9

Informal extract from Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Transcultural Architecture: Limits and Opportunities of Critical Regionalism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). The page numbers do almost match and it is possible to quote from this extract. The present version contains more photos than the book version.

1

Reima Pietilä’s Kuwait Buildings Revisited:

About the Limits of Transcultural Architecture

Introduction In 1969, Reima and Raili Pietilä

1 were invited to participate in an architecture competition

for the improvement of Kuwait’s Old Town area. In 1969/70 the architects spent four weeks

in Kuwait to become acquainted with Kuwait’s urban milieu; in 1970 they drafted a report

entitled “City of Kuwait: A Future Concept.” No winner of the competition was announced.

Instead the planning board asked each of the four participating offices to develop a particular

area of Kuwait’s Old Town. The Pietiläs were assigned the development of the downtown

shore area located east of the Sief (or Seif)2 Palace. In particular, they were asked to conceive

three buildings: an extension of the Sief Palace (which served, at that time, as the

administration and reception hall of the ruler), the Council of Ministers, and the Ministry of

Foreign Affairs. Correspondence contained in the Pietilä Archive shows that, originally, also

a fourth building, the Ministry of Awqaf [land attribution for Islamic purposes] and Islamic

Affairs, was planned on the site.3 Work on the project would stretch over a period of 10 years

and was accomplished in 1983.

The main purpose of this chapter is to reevaluate the Ministry of Foreign Affairs thirty

years after its completion. To my knowledge, the building has not been visited by any

international person with an architectural interest since 1986. It is highly protected and

cannot be accessed by persons not affiliated with the ministry. It took me three years of

anxious administrative work to get (an unofficial) permission to visit the building.4

The main part of the chapter will thus describe and analyze the transformations that the

Ministry buildings as well as its environment have undergone during the last thirty years. I

argue that Pietilä’s approach, which I call “transcultural,” has been misunderstood by the

people who were responsible for modifications and improvements of the building. Though

the reasons for this misunderstanding are complex, the case of the Ministry demonstrates the

limits of Critical Regionalism in general. The building represents an example of Critical

Regionalism as its architects attempted to return to cultural sources without reinstating them

literally. The Pietiläs both respected and overcame regional elements through the use of

metaphors, symbols, poetization and irony. They produce architectural expressions that can

be seen as both individual and universal. Their approach can also be called transcultural

because transcultural architecture produces new cultural expressions by simultaneously

reinstating and overcoming local culture. The meaning of Transcultural Architecture and its

relationship with Critical Regionalism will be explored in this chapter. The authorities who

were in charge of the transformations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not appreciate

this transcultural approach and favored either culturally “neutral,” modern architecture or

10

more straightforward reinstatements of an architecture that appears to be generally “Islamic.”

The differences between those options will also be discussed in detail.

Modifications of the building have been carried out along the above lines during the last

thirty years, that is, the building has been made more “neutral” and more “generally Islamic.”

It has often been said that architects and architectural theorists tend to look at the dynamics

of architectural production, but too often neglect the problem of the consumption and further

re-production of architecture by the users (Hernández 2005b: 127). This chapter takes a

lengthy look at the interactive dimension of architecture, which will turn out to be

particularly interesting in the context of intercultural communication and confrontation. It

will become clear that not all mistakes can be attributed to the users. Pietilä’s shortcomings

will also be discussed. Did he, in spite of his eager appropriation of the local culture,

withdraw himself from the Kuwaiti realities into a system of self-referentiality meant to

produce narratives for an imagined community? It will be shown that the case of the Sief

Palace buildings is very complex.

It is impossible to talk about the Sief Palace project without also considering the

comprehensive urban development plans that the Pietiläs had finalized three years before

beginning to work on the buildings. The plans deal with Kuwait City as a whole but also

address the Sief Palace area in particular as they insist on the function of the Sief Palace area

as the central point of Kuwait City. I will show that the urban environment of the buildings

has changed since the 1980s in a way that contradicts the premises set out in Pietilä’s plan,

and that this affects the value of the original Sief Palace area and of the Ministry of Foreign

Affairs in particular.

1. “City of Kuwait: A Future Concept”

1.1. Kuwait in 1969

The two plans developed by the Pietiläs were summarily called “City of Kuwait: A Future

Concept.” It is important to put the architects’ ideas into the right historical context. The

development of Kuwait City has been determined by a unique set of circumstances and it is

necessary to draw an image of the situation out of which this long-term project, which was

initiated in 1969, has developed. In the pre-oil period, the city of Kuwait was composed of

traditional buildings dating from the eighteenth century up to the first half of the twentieth

century. Their vernacular design impressed visitors especially through its functionality and

rational approaches. The Lebanese planner Saba George Shiber believed that old Kuwait was

the most unique city in the world (Shiber 1964: 2) because its inhabitants had managed to

build an aesthetically pleasing city by overcoming the most unfavorable physical conditions

through inventiveness and good organization. However, when looking at the results of the

first fifteen years of Kuwait’s modern development, Shiber has only harsh words. In his 643

pages long The Kuwait Urbanization (1964), Shiber explains that in the early 1960s Kuwait

had become “an encyclopedia of what is wrong in engineering and architecture” (p. 7)

excelling in “spread and sprawl, mixture of uses, and wastage of land” (p. 252) as well as in

“pseudo-futuristic attitudes” (p. 290). Urban qualities deriving from spatial relationships

between buildings such as distance, scale, proportion, and contrast had simply been

disregarded. Instead, land was divided arbitrarily and the old town was chopped up into

“odd-shaped blocks” producing “a kaleidoscopy of shapes defying any attempts at rational

11

planning or functional architecture … Little thought was given to the resulting orientation of

buildings, their cross ventilation or their rational structural order” (p. 163).

One problem was that planning had too often been guided by a “superficial

understanding and application of the concepts behind so-called ‘modern’ architecture” (p. 17)

as well as by forces of “exploitation, unprecedented speculation in land [and] arbitrary and

non-scientific decisions” (p. 20). Building had proceeded quite wildly during these early

years and “hardly were plans prepared before demolition and the beginning of the

construction. A fortnight later one could see the lines becoming ditches” (p. 120).

The Australian architect Evangelica Simos Ali, who has been specializing in Kuwaiti

architectural heritage, confirms that in the 1960s “the destruction of everything that was old

was indiscriminate, swift, permanent, and uncontrolled. This was in spite of the very prudent

and comprehensive Law of Antiquities that was signed by Sheikh Abdullah Al Salem Al

Sabah in 1960, but never implemented” (Al-Rashoud 1995: 106). Many problems arose also

“from lack of clear zoning policies, regulation bylaws, and shortcomings in the adopted

plans” (Abu-Ayyash 1980: 561). In general, buildings would be scattered over large spaces

which prevented the formation of a real urban tissue. Kuwaiti society would simply be

overlooked and “their problems were lightly disposed of by pencil and T-square” (Shiber:

120). Kuwaiti people became victims of “modern” planning.

According to Shiber, by June 1960 things had become so bad “that certain urban suicide

was at least incipient in the old city. The rate at which land was being devoured by streets,

buildings, and dubious ‘leftover’ spaces was staggering” (p. 6). Shiber describes the

“spiritual-social-psychological anomie” (p. 159) of “soulless and characterless streets” (p.

161) and asks himself why after fifteen years of massive investment and foreign consultancy

architects “have not bequeathed one noteworthy building to Kuwait worthy of the chance

given by Kuwait to them and commensurate with the untold millions of dinars” (p. 36).

During the 1970 the government of Kuwait became very concerned about the downtown in

which Kuwaitis were no longer living and which was abandoned after working hours. The

authorities decided to have some residential complexes built in the city center (cf. Mahgoub

2008b: 168). It is at this moment that the Pietiläs—together with three other foreign

architectural offices—were asked to intervene.

Historically speaking, the Pietiläs’ first contact with Kuwait in 1969 was during the days

of the so-called first phase of the post-oil period. However, from 1973 onwards, when work

on the Sief area buildings actually began, Kuwaiti society would again undergo dramatic

changes. This period is generally called the “second phase” of the post-oil period. The latter

is linked to the 1973 oil crisis (or “first oil crisis”), which started in October with an oil

embargo as members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had

agreed to use their leverage over the price setting mechanism for oil. With this crisis the

standard of living in Kuwait sored to impressive heights and the real building boom began.

The first tall buildings (max. 12 floors) were constructed. The boom spread over the whole

Gulf. It has been stated that during those years, one quarter of all architectural activities in

the non-communist world took place on the Arabian Peninsula (Kultermann 1985: 42).

12

Fig. 1.1: The old city in around 1969. The Sief Palace clock tower is in top left corner. From Pietilä Archive

Helsinki.

1.2. A History of Master Plans

A first urban master plan for Kuwait was implemented from 1952 to 1960. The predominant

aim was to arrange neighborhoods spatially in order to organize the domestic economy. This

master plan failed mainly because it had neglected the macro-scale of planning. The other

problem was that it had not taken into consideration Kuwait’s dramatic population growth. It

was thus decided to establish a centralized planning body (the Planning Board), which

included also architects working in the field of modernism. This lead to the draft of a Second

Master Plan (the baladiya design or municipality design), which included ideas more directly

related to the regional urban development. This plan was used between 1960 and 1967.

However, in the end, also this plan’s focus turned out to be too narrow as urban growth

would again surpass expectations. In 1968, the so-called “Third Plan” by the British firm

Colin Buchanan and Partners evolved as an attempt to design Kuwait on a macro scale

suggesting completely new urban centers. It established the metropolis of Kuwait along

coastal lines (at least in its updated version), which is the basis of the urban reality of present

Kuwait (cf. Abu-Ayyash 1980: 562–63).

One reason why all master plans failed was the rapid population growth. In 1969 Kuwait

had a population of 600,000. In 1973 the population had already risen to 800,000 and in 1983

to 1,500,000. From then onward, it would increase roughly 100,000 per year, reaching 2

million in 1988 and then sharply declining after the Iraqi invasion in 1990 (source: index

mundi). Today Kuwait has a population of 2.9 million. The other problem was that a master

plan existed, but that there were not enough architects able to carry out the plan’s premises.

This is why in 1969 four foreign teams were invited to express their thoughts about the city

as well as about the existing plan. The purpose of the competition was thus not to overrule

Buchanan’s Third Plan, but rather to produce interesting supplementary views and

recommendations in the form of visual media (and not through texts) about how they

imagined Kuwait’s urban future. In that sense, it was not a competition. Correspondence in

the archive shows that information about the ideas of other teams would be exchanged and

evaluated (the correspondence passed through the head of the Master Planning Department,

Hamid Shuaib).

13

1.3. The Pietiläs’ Two Plans for Kuwait

All four teams pronounced themselves against the current urban spread and asked for a

condensation of the urban fabric. Similar to earlier critics, the Pietiläs found that in Kuwait,

“new constructions don’t give any identifiable shape for the city” (Pietilä Archive Helsinki);

but they also pointed out that in spite of the destruction, traces of Kuwait’s traditional

character remained extant in residential quarters as well as in the Souq (traditional market

area). As a consequence, they proposed two alternative schemes for Kuwait. The first one

suggested the redevelopment of old Kuwait as a habitation center for 100,000 inhabitants

with medium and low density. The inner city would accommodate the central administration

and cultural institutions. A new souk was also planned. The second plan, which employs

more decentralizing strategies, suggests new supplementary centers for Kuwait in which

additional population growth would be accommodated. Those centers were Air Port City, Al

Ahmadi, and Doha Lake. The macro scale vision is characterized by the distinction between

“east coast” and “west coast:” a “university city” was to be built on the west coast and a

“harbor city” on the east coast.

The location of the region called “Doha Lake” received particular attention. Under the

name of “Doha Lake” is an extended area reaching from Jal Az-Zor, which is situated north

of Jahra at 50 km distance from the city center, down to Doha, which is now part of Kuwait

City. In morphological terms, Jal Az-Zor is a line of limestone and sandstone escarpment

along the seashore with an altitude of 28 meters above the sea level. Parts of it reach a height

of 116 meters. Notes from the archive show that the Pietiläs believed that this area had a

general altitude of 100 meters above the sea level and decided that its microclimate would be

particularly suitable for a new residential area. About 200,000 people were supposed to be

located on this ridge in order “to avoid the sprawl over the flat desert.” The university center

should also be built in this location. Furthermore, the Pietiläs planned to plant forest shelter

areas from Jal Az-Zor down to the Doha peninsula; further recreational places would be

constructed along the whole coastline up to Salmiya. They also suggested that transport from

the old center to coastline agglomerations should be done by hovercraft. Today the Jal Az-

Zor area contains a 320 square km fenced Natural Reserve containing many rare birds.

14

Fig. 1.2: The area of greater Kuwait city.

Though the three “sister cities” (Air Port City, Al Ahmadi and Doha Lake) were

supposed to be equal to Kuwait in importance, the Pietiläs suggested in parallel a maximum

development of activities in the Old City. This would have had an effect on the Sief Palace

area. The juxtaposition of two plans, that is, the mix of limited centralization in the city and

overall decentralization makes the full use of the waterfront possible without disconnecting it

from other city functions. Once the two plans were applied, the Arabian Gulf Street, which

isolates the central city from the waterfront, could have been closed (the Pietiläs were strictly

against the idea of a corniche road). Then a more direct connection of the greenbelt with

inner city and metropolitan area would have become possible. The limited use of the city

center would also have been beneficial for the conservation of the remaining historic

buildings.

