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.

We discussed the definition of camouflage in our post Hiding in Plain Sight:  if something is camouflage, then it is attempting to be protected by misrepresenting itself to appear to be part of the natural surroundings. 

The SqishHistorically, camouflage was developed as an early form of biomimicry used by combatants in an attempt to be invisible to the enemy.  In the jungle of our suburban landscape, camouflage is being utilized to hide inanimate objects from the enemy critic who has determined that the natural form of the satellite dish is ugly and should be disguised to blend in with the natural surrounding of the brick veneer. 

In the age of wireless communication, the satellite dish was once linked with status; however, as satellite television has become easily accessible, the compact TV satellite dish has become ubiquitous and deemed unattractive.  A company called Sqish has developed a new flat dish that blends in with the structure on which it is mounted by use of "sqishoflage," which utilizes user-supplied photographic siting input to develop a self-adhesive sticker to apply to the surface of the dish that matches the dish's background.  And suddenly we have an attractive dish?  No, you can't see it--it's camouflage, remember?  Wait, I think I see something...what is that matte-finish faux-brick protrusion extending from your wall?  This is a self-described "funky" alternative, and it is obviously not a mainstream replacement for the satellite dish.

Typical apartment building TV satellite dish installationAnother recent attempt to address the issues with the dish "problem" was to draw attention to, rather than hide, the circular dish shape by "pimping" the dishes through individual artistic makeovers.  This unique effort was a project instigated by an artist, not by the satellite dish owners or the city.  We do not see this type of action as a solution to the perceived problem, either.

As sustainable home practices become more en vogue, satellite dish appearances become more dated.  It is within the eye of the urban beholder where it has been determined that residential windmills and even solar panels mounted on homes are acceptable (if not attractive) because of their sustainably productive qualities and for the values for which they stand.  But as less and less effort is invested into aesthetics of the mass-produced satellite dish in an effort to keep costs down to compete with cable, the satellite dish will continue to dot the suburban landscape with their grey yet functional selves until, we believe, they become outdated or hybridized with an energy-producing feature such as a solar panel or windmill.

Bundled Infrastructure: recently completed light rail expansion along I-25 corridor in metro DenverThe Functionality predicts that the rights-of-way currently occupied by freeways in and around our cities will be one of a few great urban opportunities of the near future. The sustained horizontal growth of the last few decades seems unlikely to continue, notwithstanding dips in the price of oil. Los Angeles (America’s densest “horizontal” city) slowed its outward growth years ago, where it was constricted by local politics (Home Owners Associations, etc.) and geographic boundaries. Now, other sun-belt cities without such impediments (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Miami, Atlanta, etc.), have been hit with a glut of toxic, foreclosed housing supply that is often remote from major transit arteries.

As we've explained before, conditions are right for us to think big again about transportation (and the city at large). What is the future of the car, train, bus, bicycle? Even more pressing: how do we put people back to work, and encourage our cities to grow at a time when everyone is broke? The Functionality has a few ideas. Here’s one:

TRANSIT PASTA: extruded transit infrastructure bundled with developable parcelsStacked Transit City:

a slender, multi-level stack that can accommodate the spatial requirements of whatever transit cocktail we come up with in the future (road, rail, bus-way, bike-way, waterslides, etc).  Visualize the cross-section of a manhattan skyscraper, extruded like pasta for miles above the corpse of the 20^th century freeway. (By combining modes of transport in this way, we can convincingly argue against separate, unequal economic stimulus numbers for autos and rail).  So here’s the kicker: leftover space within and above the stack is made available at a discount for private development, helping to defray the public costs of construction. No calls for eminent domain--just maximizing the utility of public land in the heart of the city! 

Of course, no-one likes to live near the freeway. Why? Because no-one has ever really been invested in the freeway—its always been a public entitlement and not much else. Worse, it been used at times to callously disrupt and divide the city (see cross-bronx expressway, or dan ryan expressway). In the future, our transit corridors will almost certainly be tied to the vitality of our culture, and so must no longer be regarded as aesthetic or urbanistic afterthoughts. This opens myriad new challenges and opportunities for designers and engineers of all stripes. How does one access public space above the transit stack? How do we keep the air clean for housing? These questions will be answered eventually.

So, we’ve killed four birds with one stone:

• Built-in flexibility for future transit/development options;
• Cheap land for accessible, sustainable development—no eminent domain;
• Job creation for many;
• Recuperated image of the urban freeway.