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.

As a follow-up to Norman Bel Geddes' utopian film of 1940 posted below (a projection of the modern american city of 1960), we would like to direct our readers to the an op-ed printed in yesterday's NYTimes. Here, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun and Google product manager Anthony Levandowski address the dire straits of the big 3 automakers by proposing 4 innovations that they suggest might help Detroit avoid squandering its recently acquired bailout billions.

Does #2 sound familiar? Thrun+Levandowski: On the highway train of tomorrow, cars might be able to drive with robotic precision while we sit ... and relax.

Surely this similarity between today's "innovations" and yesterday's futurism offers anecdotal evidence that progress is never guaranteed. How many films and other manifestos have over-promised on the future? Where's my hovering skateboard from Back-to-the-Future II's fictional 2015? Yes, we'll concede that the sophisticated wireless networks required for Thrun/Levandowski's "highway-trains" might not have existed by 1960. But it is clear that there was the intent, at least as early as 1940, to hybridize the train with the car, merging the strengths of both.

This is really exciting: the independence of a car plus the efficiency and speed of a train in the same package! The spectacle of sedans peeling off of a high-speed train upon reaching the driver's cul-de-sac evokes visions of collective intelligence normally trotted out in defense of "emergence" theory (flocking birds, schools of fish and the like).

All of this begs the question: why have we been stuck with the dumb, only-a-car for so long? Thanks to computers, we can now do great things like transfer power "from the wheels that slip to the wheels that grip" and such, but we've dropped the ball on macro-traffic engineering for the last 68 years! Today's cars are still marketed as the 21st century horse--a stead under the sole control of the individual cowboy--which is at odds with reality of the car as an insignificant unit in mass-exodus of daily banality. Now, it appears we have the chance to resurrect the 19th century streetcar without sacrificing our individual mobility. And, finally, we are in a position to leverage the likes of GM (Bel Geddes' client in 1940) into making it happen. Let's hope it doesn't take until 2060.

The hybrid is a fascinating thing. It finds its form in the overlapping of two separate and often unexpected uses to create a final product that is more than the sum of its parts. A biological hybrid is the result of cross breeding two different taxa to respond to an environmental condition. Also it is used to select traits from an existing group of animals or plants. 

Recently form has been the result of design hybridization. Now that we can smooth symbolic shapes into surface treatments there is the continued adherence to misconceiving hybridization as the unifying of two distinct objects. The Manimal, in its ability to combine the recognizable features of man and lion and morph those features into a unified strange whole is the perfect example of this misconception. 

Today we can imagine a world where hybrids are not just formal experiments that re-figure existing programs. Program itself is in a sense the genetic code that effects the result of hybridization. New program mixed with old, new technologies mixed with old, technology and program, form and function, overlapping and juxtaposing can result in the hybridizing of those old codes.