1.4. The Sief Palace Area

The Sief Palace Area buildings play a prominent role within the particular constellations

produced by the two plans. A priori, the Sief Palace area has always occupied an extremely

central position within Kuwait’s urban space; it would have become even more central had

the Pietiläs’ measures been applied. Historically, Kuwait’s old town had been confined within

the no longer extant city wall (see black line on map) and the Sief Palace is positioned right

in the middle of the semi-circle’s diameter.5 In 1954, Kuwait’s city wall was replaced with

what would be called the First Ring Road and in post-oil Kuwait, further ring roads would be

added, all of them imitating the semi-circular shape of the old city wall. This means that—at

least formally speaking—the entire plan of modern Kuwait maintains the Sief Palace’s

predominant position.

Both Jørn Utzon’s National Assembly (1972–1982) (FIG. 73) and Sune

Lindström/Malene Björn’s Kuwait Towers (1976) are placed more or less on the opposite

extremities of the former city wall, at a distance of two resp. three kilometers from the Sief

Palace. Arne Jacobsen’s old Central Bank of Kuwait (1973–1976) is located opposite the Sief

15

Palace area at only 300 meter distance from the clock tower (see map FIG. 3). Another

international building is the Kuwait National Museum (inaugurated in 1983), which is

located right between the Sief Palace and the National Assembly (FIG. 4). It was built by

Michel Ecochard, the French planner and architect who developed Damascus under French

rule.

Fig. 1.3: Within the black line is Kuwait’s Old City which today represents only around 4 percent of Kuwait’s

urban area.

In 1980, Shiber’s statement from 1964 that in Kuwait, architects “have not bequeathed

one noteworthy building to Kuwait worthy of the untold millions of dinars” could be

replaced with Stephen Gardiner’s optimistic view that those buildings designed by important

architects “will bring a natural unity, order and continuity to the city” (Gardiner 1984: 81).6

Gardiner believed that Kuwait now has “enough key buildings by key architects in key

situations to hold the attention and maintain architectural order in this fast expanding city”

(p. 73).

16

Fig. 1.4: Kuwait National Museum by Michel Ecochard.

The Sief Palace Area project can only be understood within the context of the Pietiläs’

two urban plans, but the plans make sense only once the meaning of the Sief Palace area has

been understood. Shiber had already put forward the importance of the shore area around the

Sief Palace. Until around 1960, the central shore had been the site of the Old Harbor and the

historic dhow building area as well as the Sief waterfront were considered the living body of

Kuwait. Under the pressure of the development of the Central Business District, the Sief

waterfront would rapidly metamorphose. Shiber regrets the transfer of the harbor to an

insignificant area outside the city: “One could have left the dhow building area as well as the

old harbor, which could have become a sort of marina and lagoon for small craft” (p. 205).7

He also regrets the construction of the “New Sief Palace” under which name the clock tower

complex in yellow brick was known at that time (and which is today called “The Old Sief

Palace”), because it blocks the view on the sea. For Shiber, the Sief waterfront should have

been part of a “grand corniche concept” (here he differs from the Pietiläs) transforming the

shore area of greater Kuwait into a pleasant coastal strip beginning at the Sief Palace and

reaching six kilometers south.

The Pietiläs radicalize these ideas and suggest transforming the Sief Palace area into a

seaside public park. However, contrary to Shiber, they see a proposed corniche as an

unnatural barrier between the sea and the old city. Cars should be entirely banned from the

Arabian Gulf Street (Pietilä Archive Helsinki), which had also been one of the Third Master

Plan’s initial ideas.

The Pietiläs interpret the central waterfront as “the main natural value of the old city”

and want it to be “developed as an organic part of the new central city.” In concrete terms,

they see the future of the central waterfront like this: there should be cultural and

governmental buildings with high national importance, a pedestrian movement system with

sheltered walkways, air-conditioned galleries where they are feasible, and underground

17

parking at the edges. Further, the architects suggest a system of mass transport, ample shaded

plazas on places for mass gatherings of people and squares lined by trees (Pietilä Archive).

1.5. The Morphology of the Inner City

In general, Reima Pietilä is fascinated with orientation, form, and geography, that is, with the

strata, the lay of the land, and the atmosphere created by geological constellations. Pietilä’s

recognition of the Sief Palace area as the central part of Kuwait results from what he called

“geological” studies, which he distinguished from “urbanistic” studies. As a result, Pietilä is

interested in many things that had been absent from the agenda of Kuwait’s planners in the

1960s who considered the old city inexistent when superimposing a street plan and zonings

on it. While they worked with “rigid, geometric, two-dimensional plans” that were “very

simply and truly drawings” and excelling “in almost childish happiness and preoccupation

with superhighways [and] roundabouts” (Shiber: 116, 118), Pietilä insists to see architecture

as morphology: “The persistent bird’s eye view had made architects think of themselves as

gods: avoid looking down at the ground” (from Lehtimäki’s lecture notes, 2007: 92). Any

attempt to grasp the placeness in existential-morphological terms as an urban landscape is

opposed to the conventional master plan method.

Pietilä attempts to discover the form of the old city in the shape of “two hills of

buildings where the valley between, filled with low structures around the Souq, carried on

down to the sea, culminating with one strong architectural element, the recently built clock

tower” (Gardiner: 70). Pietilä’s sketches and notes show his obsession with a certain T-form:

“Approaching the city from the land side you see a built form which could have an imaginary

‘T’ placed over it” (Pietilä Archive). The central shaft of the ‘T’ is today’s Mubarak Al-

Kabeer Street that leads right toward the clock tower (FIG. 5). Pietilä wanted the central shaft

of the ‘T’ to be “flanked by parking structures, four stories high and new buildings. Through

the center of the shaft, which is 15 meter wide, the panorama of the waterfront is visible”

(Pietilä Archive). West of the T-form should be located low density housing as well as an

education area.

Fig 1.5: Sketches from the archive show that Pietilä has been obsessed with a T-form as an urban planning

concept for the old city.

18

Fig. 1.6: Aerial view of the waterfront prior to large scale destruction of the traditional fabric.

However, the “City Form” is experienced differently when the city is approached from the

waterfront, as is shown by Pietilä’s notes:

Approaching the Inner City from the Water Side

You see a gradually stepped wall which parallels the coast of the inner city.

The first tier is composed of motels and business buildings. Rising behind this strip

the third layer of the housing appears.

Just as the wall is not flat, it is not continuous

Where the shaft of the long leg of the “T” would intersect the wall, the wall widely

splays as it opens to allow the C.B.D [Central Business District] to meet the central

core area of the waterfront.

Between the built form of the wall and the water.

(Pietilä Archive)

19

Fig 1.7: Approaching the Sief area from the land side today. On the right hand side is the stock exchange. Pietilä

wanted the central shaft of the ‘T’ to be “flanked by parking structures, four stories high, and new buildings.”

Apart from that, Pietilä planned to design the inner city as a three layered city: at ground

level would be only pedestrians; on a second level, traffic would pass above the ground; and

on a third level there would again be only pedestrians.

Pietilä’s Sief Palace project is hermeneutical because he derives the identity of buildings

from the landscape, but at the same time he creates a landscape by seeing it through the

buildings. Pietilä totally alters the existing road plan and decides to draw roads in loops

around the base of “hills,” which necessitates a completely new street pattern in the “valley.”

He is concerned about building heights because the valley-hill relationship is supposed to

establish an organic and coherent urban system. We know that nothing came out of Pietilä’s

suggestions because they were both too radical and too expensive. What remains are Pietilä’s

Sief Palace Area buildings.

2. The Sief Palace Buildings

2.1. The Old and the New Sief Palace

After having drafted the report “City of Kuwait: A Future Concept,” the Pietiläs were asked

to develop the Sief palace area of Kuwait’s Old Town. The project consisted of two distinct

tasks. The first was to build the extension to the existing “Old” Sief Palace in a relatively

well-defined local style. The second was to design the Council of Ministers and the Ministry

of Foreign Affairs (today simply referred to as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs because the

two buildings have been “fused”). Originally, a Ministry of Islamic Affairs had been planned

on the same site (see note 2). The location of the three buildings is east to the Sief Palace at

the bottom of a ridge parallel to the shore. For the ministry buildings no particular style was

required though they had to be matched with the style of the overall site. The three buildings

would occupy a collective area 15,000 square meters to be built on an area of 54,000 square

meters of reclaimed land. All buildings were supposed to have two floors.

20

Fig. 1.8: Plan of the three buildings

A certain absurdity of the paradigms determines the style of the Sief Palace Extension

and, indirectly, also the style of the Ministry. The original Sief Palace consists of two

relatively small buildings constructed between 1907 and 1917 (FIG. 10) forming an L-shape.

The buildings are made of burnt yellow bricks and appear to be local without following a

strictly local style. Their style might be vaguely Iraqi: Sikander Khan calls it “Baghdad style”

(Khan 1988: 118) and Lewcock explains that the “semi-circular arches of the palace are set in

rectangular panels in a style which was common to both Iraq and Iran” (Lewcock and Freeth:

32). Both buildings have details such as mashrabiyas (Arab projecting oriel windows

enclosed with carved wooden latticework), balustrades as well as doors framed with brick

reliefs. Mashrabiyas are indeed not indigenous to Kuwait but more so to Iraq and Saudi

Arabia. In spite of this, the two buildings can evoke an impression of authenticity at least to

some degree. The architecture is related to traditional architecture from some part of the Arab

world.

The Old Sief Palace is directly connected to the much newer but predominant clock

tower complex designed by British architects Pearce, Hubbard and Partners in 1963 (FIG. 11

AND 14). This palace is equally made of yellow bricks (though on the central façade

containing the gate, the bricks have been painted over in pink for many years). The new

palace has a U-shaped plan and is open towards the sea. Malcolm Quantrill has called the

21

style of this “New Sief Palace” “eclectic Arab” and “somewhat fanciful” (Quantrill 1985:

102, 104) and for Shiber it was representative of the “error and escapism” (Shiber: 291)

current in Kuwait at the time. Its stylized pointed battlements are perhaps supposed to evoke

Omani forts. In any case, the palace reinstates the neo-classical Arab arch style and gives in

to a considerable amount of plagiarism and cliché-ism.

Fig. 1.9: Today the Sief Palace Area is dominated by the “New” New Sief Palace.

In 1988 began the construction of an immense government complex southwest of the

two Sief Palaces (old and new). It was basically built on the old harbor area and joins

Ecochard’s National Museum in the South-West (FIG. 9). The construction of the palace was

interrupted by the Iraqi occupation and could be finished only in the late 1990s. This

complex would receive the name “New Sief Palace” making what had so far been called the

“New Sief Palace” part of the “Old Sief Palace.” As a result, the entire “old looking” part of

the Sief Palace, that is, the original two small buildings dating from 1917 plus the new

pastiche part from 1963 would now be lumped together and receive the summary predicate

“Old Sief Palace.” Today, tourist websites such as Kuwait-info.com and even the

Government Website evoke the impression that the entire “Old” Sief Palace has been built

between 1907 and 1917. The Arch net entry on Pietilä even talks about the “nineteenth

century Sief Palace” adjacent to Pietilä’s buildings, which is wrong because what is

immediately adjacent to those buildings is the 1963 addition. Many Kuwaitis will not

designate the original, relatively small buildings as the “Old Sief Palace” at all, but will

confer such a designation to the much more striking clock tower complex next to the old

buildings although the clock tower complex is new. Even more, the “Old” Sief Palace with

22

clock tower has become a cultural icon. The Kuwait Information Guide suggests that “the

palace still retains its distinguishing feature, which has made it a shrine of Kuwait history

from the outset of the twentieth century.”

Fig. 1.10: One of the two authentic Sief Palace buildings from 1907 (left half of picture). The buildings in the

right half (as well as on Fig. 11) are additions from 1963.

Fig. 1.11: The addition to the Sief Palace by Pearce, Hubbard and Partners from 1963. The clock tower can be

seen. Being originally made of yellow bricks, the central façade has been painted in pink.

23

Fig. 1.12: Reima Pietilä’s sketch of the old and the new Sief Palaces with his planned Extension

The extension had to be built to what is today called the “Old Sief Palace” (but which

was called “New Sief Palace” when the Pietiläs were working on it). More precisely, the

building contract stipulated that the Sief Palace extension was to follow the style of the

“original building” and this irrespective of the latter’s questionable “originality.”

The fact of being forced to relate to a local cultural environment that was partially fake

has a symbolic dimension. The International Advisory Committee required Pietilä to

demonstrate ‘new Islamic architecture’ though, as Quantrill correctly estimates, in Kuwait

during the 1970s, the “Islamic tradition was more a mirage than a presence: the notion of

such a tradition had to be reinvented in order to become a reality” (Quantrill 1995: 171).

Quantrill’s statement refers to the wholesale destruction of the old city as well as to the

absence of important historical buildings that the Pietiläs could have referred to. Finally, the

Pietiläs would be officially asked to accept the features of the mirage-like “old” building as a

guideline because the Sief Palace with its indistinct affirmation of anything “Arab” was the

most “authentic” model of cultural transmission that Kuwait could offer. Reima Pietilä’s

philosophical musings about the reality of Kuwait’s inner city illustrate this problem (FIG.

13).

24

Fig. 1.13: Pietilä’s philosophical musings about the reality of Kuwait (Pietilä Archive Helsinki)

Fig. 1.14: Clock tower and surroundings in around 1969 (Pietilä Archive Helsinki)

In summary, Pietilä’s entire project is a peculiar example of virtual architecture

desperately striving to both retrieve a non-existent past and to anticipate an unclear future.

