposed beams. Every morning I drive towards it on the corniche, and now as it nears completion and looms over my dashboard, I have to worry that it may just be a collosal dirty joke.