Pietilä had the double task of (1) inventing a national architectural identity that had been

wiped out twenty years earlier and could no longer be visited or—if we are looking for great

“Islamic architecture”—had never existed; and (2) of inscribing Kuwait into a logic of

modern urbanism that would only emerge in the future and was not yet visible at his time.

2.2. The Sief Palace Extension

It has been said above that the Pietiläs had the double task of retrieving a non-existent past

and anticipating an unclear future. How did they solve this conundrum? Was the 1963 Palace

really an example of the “new Islamic architecture” that the advisory committee or Kuwaiti

authorities had in mind? If yes, it is safe to assume that it was not what the Pietiläs had in

mind. Shiber had already insisted in 1964 that a “literal return to classical style is not the

course to be followed” (p. 290). The Pietiläs’ approaches vary from the Extension to the

Ministry but, considering the context, an interesting logic remains constant. For the

Extension, they were asked to follow the style of the “original” Sief Palace.

25

Fig. 1.15: Pietilä’s Sief Palace Extension

Quantrill judges that Pietilä adopts the style of the old palace “only in the character and

cadence of the outer skin,” which takes on the essential characteristics of the Old Sief Palace

“in terms of regular openings, arch shape and so on.” However, the Audience Hall and the

Divan are contained “within a completely enclosed volume” (Quantrill 1995: 172). The

“outer skin” is indeed traditional, but it repeats the slightly pointed arches of the New Sief

Palace entrance gate and not those of the original palace. It also has rectangular frames drawn

around the arches that have been adopted from the 1963 Palace (FIG. 21) and not from the

original one.

In the covered walkway we find a curious example of how an architect can comply with

and, at the same time, rebel against the assignments given. The use of colored tiles on the

entire extension would probably have been seen as inappropriate. As a consequence, Pietilä

decides to lay out the framings of only the first window and the door with colored tiles while

the other windows remain plain (FIG. 16).

Fig. 1.16: Extension archway with use of blue and green tiles on only the first window and the door.

Today, ironically, Pietilä’s extension has become part and parcel of the “Old Sief Palace”

more than ever because the “New Sief Palace” multi-building complex from the 1990s

covers an area five times larger (roughly 4.8 x 1.6 km) than the “old” one (see FIG. 9).

2.3. The Ministry

26

The Pietiläs had more liberty with the Ministry buildings. But which option would they

choose? The concept of the Finnish embassy in Delhi as “a Finnish island floating within the

Indian Sub-Continent” (Quantrill 1998: 53) was apparently no option. A literal return to an

imagined Arab style as suggested by the 1963 Palace was equally unacceptable. Though

eclecticism has dominated Kuwait’s architectural landscape since the early 1950s, the

question of cultural “identity” is a recurring issue. During a first phase of Kuwait’s

development, architects invented an identity independently of the past: “Many of their

attempts were in search of a new identity that had no link with the past, and rather than

enhance and refine the traditional character in the context of the new, they simply discarded

the old and started to build the new on very shaky grounds” (Al-Bahr 1985: 63). Since the

1970s, this radical modernism has been complemented with images of dream houses

acquired during extensive travels, through television, and, most recently, through the internet.

All this has reinforced the eclecticism and transformed Kuwait into what Al-Bahr called

already in 1985 “a Disneyland of residential manifestations.” In 2006, Yasser Mahgoub asked

the architectural community: “When will we in Kuwait and other Gulf countries have

modern architecture suitable for our community, environment and heritage?” Mahgoub

quotes Christopher Alexander who regretted that in the Gulf countries “we miss the

connection that one could call ‘belonging’ or possession in the true emotional sense”

(Mahgoub 2006: 2, 4).

2.4. Metaphors, Symbols and Analogies in the Ministry

Sikander Khan sees the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an example of the “new breed of

contemporary buildings evolving in the Middle East incorporating all the pragmatic functions

of the twentieth century but at the same time attempting to capture the spirit of indigenous

architecture” (Khan: 70). Norberg-Schulz lauds Pietilä’s Kuwait buildings because they give

“the Islamic world an important interpretation” (1996: 176). And Randall finds that, in

general, “the sea elevation resembles Kuwaiti merchants’ houses [which is] a recall to the

waterfront architecture that once existed near the site” (Randall 1985: 17). However, though

the yellow color of the walls is clearly suggestive of indigenous housing, the appearance of

the entire complex is clearly Western and modern in shape and the direct imitation of

anything Arabic (arches, domes, and so on) has been avoided. The link with the Arab

tradition is maintained in a very indirect fashion.

A few elements can clearly be traced to local sources. The sun breaking eves are inspired by

teak eves from Basra’s Old Town. Especially when fixed to the wall, they stick out like

wooden poles and are reminiscent of vernacular Kuwaiti architecture (FIG. 17). The

protruding entrance arches have a similar “sticking out” effect (FIG. 18). The external walls

are staggered with vertical lines, which is inspired by similar walls in the city of Uruk (FIG.

19 and FIG. 20). Uruk, an ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, is located 200 km north

of Kuwait at half distance between Kuwait and Baghdad.8 Often windows are inserted into

those vertical shapes (FIG. 57). Pietilä also uses imitations of reed soffits that in traditional

houses are attached to the ceiling; he reproduces them in aluminum painted in either green or

blue (FIG. 25 and 49).

27

Fig. 1.17: Eves stick out of the wall like wooden poles

Fig. 1.18: Protruding Main Entrance

28

Fig. 1.19: Reconstruction of an Uruk Temple Façade (Innin Temple in Kassite). The former city of Uruk is

located 200 km north of Kuwait.

Fig. 1.20: Rear view of Ministry with a similar wall on the right. A white tent structure has been placed on the

formerly open terrace.

The objective of the complexes’ plan is to establish an essential link with the local

environment, which will be examined below. Khan finds in the plan the same organizational

principles as those of Babylon and Persepolis (Khan: 124). It is known that Pietilä studied

29

Gulf archeology and looked at Uruk city walls, which, according to Randall, influenced his

floor plan design (Randall 1985: 17).

Arab metaphors are also present in the form of modernized mashrabiya style wooden

latticework (FIG. 23) as well as in colored mosaic patterns placed on many walls though

never on walls visible from the outside. The patterns represent horizontal stripes of colored

bands. Apparently Pietilä thought of folkloristic handicraft, especially partition carpets

consisting of bands that Bedouin women stitch together to make 2.5 meter high walls

(Quantrill 1985: 164). The sadu motive is also found on all kinds of Arab cushions or carpets.

In this sense, the tile pattern is vaguely Arab. On the other hand, since tiles are used, it is

more likely that the design will be identified as a mosaic. If the design is understood as a

mosaic, the size of the tiles will probably be deemed too large and be identified with

bathroom or kitchen tiles. Above that, the poetical estrangement of Arab elements is taken

very far especially since the tiles’ colors are not traditional but modern to the point of being

experimental; they are almost unseen on exterior walls even in modern architecture.9 This

concerns not only the colors as such but also an often very extravagant combination of

colors, like orange juxtaposed with green (FIG. 47). The following can be said about the size

of the tiles: while the tiles are indeed much larger than any tiles used in traditional mosaics,

one must say that the main entrance of the 1963 Sief Palace is also surrounded by unusually

large dark blue tiles. As a matter of fact, those tiles have exactly half the size of all tiles used

by the Pietiläs in the Extension and in the Ministry. It can be concluded that the tile motive is

most probably borrowed from the entrance of the 1963 Sief Palace especially since the same

dark blue color has also been adopted by the Pietiläs (FIG. 21).

Fig. 1.21: The tiles arranged around the door of the 1963 Sief Palace have exactly half the size of Pietilä’s tiles.

The cutout arcades can be recognized as colonnades (though the shapes are very much

estranged), which establishes a further link with the Arab tradition. Some of the cutouts

might evoke the heads of camels though this fact is given to interpretation (FIG. 22). Those

arcades exist only in the original Ministry of Foreign Affairs part but not in the Council of

Ministers.

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Fig. 1.22: Camel heads?

Fig. 1.23: Mashrabiya style wooden latticework on the windows. Most of those mashrabiyas remain intact

today.

Fig. 1.24: Pietilä experimented with variations of coral fountains.

The “coral fountains” (FIG. 54 and 61) can be considered a further “local” theme.

Apparently, Pietilä chose the coral as a dominating theme because he believed that coral reefs

once resided beneath the building site (Quantrill: 92). From a geological point of view, this is

31

probably not true and, in general, Kuwaitis will recognize the coral as only distantly related

to anything “local.”

In all the above cases, the Pietiläs establish a relationship with local tradition that

transcends mere imitation and representation. Obviously they are looking for a new

vocabulary. However, in many cases, the poetization results in a complete change of

language that the local public might understand only with much difficulty. Khan calls this

approach the “masquerading” of the vernacular (Khan: 286), but often the mask seems to

adopt a life of its own. For example, the shapes of the “colonnades” are arguably too

estranged and probably too experimental for the conservative local taste. The aluminum

soffits are painted in blue and in light green, which will look unfamiliar and inauthentic to the

local eye because normally reeds are used after having been dried and are thus brown (FIG.

25). Further, the size of the tiles differs too much from the traditional size of mosaic tiles and

the choice of their colors is not related to any regional set of colors.

Fig. 1.25: Painted aluminum sticks emulate traditional reed soffit structures throughout the Ministry

Another concept that might not be easily grasped by the Kuwaiti public is the idea that

“from the land side the galleries in the elevation facing the courts resemble a serai” (Clouten

1983: 48).10

Pietilä adds that it resembles the serai “only poetically and vaguely, never

explicitly” (Clouten: 48), but the lack of explicitness has probably contributed to

misinterpretations.

Occasionally, by shying away from any literal reinstatement of shapes and items, Pietilä

plays with themes that are alien to the Arab culture and obviously imported. The most radical

example are the silhouettes of spruce trees, which are typically European if not Finnish (FIG.

26). While most of the cutout shapes are highly abstract and non-figurative, the concrete

spruce tree shape is a recurrent secondary theme on the building’s façade. For Finns, the tree

symbolizes a deep felt relationship with nature and certainly makes much sense on the

Hervanta Community Center because this suburb of Tampere is located in the middle of the

forest (FIG. 27). What feelings or thoughts does a Kuwaiti associate with those trees?

Obviously, the cultural experience of these “trees” is entirely different. At the same time, the

spruce motive makes the architecture truly “transcultural” as will be explained below.

However, such literal transcultural transfers might precisely be the reason why the building’s

reception has turned out to be problematic.

32

Fig. 1.26: Spruce theme window in the Ministry with mashrabiya.

Fig. 1.27: Spruce shapes and inverted spruce shapes as used in the church of the Hervanta Community Center

Complex in Tampere, Finland.

2.5. The “Skin Technique”

It has been said above that the entire Ministry complex has the quality of being “half-open”

because of its city-like floor plan. The other means by which Pietilä achieves openness is the

“skin technique” that relies on a sophisticated use of cutouts and arches. However, the

openness is only the secondary effect of the skin technique. The basically modern skin of the

buildings envelopes an interior part containing those elements derived from Arab heritage

that have been described above. In this sense, the skin technique is a direct response to (a) the

challenge of making a transcultural statement in Kuwait; (b) the right management of the

tensions between identity and internationalism as well as (c) a response to the absurd play

with fake and reality enacted by the old and new parts of the Sief Palace.

The technique of the “skin” is also present in the Sief Palace Extension, but in the

Ministry buildings, it develops qualities of tailoring. Here the “envelop” appears like a

curtain or a draped garment with cut-away openings in unusual shapes permitting the

discovery of the interior. The breaking down of a building’s external surface is a modern and

experimental idea as it fragments a three-dimensional composition. This is not the

internationalist reduction of architecture to “skin and bones” but rather a play with this

modern concept of the architectural skin.

33

The entire building suggests some of the surrealism also present in Pietilä’s Dipoli

building (1961–1966) as well as in the Malmi Church project. However, in Kuwait the

strategy is taken one step further. Here the skin concept engages in the surrealistic play with

inside and outside presentations, which makes possible explicit comparisons with surrealist

paintings such as René Magritte’s Le double secret (FIG. 28) or Le thérapeute (FIG. 29). At

the same time, Pietilä never gives in to any kind of concrete symbolism.

Fig. 1.28: René Magritte: Le Double Secret

Fig. 1.29: René Magritte: Le thérapeute

Fig. 1.30: The “skin concept” (Archive Helsinki)

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Fig. 1.31: Model demonstrating the “skin concept” of the Ministry (Archive Helsinki)

Fig. 1.32: The Ministry building in the 1980s with coral fountain in the foreground.

Fig. 1.33: The Ministry buildings in the 1980s. The traditional items can be seen through the cutouts.

35

Fig. 1.34: The Ministry buildings in the 1980s

The Italian fashion designer Anna Battista has been fascinated by Pietilä’s Ministry as an

example of “architecture through tailoring” because for her, the building offers a perfect

“outside to inside vision” as she writes:

Indeed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building presented an outside wall cut-away to reveal an

unexpected scale of openings to the wall that separated the outdoor and indoor environment. The transition

zone was a bit like a colorful “lining” and seemed to have the same purpose of the lining in a jacket or a

coat. This feature was used by the architects to create a visual access from the street to what went on

inside the building. … Can you think of other buildings that could be compared to garments? (Battista

2011)

The skin technique is intriguing because of some other connections. Paradoxically,

Pietilä’s handling of the skin is not merely modern, but also refers back to archaic

architectural practices. As a matter of fact, Adolf Loos has written about the skin as a primary

architectural device, pointing out that in German the word for “ceiling” is still the same as

“blanket” and that the parallelism between “cladding” (Bekleidung = clothing) should not be

seen as a coincidence:

In the beginning was cladding [Bekleidung]. … The covering is the oldest architectural detail. Originally

it was made out of animal skins or textile products. This meaning of the word [Decke] is still known today

in the German languages. Then the covering had to be put up somewhere if it were to afford enough

shelter. … Thus the walls were added. … [But] cladding is even older than structure. (Loos 1982: 66-67)

Anthropologist Anne Anlin Cheng traces Loos’ thoughts back to those of the architect

and foremost theoretician Gottfried Semper who even more explicitly insisted on the

importance of textiles in the history of architecture:

In this account, walls are of secondary concern and really come into being as an afterthought. Loos

explicitly takes his ideas about the primacy of cladding from the German historian and architect Gottfried

Semper, who believed that textile was the primary stimulus for all figuration in both architecture and art

and considered the first art to be the human adornment of the body on skin, beginning with tattoos and

extending to clothing. (Cheng 2009: 102)

36

For Semper, the first architectural space is the open pen, made of woven skins and other

organic materials, and the first social institution is the open hearth (Semper 1989).

By saying that skins and not walls are the most basic architectural forms, Loos and

Semper enter—certainly unknowingly—the terrain of autochthonous “Gulf architecture,” and

Pietilä, who equally unconsciously follows them, has chosen a device that could be presented

as regional. However, in the context established by Pietilä, the “skin” does not clearly refer to

textile architectures such as Bedouin tents.

There is one aesthetic choice in the design that moves the “skin” away from textile

metaphors: in the Ministry the overall impression of the wall openings is very sculptural. The

“holes” produce an effect of depth comparable to that of caves inserted in the walls or,

according to Quantrill, appear like “cavelike openings depicting natural erosion” (Quantrill

1987: 161). As Quantrill correctly points out, Pietilä does not follow the concept of

transparency, but produces different layers of form and space (1995: 172). In any case, the

openings break down primary masses and install a rhythmical pattern in an otherwise plain

and monotonous skin.

2.6. The Ministry’s Connection to the Area The “skin concept” has still another significance. Quantrill writes that in Dipoli, which is

built into a forest, “the external wall is not a barrier in the normal architectural sense, but a

skin that adapts the building to fit the natural environment,” and that “Pietilä’s intention was

to create an apathetic skin which adapts the built form to the natural context” (Quantrill

1987: 56). Also, walls appear to be “skins” (cf. Quantrill: 66) in the Hervanta Community

Center Complex (FIG. 27) on which Pietilä was working at the same time (since 1979) and

which was completed right after the Sief Palace buildings. Since a skin is not a wall but a

living organism, it enables, like the biological skin, a unique connection to the environment.

Metaphorically, it is able to adapt to the environment and to reflect the surroundings.

The other outstanding feature of the Ministry is the floor plan. As mentioned, it seems to

follow organizational principles like those of Babylon and Persepolis and has been inspired

by Uruk city walls. The genius loci of the Sief Palace area is determined by the fact that a

certain historical urban fabric once used to exist right across the street. Though most

historical buildings in the city had already disappeared at the time of the Ministry’s

construction, Pietilä uses a “city-like” plan, just as if he was inspired by a non-extant inner

city. Also, the city concept comes close to that of the Hervanta Community Center Complex

(FIG. 35). Even today, in spite of the essential modifications that the building underwent, the

feel of the city has not entirely disappeared when walking through the Ministry; it is

reminiscent of Hervanta where one can imagine walking through a medieval city. Since the

Sief complex consists of two distinct buildings (Ministry and Council of Minister), Pietilä

ties them together with a series of informal walkways as well as terraces and external and

internal courtyards. The effect is very much like that of the meandering routes in many of

Charles Correa’s buildings. All walkways are shaded or half-shaded and all courtyards have

different enclosures. The half-open main corridor of the Ministry runs parallel to the shore

through the entire site while secondary walkways run perpendicular to the major axis of

circulation. Pietilä obviously imitates some traditional city fabric; the unusual idea is that he

installs the walkways on different levels. There might indeed be a connection with the multi-

leveled plan of the inner city that Pietilä had in mind for the neighborhood. Today most of the

37

courtyards and walkways have been covered. The largest one, which was open to the seaside,

is still half open and the inner one in the Council of Ministers part has not been modified

(FIG. 36).

Fig. 1.35: The city-like plan of the Hervanta Community Center Complex in Tampere, Finland.

The corridors and courtyards represent an essential part of the structure to the effect that

the visitors will never enter an “interior” space directly but will first have to pass through

either the main corridor or through a courtyard. As a result, the entire complex has the quality

of being “half-open” when seen both from the inside as well as from the street side. It is not a

closed building but a city with several openings and entrances. The feeling of openness must

have been palpable for passers-by because the 250 meter long wall running along the Arabian

Gulf Street hides only the lower part of the Ministry. The height of this wall varies and

amounts to only 1.50 meters in the central part, where it is topped up with concrete sun

breakers that are transparent permitting viewers to see through to the elevated—and most

interesting—parts of the building. As a matter of fact, most of the cutout arches are placed on

locations higher than ground level. The elevated terrace protruding from the cutout walls and

containing (no longer extant) coral fountains, for example, was located on the first floor and

was thus clearly visible from Gulf Street.

38

Fig. 1.36: A comparison of the plan and the present situation shows the covering of courtyards and terraces.

3. Transcultural Architecture

The architectural concept of the Ministry is transcultural. Transculturalism is more than the

arbitrary combination of several cultures but transcends all particular cultures in order to

invent a new common culture that is not meant to be a new universalism. Transculturalism

rejects strong traditional identities and cultures as well as dogmatic religious values or other

items that can be seen as linked to an imperialistic heritage. Instead it reinvents a new

common culture based on the meeting of two cultures. The relationship between

transculturalism and Critical Regionalism is complicated and will be submitted to particular

scrutiny in this chapter. One problem is that the regional (no matter how critical it is) can

easily be opposed to the transcultural because the latter clearly emanates from or is a

consequence of globalization. Transculturalism is a form of internationalism and regionalism

is opposed to any form of the latter for obvious reasons. In spite of this, I define Critical

39

Regionalism as a sub-category of transculturalism. This means that Critical Regionalism is a

part of Transcultural Architecture but does not represent the latter in its whole breadth.

It has been said above that Critical Regionalism represents a sort of radicalized

Transcultural Architecture, which remains true, since transculturalism is not necessarily

critical while Critical Regionalism is. However, the anti-imperialistic attitude of

transculturalism can also follow from a process of hybridization that is not necessarily based

on critical reflections.

Vice versa, all Critical Regionalism is transcultural because it overcomes one culture by

critically reflecting it against another culture. As a matter of fact, most of the time, Critical

Regionalism has not been seen as a coming to terms with two cultures but rather as a coming

to terms with the past and the present. However, since the culture of the past is often

indigenous while the present culture is often western, one can also speak of an act of

transculturation here and not merely of a combination of tradition and modernity.

Two or more cultural elements can be combined in different ways and it is important to

specify differences in order to distinguish transculturalism from multiculturalism and other

strategies destined to synthesize different cultural elements.

3.1. Transculturalism

The concept of the transcultural was coined in 1940 by the South American scholar Fernando

Ortiz in his book Cuban Counterpoint. Ortiz was inspired by José Marti’s article “Our

America” (1891), which puts forward the idea of métissage (the intercultural mixing of

peoples) as a new identitarian concept. Ortiz writes:

I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process

of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another

culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily

involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as a deculturation. In

addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be

called neoculturation. (Ortiz: 102-103)

The transcultural situation that Ortiz found so typical for Cuba has by now spread over all

continents and determines the existential situation of many individuals. Philosopher Mikhail

Epstein writes that

today more and more individuals find themselves ‘outside’ of their native cultures and their ethnic,

racial, sexual, ideological, and other limitations. Transculture is an open system of all symbolic

alternatives to existing cultures and their established sign systems. As a transcultural being, I can

ascribe to any ethnic or confessional tradition and decide the degree to which I make it my own.

Transculture is a mode of being, located at the crossroads of cultures. (Epstein 2005)

3.2. Multiculturalism

Transculturalism is different from multiculturalism. Whereas the latter conserves distinct

elements of each culture and can therefore easily lead to ghettoization the former believes

that the contact of the self with the other should lead to the construction of multiple

identities. According to Epstein

transculture does not add yet another culture to the existing array; it is rather a transcendence into a

‘meta-cultural beyond’ in the same sense in which culture is a ‘meta-physical beyond’ in relation to

40

nature. If culture positions itself outside nature, then transculture is a new globally emerging sphere in

which humans position themselves outside their primary, ‘inborn,’ naturalized cultures. (Epstein 2005)

3.3. Micro and Macro Levels

Transculturality can appear on macro and on micro levels. In the modern, globalized world,

entire cultures tend to interact and create new transcultural patterns. Even places of everyday

life are, in the words of Andy Bennett, “highly pluralistic and contested, and are constantly

being defined and redefined through processes of relocation and cultural hybridization”

(Bennett 2005: 4). This concerns the transcultural on the macro-level. At the same time,

individuals adopt increasingly transcultural identities, and most of the time they do so not

because of the conscious choices they have made, but because of general biographical events

to which they have been submitted. Here the individuals become transcultural, which

concerns the micro-level.

In the case of Pietilä’s building, an individual (the architect) has decided to make a

conscious transcultural statement. The result is neither “Western modern” nor is it limited to

a generic Islamic vocabulary resulting in a fake authenticity (a pastiche) simulated for others.

3.4. Fusion, Mosaic, Network

In transcultural architecture, proper regional cultures will be rearticulated or seen under a

new light because transculturation changes the focus. The rearticulation of heterogeneous

elements signifies a renovation of cultures inasmuch as different elements are supposed to

reinforce each other’s values. Transcultural architecture does not lead to an affirmation of

clichés about each culture but rather to a sophisticated synthesis or to a hybridity that can

make sense in its own terms. In other words, ideally, each culture does not only survive

within transcultural architecture, but it manages to be at its best within the newly established

transcultural context. Transcultural architecture is thus not merely a compromise, but a

juxtaposition imbedded in an overarching structure able to establish logically sound lines of

communication between diverse elements.

A Hindu temple from the late seventeenth century in Goa showing European influences

is transcultural. A glass tower with an Islamic arch as an entrance or some “clip-on

regionalism” meant to make it contextually relevant is not. A decaying urban landscape that

has been revitalized by new immigrants through the introduction of new cultural ambiances

and economic networks is transcultural. A residence in an East Asian style Dubai (FIG. 37)

that the owner believed to look like a “Japanese temple” is not. In the above negative cases,

the combination of cultures did not result in the creation of a new culture but, on the contrary,

everything cultural seems to have died during the process of intercultural combination. The

initially cultural elements have been transformed into commodities.

In the worst case, the combination is driven by commercialism. Then the semiotic

significance of the buildings might still be important and make them an interesting subject of

study, as Charles Jencks has pointed out about Las Vegas (Jencks: 2002: 57). However, from

the beginning to the end of the transformative process, the perception of those elements never

reached beneath the surface of images. As a result, the process could not mobilize the power

of memory, myths and identities that are naturally enclosed to those cultures. Unfortunately,

the postmodern trivial manipulation of signs and references, though often justified through

high-flying intellectual discourses, most often follows the latter pattern.

In the above positive cases, a new culture could arise because a lengthy process of

intercultural negotiations was able to create a new context within which the old could survive

41

as a culture. This does not mean that the old survived here literally and unaltered. As will be

shown below, a certain cultural loss is inevitable in transculturalism. The important point is

that transculturation must result in a new element that is culture thereby compensating for the

loss suffered by the initial cultures.

Fig. 1.37: Fake Japanese temple (private residence) in Dubai.

The conclusion is that transculturality does not lead to uniformity through progressive

processes of cultural fusion. On the contrary, the transcultural process maintains and

produces diversity as it creates complicated structures able to hold together various elements.

The “mosaic” model is appropriate as a metaphor for transcultural transcendence insofar as it

differs from the “fusion” metaphor, which uses the liquid element to indicate a process

through which the self and the other become indistinct. Constant fusion will indeed lead to

universalism. Therefore the mosaic model is useful. It is also useful because it overcomes the

idea of the multicultural juxtaposition. Guy Scarpetta writes in his book, Impurity, that in

today’s world “each person is a mosaic” (1989: 26). In the mosaic, elements remain distinct

but are coordinated by an overarching aesthetic structure that is not universalistic but

dependent on the parts.

At the same time, the mosaic model can be found problematic. There are actually two

ways in which a mosaic can be thought of: in a transcultural and in a multicultural way and it

is necessary to distinguish both. In the multicultural mosaic, each element remains distinct

without communicating with other elements. This is why on the macro-level,

multiculturalism can easily lead to ghettoization. The transcultural mosaic, on the other hand,

combines the individual and the general in a paradoxical way without simply subsuming the

individual under the general. While, in my opinion, a transcultural mosaic is workable, some

thinkers declare any mosaic model inappropriate for transculturalism. Wolfgang Welsch, for

example, refuses the mosaic and suggests instead the metaphor of the “network” for the

description of transcultural situations when writing:

transcultural webs are woven with different threads, and in different manners. Therefore, on the level of

transculturality, a high degree of cultural manifoldness results again … It’s just that now the differences no

longer come about through a juxtaposition of clearly delineated cultures (like in a mosaic), but result

42

between transcultural networks, which have some things in common while differing in others, showing

overlaps and distinctions at the same time. (Welsch: 206)

The network metaphor brings us close to another model that has been used for the study

of transculturalism: the rhizome as it has been developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari (cf. Hernández 2005: xv-xix). The notion of the rhizome perfectly well illustrates the

way in which different cultures can maintain their separate identities although they exist in a

permanent relation with each other. In their book, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and

Guattari introduce the notion of structureless plateaus or rhizomes in which acts of

territorialization and deterritorialization as well as of organization and rupture form a place

that is stratified but without precise limits. The rhizome is made of lines without being

shaped by profound, metaphysical structures. It remains undetermined by evolutionary

linearity, hierarchy or geometrical orientations, but is entirely made of processes of variation

and expansion. Rhizomes have no beginning and no end but begin in the middle and rely

neither on transcendental laws (roots) nor on abstract models of unity. The authors write:

“Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified,

territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, and so on, as well as lines of

deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome

whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the

rhizome” (1980: 16; Engl.: 9).11

Alan Colquhoun has explained that “the relationship between industrialization and

traditional cultures and techniques is not one in which [both] become organically fused with

one another, as Le Corbusier implied, but one of hybridization, where different cultural

paradigms, detached from their original contexts, coexist in an impure and unstable form”

(Colquhoun 2007: 145). Hybridization, which signifies here the “fusion” of different regional

cultures as well as the fusion of the modern with the past, corresponds to rhizomatic

structures much more than the structures of the more rational organism. However, unlike the

simple fusion, all hybridizations leading from the regional to the transcultural will probably

require a critical consciousness, as will be shown in the next section.

3.5. Transcultural Architecture and Critical Regionalism

I do not believe (as does Felipe Hernández) that Critical Regionalism necessarily leads to the

harmonization and fusion of cultures and that it is distinct from Transcultural Architecture for

this reason. Critical Regionalism lets cultures overlap, but the critical part takes care that

distinctions will be maintained. Nor are the principles of Critical Regionalism opposed to the

rhizomatic form of constant interaction. Both Critical Regionalism and transculturalism

oppose rigid binary structures and challenge foundational, homogenizing, and hierarchical

methods. Both transfer local forms of culture to the “next level” without preserving them

literally. Frampton’s initial formulation requiring Critical Regionalism to achieve “a revealed

conjunction between, on the one hand, the rationality of normative technique, and on the

other, the arationality of idiosyncratic forms” (Frampton 1981: 22) is perhaps unfortunate

because it can be understood in a way that rationality will always win (or is supposed to win)

over the arational. Will—in the best case—the dominating rational not merely tolerate the

arational, but still try to control and to restrict it at any moment? Though I support

Frampton’s Critical Regionalism in general, I think the rational-arational dichotomy conveys

a wrong idea. In reality, the local does have power. In Critical Regionalism, the idiosyncratic,

43

the unique, the local as well as the quirky can challenge, transform and even dominate

“rational” normative global techniques.

This confirms my above assumption that Transcultural Architecture is not opposed to

Critical Regionalism but that Critical Regionalism must be seen as a subcategory of

Transcultural Architecture. Critical Regionalism is always critical while Transcultural

Architecture is not necessarily critical. It has been said above that this is the reason why

Critical Regionalism is more “radical.” In another sense, however, Transcultural Architecture

is more radical than Critical Regionalism because it works more consistently towards the

creation of networks and rhizomes. The latter is not necessarily the case of Critical

Regionalism.

On the long run, the result of Critical Regionalism must be Transcultural Architecture. If

Critical Regionalism limits itself to merely affirming multiple regionalisms without

emphasizing the tendency of networking as well as the pluralistic seeing of the familiar in the

unfamiliar, it remains captured in a utopian sort of multiculturalism. On the other hand,

would it merely insist on combination and métissage, it would end up—after a long chain of

fusions—as a blunt universalism. However, this is not the case because the critical (or self-

critical) part of Critical Regionalism urges architecture of any origin to see the self in the

other. When this is done in a consistent fashion, Critical Regionalism will end up producing

Transcultural Architecture. But the importance of “critique” on each developmental stage is

obvious.

Another important consequence is that by inscribing itself into the larger framework of

Transculturalism, Critical Regionalism will shun some of its foundation stones, which are the

“regionally relevant” construction elements and techniques. Transculturalism transforms

traditions, and Critical Regionalism has to face this reality. As will be shown with the help of

other examples and as will be theorized in the conclusion of this book, a Critical Regionalism

with a minimal regional (but maximal critical) input is not only thinkable but does exist.

Transculturalism, on the other hand, can come about without any critical effort. The

above mentioned Hindu temple in Goa with European influences or the decaying urban

landscape that has been revitalized by new immigrants are examples of a transculturalism

where no critical thinking effort had been invested. This is why the Goa temple will not be

classified as Critical Regionalism. Also in the examples of failed Transcultural Architecture

(like the glass tower with an Islamic entrance arch or the “East-Asian style” house in Dubai),

the failure can be traced to a lack of critical thinking. Transcultural Architecture can evolve

naturally or artificially. In the latter case it needs to be critical.

3.6. Pietilä’s “Skin Technique” and Transculturalism

Pietilä’s Ministry responds to the above conditions of Transcultural Architecture. In a

transcultural fashion, Pietilä reinstates neither local architecture nor expatriate architecture,

but transgresses both in order to make an entirely new statement. This is how the ministry is,

if we use Epstein’s words, “located beyond any particular mode of existence” and finds its

place “on the border of existing cultures.” Finally, it settles in a realm beyond all cultures

without belonging anywhere.

Pietilä avoids fusion but uses a structure that comes close to the network. He produces a

kind of métissage that does not transcend concrete identity merely in order to end up as an

indistinct fusion of elements. First, the loose macro structure of the complex enables the

existence of a rhizomatic micropolitics of individual elements. Second, it appears that the

44

skin concept is able to express particularly well the transcultural pattern of “recognizing

one’s own culture in the other.” In an almost literal fashion, it shows the one inside the other.

The skin model conveys those complex interconnections that bind the different cultures

together. Because it is also different from the multicultural mosaic pattern, it corresponds

perfectly well to the network pattern. Correspondingly, Pietilä explains: “My aim was not to

put old wine into new vessels. I have ‘gone around’ the problem of how to reconcile between

the old and the new architectural traditions. My poetization of metaphoric elements is

apparent” (from Quantrill 1985: 115).

Pietilä once wrote that the concepts of location and time “extend beyond everyday limits

into a poetic scale” (Pietilä 1985: 17). As a consequence, his “transformational syntax”

(Quantrill 1985: 115) transcends all merely comparative procedures in the Ministry. It

produces mutual involvements and interferences. The building opens new aspects of cultural

development: it neither absolutizes nor relativizes one or the other culture, but highlights

differences helping us to understand one culture through a concept that has been derived

from the interpretation of another. To use one of Kenneth Frampton’s key phrases, one can

say that Pietilä’s approach attempts to “deconstruct the spectrum of world culture” and to

produce a “synthetic contradiction” (Frampton 1983: 21). By wrapping a quasi “western”

skin around architectural elements identifiable as estranged Arab items, and by cutting

openings whose shapes are neither Arab nor modern into the “western” skin, Pietilä

challenges all those who see cultural identities as fixed, static, and homogenous categories.

The intercultural dialogue that he establishes is not authoritarian or determined by any

hierarchy, but it is multi-directional and endlessly interactive. Cultural hybridization

destabilizes systems of hierarchical differentiation. Through its hybridization, it points to the

mutability of all cultures; and this is particularly well expressed in the Ministry building.

The skin concept is a truly dynamic system of deterritorialization. It is playful to the

extent that it uses divergence and destabilization of the self as well as of the other. Its

language is, so to speak, pre-linguistic as it seems to suggest not-yet spelled out symbols.

This has a further consequence: this architecture can never be a mere display of resistance to

the modern architecture of the global world (a path that Critical Regionalism often chose

while Transcultural Architecture does not do so necessarily). At the same time, the skin

concept is not—in spite of its playfulness—a trivial manipulation of signs and references.

Nor is Pietilä merely “translating” from one culture into the other. The skin concept implies a

high degree of critical consciousness leading to the creation of new objects, new spatialities,

and new aesthetic experiences.

We need to conclude that Connah misunderstands Pietilä’s approach when asking why

there is “no more plasticity, surface ornament and isolated symbolic elements with a special

treatment of the external architectonic symbolism?” (1989: 343) Connah still thinks in terms

of abstract multicultural synthesis and not in terms of Welsch’s networks or Frampton’s

“synthetic contradiction.” He is not willing to recognize that Pietilä’s transcultural process

has to include the strategy of fragmentation.

3.7. Postcolonialism

Not by definition but certainly in practice, Critical Regionalism often has a postcolonial

dimension. By postcolonial I do not necessarily mean the negative ideology that Eggener,

Jacobs, and many others attach to the term by letting it appear as a continuation of

colonization. The term postcolonial can also simply address all those elements and events

45

that came after colonization. The emergence of regionalism is not only due to architects’

dissatisfaction with models of modernity, but also to the increasing self-confidence of non-

Western architects after colonial occupation. There are thus reasons to say that the Ministry,

as a foreign building in Kuwait containing local elements, illustrates the complex relationship

that Kuwait has with its “colonial” past. However, this past is different from the colonial past

of most other non-western countries. Though it is impossible to go into the details of

postcolonial theory and its relationship with Kuwaiti history in this chapter, some points need

to be mentioned. While, since the 1980s, postcolonial theory has had a significant effect on

the way we understand intercultural relations today and historically, there might be no theory

that fully represents the cultural interactions by which the Gulf region has been determined in

colonial and postcolonial terms. The problem is that the discourses of Frantz Fanon, Edward

Said and Gayatri Spivak concentrate on previously colonized countries as well as on western

metropolitan centers. However, the closest the Arabian Peninsula has come to colonization

was under Ottoman rule, which spared the region much of the typical anti-colonial struggles.

The harsh East-West confrontation, underlying, like a grammar, most postcolonial discourse,

is here missing, which has shaped the national psyche of the region in a special way.

Postcolonial resentment, for example, is almost absent. It has been said about the United

Arab Emirates that they are “characterized by a general lack of resentment. With the sights

set firmly on the future rather than in the past, the spirit that dominates is one of openness,

discovery, [and] the authenticity problem in the sense experienced by directly colonized

countries, is largely avoided” (Findlow 2000: 35). The same is true for Kuwait.

All this means that in Kuwait, the “resistance approach” of Critical Regionalism is to a

large extent unwarranted (except in those unfortunate cases where resentment has been

reintroduced, most recently, by way of fundamentalist religious rhetoric). Can we not

conclude that for all those reasons, Kuwait is an ideal playground for Pietilä’s transcultural

destabilization of both the self and of the other? Both the “eastern” self and the “western”

other are here seen as more equal than in other previously colonized countries. Racism is

internal and is almost exclusively what Kuwaitis direct towards poor Asian immigrants. At

least in theory, Critical Regionalism can here be introduced without having to digest an

essential postcolonial resistance theme. In praxis, the situation looks different. Paradoxically,

the authoritie12

were dissatisfied with Pietilä’s subversive patterns and preferred, as will be

shown below, more authoritarian and identitarian narratives that they would produce

themselves. Resistance arose but not towards the former “colonizers” nor towards “modern

architecture” but merely towards Pietilä’s transcultural architecture.

3.8. Identity in Finland and in Kuwait

Before looking at the reception of Pietilä’s transcultural architectural statement in Kuwait,

some differences need to be pointed out concerning the status of identity in Kuwait and in

Finland respectively. Kuwait is home to two hundred nationalities and Kuwaiti people are a

minority in their own country. To some extent, this diversity has influenced Kuwaiti

architecture. Still it would be wrong to say that national identity is absent: traditional identity

structures as well as the common experience of the Iraqi occupation have secured a sense of

common roots and experience. According to Omar Khattab, in Kuwait, more than in other

Arab cities, the reassertion “of local identity has become a matter of great importance

especially after Iraq’s claims in Kuwait and the second Gulf War” (Khattab 2001: 379). In the

1980s, a search for responsive architecture set in among some local architects. The most

46

remarkable examples are the works of Saleh Al-Mutawa who attempted to revive the

traditional architecture of Kuwait (see Al-Mutawa 1994). Al-Mutawa’s buildings might be

the most vivid example of Critical Regionalism in Kuwait though his architecture is

problematical because he often reinstates tradition in a very literal fashion.

Also for Pietilä, architectural identity is of utmost importance and his thoughts about the

genius loci as a catalyzer of “biological chromosomes” have become famous in the

architectural community of his home country and beyond. Pietilä believed that “a genius loci

trait is chromosomic for the growth of identity in the process of design” (Quantrill 1988: 20)

and Christian Norberg-Schulz defines the genius loci as the “precognitive, immediate

recognizing of the things themselves” (1996: 45). Finland, which, with its 5 million

inhabitants, is not much bigger than Kuwait, has constantly been concerned with its identity,

and very early developed ideas about how architecture should be used within the cultural

identity of the country. In 1958, Sigfried Giedion would call Finland the leading country of

“new regionalism” (Giedion 1958). The problem is that, at the same time, architectural

identity in Finland appears as a multifaceted subject and cannot be reduced to Norberg-

Schulz’s slogan that the Finnish building is a “successful translation of the Finnish

environment into architectural form” (1996: 195). Moreover, Norberg-Schulz believes that

this “Finnish quality comes to fruition in the work of Reima Pietilä, who maintains Finnish

space and form” (p. 45). Norberg-Schulz’s praise has not only been beneficial for Pietilä but

his professional development has suffered from this reduction of his expressions to mere

“Finnish space and form.” Even today Pietilä is often perceived in Finland as an isolated

thinker steeped in “Finnishness” who is believed to be not closely linked to international

regionalist movements (see Koponen: 139). Of course, this view is not justified. As Gareth

Griffith correctly points out, many Finnish architects—among whom we have to count

Pietilä—have been particularly concerned with the fact “that their work will always be

interpreted from the essentialist point of view as a reflection of nationality or geography. But

architecture cannot be simply derived from nature or nation” (Griffith 2004: 57). Since the

1970s, the Finnish search for architectural identity has been rather fractured by self-critical

and anti-essentialist stances and is far from being straightforward; and Pietilä is a typical

example of this development. Finally, the Kuwait Ministry is a result of those constellations.

The above account of “identity in Finnish architecture” makes clear that Finland and

Kuwait are entirely different architectural working environments. Roger Connah writes that

while in the 1960s, Finland was still “a rather repressed environment,” new architects went to

great length to appropriate “critical writing from abroad” in order to overturn cliché-ism and

essentialism. Some Finnish architects made immense efforts to wrench contextualism from

romantic ideas about cultural symbols and redefined it, at times in torturous fashions, with

the help of phenomenology or diverse postmodern aesthetic theories. Here architects went

constantly against “official” political and academic doctrines. Pietilä in particular, rejected

the rationalist aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970 because he “had seen too many older building

parts of Helsinki torn down and replaced by mediocre second rate city developments”

(Connah 2005: 193). At the same time, he rejected nostalgic approaches or simple vernacular

solutions though the public—which still held Alvar Aalto in great esteem—favored those

solutions. According to Connah, in the 1970s, Pietilä had become a “rogue thinker” in his

own country (Connah 2005: 196), also because his complex thoughts went against the grain

of the Finnish Architecture Review, which expressed very little interest in his theoretical

musings (Connah 1989: 330).

47

In Kuwait there is no equivalent of such a critical, intellectualist and anti-mainstream

approach, neither in the 1970s nor today. Nor is there an equivalent of a “rogue thinker.”

Apart from the modest attempts of Al-Mutawa, the country does not seem to be able to

produce a solid brand of revised modernism either. And somehow this is true for the entire

region. Though in the 1980s a postmodern attitude was established in the Arab world and

“architects started to look back at the pre-modern period and historical references” (Mahgoub

2008b: 170), the fundamental cultural experiences preceding this relatively superficial

postmodern wave—most visible in the battle opposing intellectualist architectural approaches

and populist romanticism, and which finally lead to the formulation of a more critical

regionalism—were not available in the cultural environment of Kuwait and most other Arab

countries. Traditional “Islamic” architecture was the almost unique aesthetic response that a

conservative climate prevalent in most places in the region in the 1970s could offer. The few

outstanding examples of Critical Regionalism that do exist in the region have most often

been implanted by foreign architects, and this most of the time in the 1970s and 1980s.

4. The Ministry Transformed

4.1. The Ministry Buildings

What remains of Pietilä’s transcultural approach today? Ambitions such as Pietilä’s could

have gained symbolical dimensions in a place like Kuwait where seventy percent of the

population are foreigners. However, because of the above described context, the transcultural

statement could not live up to the idealist intentions of its creators. In 1994, major

“reconstruction” works began on the Ministry site, the most ambitious project being the

elimination of the cutout wall openings (in spite of intensive research it has been impossible

to obtain the names of the architects and companies that carried out the work). Further major

transformations are: the open corridor has been muted into a closed corridor (FIG. 59 and 60)

by adding several supplementary buildings in front of the street side facade. Most of added

building parts feature arch-like shapes decorated with modernist geometrical forms such as

upright standing squares placed on the top of those arches or on rooftops (FIG. 39, 40 AND

45). Initially, the use of the arch as a main motive has been against the initial guidelines for

the design of the Ministry complex as issued by the Ministry of Public Works in 1970, which

strongly advised against monumentality.

The new monumental additions, placed right on the terrace that once permitted to see

parts of the building’s interior from the street side, have been equipped with a dome made of

stained glass (FIG. 64). Again this runs counter to Pietilä’s intentions as he had most

conscientiously avoided domes. Underneath the new dome, heavy wooden doors mark the

official—though practically unused—main entrance of the Ministry. Smaller dome-shaped

windows have been placed on the roof wherever possible. The yellow bricks have been taken

off from a part of the original street façade wall, showing this section without cladding in raw

concrete (FIG. 43).

Most recently, the east façade facing the fish market has been amended by placing

additions in front of the original buildings occupying a surface of 9000 square meters (FIG.

44 and 45). The project value of this latest addition is $15 million and the work has been

carried out by the office of Dar Saleh Al Qallaf Engineering Consultants. The aesthetics of

48

these buildings draws on the theme of the upright standing decorative squares from the

earlier additions and as a result, the builders had more squares placed on the roof.

Fig. 1.38: Street view

Fig. 1.39: Same street view today. The building is hidden behind a new façade. Some of the original cutout

walls (on the left) are still visible.

Fig. 1.40: Detail of street view. Heavy arches and upright standing squares dominate.

49

Fig. 1.41: Detail of street view in 1986

Fig. 1.42: Same detail today

50

Fig. 1.43: The yellow bricks have been taken off on one part of the original building, which now appears in raw

concrete. The intention was probably to match this part with the color of the additions.

Fig. 1.44: East façade

Fig. 1.45: East facade with additions from 2014. The Sief Palace clock tower can be seen on the left.

The most important consequence of the transformations imposed upon the building

during the last thirty years is that the “Arab” motives found at the interior of the building are

no longer visible through “holes.” The holes no longer exist and most of the motives have

been eliminated. First, this means that the “skin” concept has been totally cancelled and that,

as a result, the skin has become a meaningless modern building shell whose strange

cutouts—where they can still be seen—have no function but look rather pointless and

awkward. Many long-term residents of Kuwait told me that they had never suspected those

buildings to belong to a ministry, but had always identified the area as an industrial zone.

Partially responsible for this misperception is Pietilä’s own decision to place the A/C center

and the cooling towers on the street side, which tremendously diminished the aesthetic appeal

of the complex right from the beginning (FIG. 46). Second, by eliminating the openings, the

language and structure of the building have moved from “half-open” to “entirely closed.”

51

Fig 1.46: Passersbys often identify the ministry buildings as an industrial zone. The above A/C center and the

cooling towers are original and have not been modified.

Fig. 1.47: The kitchen is almost the only place where the colored tiles remain.

Already a few years after the ministry’s completion began the systematic elimination of

Pietilä’s “Islamic” motives. Colored tiles have been either torn off or—in rare cases—been

painted over. Remaining tiles can be found almost only in the restrooms and kitchens (FIG.

47). According to the Kuwaiti architect in charge of present renovation projects (whose name

has been consistently withheld from the author), the elimination of the tiles had been seen as

the most urgent task because they “did not add to the building but let it look uglier.” The

author has also been told that Kuwaiti people often call the ministry “Kuwait’s largest public

toilet” because of the predominant tile theme.

Already a few years after its completion, the coral fountain had been refurbished with

black granite plates. The “corals” have also been topped up with white marble stripes on

which are engraved golden arabesques (FIG. 55 and 56). (The present architect in residence

is not aware that the fountain has ever had colored tiles though the colored coral fountain is

probably the most documented element in any international publication of Pietilä’s Sief

Palace project.) The remaining coral fountains (FIG. 62 and 63) had to be demolished when

major additions were placed on the terrace square. All other original fountains have been

either modified or have disappeared.

52

Fig. 1.48: One of the few exterior facades where colored tiles remain. The color combination is unusual even in

a modern context.

Fig. 1.49: Main Hall before. Painted aluminum “reed” soffits are placed on the ceiling (right side). The ceiling

has a “rugged” shape.

53

Fig. 1.50: Main Hall today. The tiles have been eliminated and walls have been painted in white. The aluminum

soffits have been taken off and the rugged structure of the ceiling has been rectified.

Fig. 1.51: Plants, carpets, marble, wood and leather dominate the new aesthetics of the mail hall.

The architect and his assistant explained to the author why the sadu patterns emulated by the

tiles had to be eliminated. One reason was that those patterns are not Kuwaiti but more

universally Islamic or even Spanish, and that Pietilä’s ambition to use them as an expression

of Kuwaiti identity has been inappropriate. Alternatively, more literally islamicizing patterns

have been put on the coral fountain as well as on the walls of the newly constructed central

corridor. The dome and the arches are also put forward by the present architect as appropriate

means to reinforce the Islamic identity of the building. Pietilä’s emulations of reed soffits,

traditionally used in in the construction of ceilings in traditional houses and which Pietilä

attempted to reproduce with the help of long metal sticks (FIG. 25 and 49) have equally been

eliminated at a very early stage. The same goes for some of the mashrabiya style wooden

latticework covering the windows (FIG. 26) though most of them have remained in place.

Because the seaside terrace could rarely be used in the Kuwaiti climate, a covered

diwaniya13

style reception room has been constructed on the terrace (FIG. 52). The diwaniya

is covered by a white tent structure from whose pointed top hangs a chandelier imitating

54

palm branches (FIG. 53). The diwaniya’s walls are clad with artificial fur that has been

strewn with metallic pallets (FIG. 54).

Fig. 1.52: A new diwaniya has been placed on the seaside terrace.

55

Fig. 1.53: The diwaniya is covered by a tent structure from which hangs a chandelier.

Fig. 1.54: The walls of the diwaniya are clad with artificial fur that has been strewn with metallic pallets.

A conversation with the Kuwaiti architects yields the impression that the planning

history of the Ministry represents a series of miscommunications between architects and

clients. First, the complex had been planned as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the

Council of Minsters but, due to misunderstandings, the delivered buildings were built in a

way that made them unfit for the latter purpose. From the beginning both buildings were used

by the ministry only and a new Council of Ministers had to be built elsewhere. Next, the

architects repeat a reproach that had also been voiced by Connah: “Why had there not been

more openings to the seaside?” (Connah 1989: 343) Pietilä himself had answered this

question pointing out that in the hot climate large window openings are not useful.

Meanwhile more window openings have been created. Pietilä’s collaborating engineer Vilho

Pekkala, explains that “the facades on which the sun shone were provided with shades made

from concrete elements, which decreased heat transfer through the windows. At that time

thermal effective windows, as used nowadays, were unknown” (Pekkala 2007: 74).

Pietilä’s “hot climate” argument is encountered by the Kuwaiti architects with the

counter-question why, since he was so concerned about the climate, he designed an open

corridor as the main passage way between two major buildings, forcing people to walk in the

heat when going from one end of the complex to the other (FIG. 59). Pietilä would certainly

reply that at that time, these were two separate buildings (Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the

Council of Minsters) and that not many people would have to walk from one end to the other.

He had gleaned the courtyard concept from regional architecture. Was that a mistake? Pietilä

believed he had done enough. He had designed the arcades and galleries surrounding the

buildings as “climatic sun-protecting shelters [that] also provide ample opportunity for a

poetic imagery of shape and shadow” (Pietilä 1985: 87). Climatic questions had been

meticulously considered as explains Vilho Pekkala:

The exterior walls were of a brick-mineral construction. The mineral wool had a thickness of 50 mm

and it was coated with aluminum foil to reflect the heat. This was a new solution and proved to be

effective. Roof surfaces white, given effective thermal insulation. … The Sief Palace included an air

56

conditioning center with large, ceramic, water-evaporating cooling towers. Local specialists later

wondered how it was possible that such small amounts of energy were needed for the cooling. (Pekkala

2007: 74)

The five meter large street side arcade kept the interior elevation in shade. Apart from that,

all windows are recessed thirty centimeters from external surface (Fig. 26).

In 1998, in order to improve the situation, the entire former cutout outside wall has been

closed and the terrace has been transformed into a five meter large air-conditioned corridor

(FIG. 59 AND 60). A reception room covered by a dome made of stained glass has been built

on the terrace. This is the most dramatic change the building underwent.

For the Kuwaiti architects, Pietilä’s entire approach seems to be rather a subject of

ridicule as further conversations revealed. Their own designs might have solved certain

practical problems but lack character and originality. In many instances they give in to the

cliché-ism and essentialism that Finnish architects have so desperately tried to avoid since

the 1960s and that the Pietiläs avoided in particular. In any case, according to the architects,

the ministry “looks now more like a ministry,” which seems to have been the main concern.

Fig. 1.55: Large Coral Fountain in 1986.

57

Fig. 1.56: Large Coral Fountain today with islamicizing patterns on the black marble.

Fig. 1.57: Courtyard in 1986 with pyramid fountain

58

Fig. 1.58: Same courtyard today

Fig. 1.59: Corridor of main axis in 1986

59

Fig. 1.60: Same corridor in 2012

Fig. 1.61: The shapes of the door openings on the main axis have been adopted from the original door design

(see below).

60

Fig. 1.62: Those coral fountains disappeared when the additions (see present street view, Fig. 38) were built on

the terrace.

Fig. 1.63: Today the spot where the above terrace used to be looks like this. The place is covered by a dome (see

Fig. 25)

61

Fig. 1.64: A dome covers the additions that have been built on the terrace.

Fig. 1.65: The north entrance and window have been laid out with granite plaques.

Fig. 1.66: Formal elements like arches have been added.

A large part of the discrepancies between Pietilä’s intentions and the expectations on the

receiving side can be traced to different ideas about how a modern building in Kuwait should

protect people from the heat. Pietilä designed the arcades and galleries as climatic sun-

protecting shelters and relished in the poetic imagery of the galleries’ shadows. “The people”

(see note 11) simply wanted air conditioned corridors. However, beyond those more or less

technical problems, more original issues can be extracted from the short history of the

62

Ministry. The unnamed Kuwaiti architects did not offer resistance to modern, Western

architecture—which they actually welcome—but to Pietilä’s transcultural (and at times

surreal) mixture of the western and the local. As an alternative, they constructed more

monolithic and univocal meta-narratives of “The Ministry,” which becomes clearest when

they dismiss Pietilä’s transcultural attempts with the words: “a ministry should simply not

look like that.” For them, hybridity and hybridization are allowed only as long cultural

distinctions between “East” and “West” are not transgressed. Pre-colonial elements must

remain pre-colonial and the modern should always be clearly identifiable as modern.

Historical references should be in keeping with the officially sanctioned identity of the

country.

As a result, the Kuwaiti architects had to take “the strange” out of Pietilä’s acts of

estrangement, for example when rectifying the rugged structure of the ceiling in the main

hall. With their own design they do not necessarily return to the condition prior to

colonization but they do something else: in order to keep the western and the local distinct,

they bring authority back into the architectural narrative of the Ministry. For them, this is the

main purpose. At the same time it is, of course, precisely the strategy that transcultural

architecture and Pietilä in particular, tries to avoid.

4.2. The Environment of the Ministry

The transformation of the Ministry’s environment is as radical as that of the Ministry itself

and needs to be analyzed if we want to understand the present status of Pietilä’s buildings.

The state of the area also shows what kind of architecture the authorities (and probably also

the largest part of “the public”) would have preferred. After the liberation from the Iraqi

occupation in 1991, Kuwait entered into a fury of development projects whose result was not

the reconstruction, but rather the reinvention of the entire city. According to the Historic

Building Preservation survey, by 1995, seventy-two percent of the surviving old town

buildings (of which there were not many in the first place) were under threat by government

planning. Meanwhile, Kuwait has evolved into a city of glass towers and shopping malls and,

according to Mahgoub, a recurring question among Kuwaitis is “why is our capital so

unsightly?” (Mahgoub 2006). Anderson and Al-Bader attest that Kuwait faces “the general

debilitation or eventual disappearance of the ‘sense of place’” (2006, quoted from Mahgoub

2008b: 180), a condition applying to most Gulf States where an “overarching sadness and

sameness [is] reflected in the pervasive ‘Las Vegas’ veneer that has been lacquered upon

them” (Mahgoub 208b: 180). Just like in other Gulf cities, communal life seems to have

moved into an amazingly large number of shopping malls, which offers the only spatial

experience and “public” life (though the space is private). At the same time, the use of

traditional styles is viewed as “a defense mechanism against the domination of the sweeping

identity of globalization” (Mahgoub 2007: 74-75) because a “return to the roots” ideology

functions also as a reaction to the war (cf. Mahgoub 2008). As a result, literally reinstated

traditional architecture is idealized as the only valid Kuwaiti architectural identity. This

culminates in romantic emulations of the “traditional village,” which very much represents

the “nostalgic historicism or the glibly decorative” (Frampton 1983: 20) feared by Critical

Regionalists. The recent artificial construction of a traditional Kuwaiti souq inside the

hypermodern Avenues Mall is a good example of this historicism.

4.3. New Buildings

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Construction of a huge New Sief Palace began already before the Iraqi occupation. It began a

few years after the accomplishment of Pietilä’s Sief Area project. The work has been carried

out by a Kuwaiti company named Archicenter and was accomplished only in the late 1990s

because the occupation set a halt to all construction work. The project modified the coastline

because the New Sief Palace would be built on claimed land, right behind (seen from the

land) the old Sief Palace and along a new shoreline that ventures up to 280 meters into the

sea. This makes the Old Sief Palace landlocked. Pietilä’s Ministry buildings are affected by

this development because the sea elevation of these buildings now faces new installations

that have been built into the sea, such as a dock for grand visitors’ yachts including a heliport

(see FIG. 9). Originally, the Pietiläs had placed the ministry buildings close to the shore in

line with the older Sief Palace buildings. The authors of The Evolving Culture of Kuwait even

highlight the fact that the Pietiläs “have built along the coastline skillfully deploying its

natural formation and making the water front an integral feature of their design” (Royal

Scottish Museum 1985: 91). While they attempted to produce an “imaginative portrait of the

spirit of Kuwait that would be seen from out in the Gulf” (Gardiner: 143), at present the

building can hardly be seen from the sea. Furthermore, the 1,250 meter long waterfront of the

Sief Palace area is far from being the living body of the city because the entire Sief Palace

Area is strictly closed to the public and thus literally dead. Nobody uses the colonnade of the

Sief Palace Extension either. The Pietiläs’ interpretation of the central waterfront as “the

main natural value of the old city” sounds today like a far-fetched slogan.

Most of the Ministry’s neighboring buildings are “Pan-Arab style” buildings: the 1963

Sief Palace, the New Sief Palace, and the 45.000 square meters large Grand Mosque, which

was equally completed in 1986. Gardiner found this mosque, which has a 70 meter high

minaret, “a little conventional and over-concerned with perpetuating tradition” (Gardiner:

77). A recent building on the same side of the Arabian Gulf Street is the Al-Babtain Central

Library for Arabic Poetry built by the Kuwaiti Alamiah Company in 2007 (FIG. 67). The

library’s main feature is a stylized—though still very literal—Islamic arch. Its main buildings

evoke the shape of an open book. The library’s website praises the architecture because it

uses “traditional Kuwaiti characteristics” such as “huge wooden doors” and a “precise choice

of colors and their harmonization with furniture and carpets.” A new “Heritage Village”

(Mashrua Al-Karia Al-Torathia) is under construction almost across the street from the

Ministry. However, the most dramatic change has been brought about by the construction of

the new tower of the Central Bank of Kuwait, which is celebrated on the bank’s website as a

new landmark symbolizing “the country’s significant economic power in the 21st century.” It

supersedes Aarne Jacobsen’s old Central Bank building. The construction of the new tower

will be finished in 2015 and it is located right opposite the Ministry. The forty stories high

slim pyramid has been commissioned by the international firm HOK specializing in

skyscrapers and famous for its design of the Baku flame towers in Azerbaijan. The placement

of such a tall building in this particular location contradicts all planning initiatives from the

1970s and especially those of the Pietiläs’.

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Fig. 1.67: Al-Babtain Central Library for Arabic Poetry.

Fig. 1.68: The “new” New Sief Palace (as opposed to the “old” New Sief Palace from 1963) was accomplished

in 1999. The design is “Pan-Islamic.”

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Fig. 1.69: In the public consciousness the Sief Palace Area is represented by the New Sief Palace as shows this

stamp.

The “new” New Sief Palace, which dominates the area, follows generic Pan-Islamic

design with imposing Islamic arches, but makes also ample use of neo-classicist columns.

The Kuwait Information Guide praises this new palace (which houses all institutions that

were formerly included in the “Old” Sief Palace) as “an example of Islamic architecture

inlaid with Kuwaiti art derived from its environment.” Particularly striking is the geometrical

tile pattern of the ground of the premises (well visible on google earth).

If we add the “Heritage Village,” which is under construction, to the list of main

buildings of the Sief area, we can say that in this area, imitation has clearly prevailed over

transcultural approaches. The “New Islamic architecture” that Pietilä was asked to build in

1980 has been materialized by following very “conventional” concepts. Some aesthetically

questionable buildings like the Ministry of Planning do still face the Pietilä building. The

former is about as old as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but has not been well maintained. It

is about to be refurbished only now because the neighborhood of the prestigious new

headquarter of the Central Bank does not tolerate such a rundown building.

The ideas of the older planners to build more cultural buildings of national importance

have been adopted by the new planners; unfortunately only after having neglected the Sharq

area for almost thirty years. The Al-Babtain Poetry Library is the first cultural building that

has been added to the area since 1986. The driving force of the recent renewal is the new

Central Bank high-rise.

4.4. The Macro-Scale

The Sief Palace area is affected by the macro-scale of the area’s urban development. By the

time Pietilä’s Sief Area project was finished, Kuwait’s urban condition had totally developed

towards a cityscape without hierarchy or layering dominated by a number of unconnected tall

buildings and mega-projects whose cultural and environmental sustainability often remained

questionable. This tendency remains particularly visible in the neighborhood of the Ministry

because here urban planning and architecture did not seem to matter for three decades. Given

the urban development east of the Ministry as well as the relative quietness of the New Sief

Palace area, the Ministry’s place is now no longer in the center of the crescent shaped area

enclosed by First Ring Road, but instead it is situated at the periphery of the urban context of

the Sharq district. This designates a completely different value to the Sief Palace area.

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Officially, almost the entire Ministry is located in the Sharq district as the district border cuts

from the Sief roundabout right through the Ministry premises up to the parking lot. The rest

of the Sief area is in Qibla. This means that in spite of the geometrical continuity produced

by the parallel ring roads, the significance of the Sief Palace site has considerably changed

and the transformations have made the Ministry particularly isolated in geographical terms.

While in the 1980s the purpose of the Sief area project had been to revive the old central city

by designing three new buildings, today the Ministry buildings find themselves “locked

away” in the most western corner of the Sharq district. The Sharq area is dominated by the

Sharq shopping mall, the first grand project to be built after the Iraqi invasion. Any natural

connection with the Sief buildings and the area has thus been cancelled: both Ministry and

Sief buildings are forbidden to the public; the former cannot even be seen from the street

because it is hidden behind monumental additions. The arches and the emphasis on

monumentality create a distance between the building and the spectator. (As a result of the

Iraqi invasion trauma, a machine gun mounted on an army vehicle is constantly pointing at

passerbys and makes them feel uncomfortable.)

The area that accommodates five buildings by world class architects in three districts

(Qibla, Sharq and Dasman), is extremely incoherent. The incoherence becomes extreme in

the area opposite the Sharq Mall as show the many sand fields in the google earth picture of

the area (FIG. 70). The “key buildings” that aroused Gardiner’s enthusiasm in 1980 are there

but any sense of urban coordination is lacking. As show Figs. 71 and Fig. 72, buildings are

still placed on empty fields and, as Shiber had written fifty years earlier, little thought is

given to the orientation of buildings or their structural order. The Museum of Modern Art is

located in an old high school building in the middle of a sand field. No “tailoring” of the

urban fabric has been done. There is coherence neither between the important buildings nor

between the Sharq area as a whole and the Sief Palace area. To a very large extent, the

inconsistent handling of “Sief vs. Sharq” is responsible for the feeling of urban desolation

that persists in this part of the city in spite of the realization of multiple projects. Given that

the Pietilä’s main purpose had been the informal integration of the area into the urban fabric

as well as the metaphorical appropriation of the genius loci, the result is rather ironical.

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Fig. 1.70: Incoherence becomes extreme in the area opposite the Sharq Mall

68

Fig. 1.71: Little thought is given to the orientation of buildings or their structural order.

69

Fig. 1.72: Buildings are still placed on empty fields in Sharq.

5. Conclusions

Pietilä’s Ministry could have been a good example of a successful Critical Regionalism

inspired by transcultural thinking. The confused reception of the Ministry can be traced to

several factors: badly organized urbanism in Kuwait, inadequate aesthetics of the building,

difficulties of installing Critical Regionalism in the non-West in general, and the subordinate

status of critical thinking in the receiving culture in particular. The latter point will be dealt

with in detail in this conclusion.

5.1. The Urban Problem

It has been said that the best regional architecture has been produced by “desert regionalism”

in India, the Middle East, and Mexico (Curtis 1985). On the other hand, even in desert

regions, successful regionalism is not achieved easily. Even Hassan Fathy faced immense

problems in rural communities “whose distorted aspirations and values attached to their

understanding of comporaneity did not match the environment that Fathy offered them”

(Özkan 1985: 12). To produce a successful regionalism, it is helpful to have an environment

in which a variety of other examples of regionalism are already present. Harwell Harris has

said that “to express this regionalism architecturally it is necessary that there be building,

preferably a lot of building at one time” (Harris: 58). The Sief Palace Area Project was born

into particularly unfortunate circumstances. A complete restructuring of the entire area,

which started even before the invasion with the construction of the New Sief Palace, has

changed the environment and made it relatively incompatible with the Ministry’s character.

Furthermore, poor urbanistic choices are responsible for the fact that the Ministry never had a

chance to “speak” to a larger public.

5.2. The Aesthetic Problem

Pietilä’s architectural agenda does not accord with a Kuwaiti mindset as it is too much

determined by the ambition to go beyond geometry, to create unpredictable shapes and to

implement a fragmented “pluralizing antisystem, antihierarchy, disentity, [and] the context of

assembling-disassembling” (Quantrill 1985: 25), which resulted in surreal abstractions.

Conservative Kuwait is probably not the right place to experiment with such ideas. About

Pietilä’s surrealistic Dipoli building, Pauline von Bonsdorf notes that “one would expect

these surfaces in a barn but not in a convention center. [It is] breaking the norm of good

architectural behavior and common-sense taste, and it may cause rejection and aversion in

the visitor” (Bonsdorf 2007: 14). Similarly, Kuwaitis argue that tiles should be expected in a

public bath but not in a ministry. Khan noted in 1988 that “there must be mass appeal in the

form that is communicable to and understandable by the public” (Khan: 136) and found that

this appeal did not exist in the case of the Ministry. Connah had similar thoughts.

Obviously, the Kuwaiti authorities had difficulty fully grasping Pietilä’s intention to

embody “the spirit and rhythm of Islamic work but not its actual forms” (Quantrill 1995:

172). Pietilä’s expressions are too abstract, too ironical and too poetically vague. For

example, Pietilä had pointed out that “the windows are guardian shapes, … [and] that the

function of these wall openings is to allow friendly forces in and hold out enemy powers,

spirits …” (Quantrill 1985: 130). Even to enlightened researchers it might not be entirely

clear what is meant by this. It can perhaps be best interpreted as an attempt to produce a

sense of “wonder” in the way in which Columbian architect Rogelio Salmona’s expressions

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were believed to be based on “syncretism and its power to provoke wonder” (Castro 2005:

157). Pietilä’s “Metso” library in Tampere, which is supposed to be a “genius loci with a

touch of mysterious charm,” works better along those lines and is also much better

understood and appreciated by the public. In the Ministry, the renovators either eliminated

the walls containing guardian shapes or sealed them with monumental structures.14

The problem seems to be that Pietilä’s locally inspired symbols, even in instances where

they are recognized by locals, will remain “mere symbols” with which they cannot establish

a more intimate contact. The case is similar to the Ciudad Universitaria in Mexico (designed

by Mario Pani and Enrique del Moral), which also abounds with local symbols like pyramids

and piloties and which, in the opinion of Harwell Harris, “has given the Mexican something

familiar to take hold on. But unless the Mexican finds other uses for the stilts, the thin vaults,

the cantilevers, and the sun-breaks than are exhibited in the national University buildings,

they will remain mere symbols of an alien modernity” (Harris: 64). Also here the modern

language failed to create a living architecture.

As pointed out by Tzonis and Lefaivre, Critical Regionalism does not merely establish

affinities or familiarities but is more dependent on the device of “defamiliarization” which is

supposed to “challenge the legitimacy of the possible world view in the minds of the people”

(1991: 3); and defamiliarization is one of Pietilä’s main aesthetic strategies.15

However, by

applying such modernist devices, Pietilä took for granted a Western intellectualist paradigm

that searches for architectural identity by relying on fractured, self-critical, and anti-

essentialist procedures. In Kuwait, especially after the Iraqi invasion, the search for identity-

symbols has evolved along rather straightforward lines. If it is true that Critical Regionalism

can emerge only through “a new kind of relations between designer and user” (Tzonis &

Lefaivre 1981: 5), it needs to be stated that in Kuwaiti such a relationship has not been

established. While for a “western” critic like Alan Colquhoun it is “no longer possible to

envisage an architecture that has the stable public meanings that it had when it was connected

with the soil and with the regions” (Colquhoun: 155), people in non-Western countries are

much more likely to search for such an identity.

5.3. The Kuwait Project and the Problem of Critical Regionalism

The examples of Critical Regionalism most often cited by Frampton are small-scale projects

with a strong personal input. However, in the Kuwaiti case, the main problem has not been

the size or not even the official character of the building. At the end of this chapter and in the

next chapter we will look at two other examples of official buildings (Utzon’s National

Assembly in Kuwait and Louis Kahn National Assembly in Dhaka, Bangladesh), where the

method of Critical Regionalism has led to successful results. A more important problem is

different perceptions of the term “liberation” that is inherent in the ideology of Critical

Regionalism. Strangely, liberation is supposed to function through ambiguity. According to

Tzonis and Lefaivre, ambiguity is important in Critical Regionalism because it can function

as a means of liberation from repression and chauvinism. For those authors as well as for

other authors of texts on Critical Regionalism, liberation anything western is important.

However, what happens when the users of this newly constructed architecture do not find

such liberation useful at all? And what happens when they do not see why a liberating

vocabulary should be ambiguous? Then those liberating and ambiguous narratives will not

fall on a fertile ground.

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There is a dichotomy: on one side, regionalism tries to install time and history in

buildings while on the other side, anti-historical modernism tries to base its expressions on

“eternal” truths—or at least on a timeless concept of eternal innovation. It is obvious that this

dichotomy is useless in the Kuwaiti context. Critical regionalism can only be understood in

relationship with certain perceptions of modernity. The problem is that the understanding of

“modernity” is not necessarily the same in the non-West and in the West. Modernism as a

utopian and purist ideology has been accepted by many non-Western countries in the past

and has more recently been rejected by neo-traditionalist or religious cultural movements.

Different from this is the kind of “modernity” that is often on the “western” mind today. This

modernity speaks out against the above utopian proto-modernity with its innocent faith in the

future, belief in progress, and so on The new, predominately “western” modernity sees itself

rather as a “critical” (some might say “cynical”) type of modernity that is disillusioned by

humanism though it still somehow clings to it. This “new modernity” sees itself mainly as a

resistance movement attempting to slow down a soulless process of unification,

industrialization, and technization of an “old modernity.” At the same time it has difficulties

spelling out its own alternative vision of the future. Critical Regionalist thought is derived

from this critical type of modernity, which is why it cannot be installed in regions where the

image of the first type of modernity persists (either as an example to emulate or as an

example to reject).

It has been said above that Transcultural Architecture settles in a realm beyond all

cultures without belonging anywhere. With regard to the Ministry, this turns out to be a

problem rather than a solution. First, in a globally compressed world determined by the

transnationalization of capital and internationalization of labor, many people might desire not

to transcend their ethnic and cultural roots but rather to reinstate them. “Liberty” in this case

is the freedom to choose, emphasize, and demonstrate one’s identity. Second, politics are a

factor. According to Nezar Al-Sayyad, “many Middle Eastern governments resorted to using

local and foreign architects to help them create such a new national style” (Al-Sayyad: 259).

It is certainly no coincidence that almost all important commissions in the 1970s and 1980s

have been given to foreign architects who pledged to build on the continuation of the Arab

tradition. And when the Kuwaiti guidelines said that the Ministry should demonstrate “new

Arab architecture and a character tailored for the local identity” (Clouten: 48), the authorities

probably did not have “transcultural architecture” in mind. As for them, new Arab

architecture was too much a matter of national pride and identity. A large part of the

architectural activity in this region has been concentrated on official buildings and palaces.

Since, according to Kultermann, those foreign buildings represent “an image of the country’s

power and authority” (Kultermann: 42), it is not surprising that Pietilä’s abstract

transculturalism, which is supposed to undermine authorities and hierarchies, has been found

unacceptable. While Critical Regionalism sees the political instrumentalization of vernacular

architecture as a danger, for the Kuwaiti authorities, architecture should construct national

identity in a relatively direct fashion. This is especially true in the case of a Ministry of

Foreign Affairs, which is supposed to show how official representatives want to appear in the

national arena. Here, Critical Regionalism offers no solution since it constantly avoids

univocal narratives and favors ambiguous hybridity. In a world without aesthetic hierarchies,

all styles are equal and everybody is free to add his/her option to the transcultural mosaic.

This is not the way to be chosen for an official building in Kuwait.

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5.4. Critical Thinking in Kuwait

Another problem is that Pietilä’s radical attempts at provoking his Finnish students “to start

thinking in another way” and to “reject any ‘face-value’ or banal connotation in over-

simplifying the complexities of architecture” (Quantrill 1987: 161), is rather unheard of in

Kuwait until today. Pietilä wanted to free students from didactic constraints, and to “fight

against thinking routine that has been taught in high school” (Quantrill 1987: 161). Wherever

transculturalism is applied, such a critical stance becomes necessary because central and

peripheral elements need to be weighed against each other. In his typical fashion, Pietilä

offered with his Kuwait project not a solution, but rather a problem that the public was

supposed to solve.

In general, in Kuwait, critical thinking and critical evaluations of given patterns of

thinking are rarely taught in schools and universities. A study at Kuwait University done with

77 students shows a score of 12.45 in critical thinking tests for Kuwaiti students against a

score of 18.0 for American students (Al‐Fadhli and Khalfan 2009: 553).16

May Ann Tétreault

reports that at Kuwait University, students “are assigned only summaries of novels along

with summaries of critiques, which they were to memorize. One student remarked that she

wanted to write about her own ideas, but this was not permitted by most of her professors”

(Tétreault 2011: 85). Ilene Winokur finds that while critical thinking and problem-solving are

deemed more and more necessary for entrepreneurship in the contemporary world, in Kuwait

“traditional methods of teaching and learning, such as lecture and memorization of content,

do not prepare students with the cognitive skills required to think like an entrepreneur”

(Winokur 2014: 121). As a result, “the youth are mostly unprepared to seize these

opportunities because they lack the critical thinking and problem solving skills to adapt to an

ever-changing economic environment” (p. 120). One of the basic findings of Tony Blair and

Associates’ report entitled “Kuwait Vision 2035” is that students are not receiving an

education that prepares them for jobs in the Kuwait of the future because thinking skills are

weak (Blair 2009). The Blair report also quotes professionals saying: “The students go

through the public school system without learning any real life skills or critical thinking, and

end up relying heavily on family connections [in lieu of an education].”17

Furthermore, the

2009 Singaporean study, A Diagnostic Study of Education in Kuwait, analyzed the quality of

the current teachers in Kuwaiti public schools and attested “a lack of understanding and

competencies in using a repertoire of teaching methods to enhance critical thinking and to

develop problem-solving skills” (NIE-Singapore 2009: 112). I have myself been teaching

Critical Thinking classes at a Kuwaiti private university for five years and would judge the

students’ achievements at around 30 percent on average compared with students who would

take the same class at an American university of average standing. The inability to retrace

Pietilä’s thinking patterns might be one of the reasons why, during the thirty years that the

building has been used by Kuwaitis, all traces of Pietilä’s thoughtful eclecticism have been

eliminated.

Of course, in the above critique of critical thinking skills, the classical problem of

Critical Regionalism’s rampant colonial attitude recurs once again. Does “the West” have the

right to force all the world’s peoples to “think critically”? Is the non-Western world not

allowed to have its own (perhaps “non-critical”) way of thinking? Is the non-West not

allowed to enjoy authoritarian traditions, straightforward symbols and (what Westerners

would call) kitsch?

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It remains a fact that the “western” obsession with criticism puts a strain on people who

believe that some things simply do not need to be criticized. Why should architecture be

submitted to critical standards that have been established by Western critical philosophy? A

common pattern tends to put the ascetic and intellectual standards of critically minded

architecture on one side and those things that “the people really want” on the other. Vincent

Canizaro has characterized the situation like this: “In critical theory, one’s personal or local

history was available only through the technique of defamiliarization, lest one fall prey to

nostalgia. … and yet we crave for comfort, even postmodernists” (Canizaro 2007: 11). Why

does beauty need to be perceived critically? Why can it not be “enjoyed” straightaway? Only

because some westerners (probably the intellectual heirs of puritans) think that any kind of

enjoyment is naive?

In aesthetics, the kind of liberalism believing that all standards must be established

internally and that external authorities need to be refused per se, is known as “kitsch

liberalism.” Kitsch liberals insist that kitsch is not aesthetically inferior for the simple reason

that it is real—at least more real and less pretentious than much of the so-called high culture.

Selle and Nelles defend this liberalist attitude like this: “[kitsch] is not founded merely on

deceit; it is not an ‘as if’ culture, it is ‘lived’ culture, and whoever calls it kitschy is making

an absolute of a position based on educational tradition and normative interest” (Selle and

Nelles: 41).

I do not agree with the above argument. However one often turns the topic around, it

remains absurd to speak of an intellectual “imperialism of critical thinking” (just as it is

wrong, in my opinion, to condemn any criticism of kitsch). The reason is that the instruction

of “critical thinking” always leaves open the ‘what’ of the subjects’ thoughts and teaches

those subjects only the ‘how’. Therefore, at least theoretically, Critical Regionalism will

never be forced into the straightjacket of protest against those things that some people might

perhaps enjoy (authoritarian traditions, straightforward symbols, kitsch …). The practice

might look otherwise in certain cases. But theoretically, protest is not an ideologically

established value transmitted by Critical Regionalists at the moment they are teaching non-

Western nations to think critically about the global architectural situation as well as about

their own architectural standards.

The liberalism and relativism by which Keith Eggener’s attack against Critical

Regionalism is driven is thus not pertinent. Eggener presents the case of Mexican architect

Luis Barragán—whose work is held up by Frampton as exemplarily regionalist—as a counter

example. Eggener points out that Barragán is an elitist, conservative, and romantic bourgeois

and thus no Critical Regionalist at all:

His elegant walled compounds, elite subdivisions, and equestrian enclaves may, as Frampton suggested,

mark a kind of critique, but it is worth keeping in mind just what sort of critique this was: hardly radical or

progressive, but romantic and reactionary. His elegant walled compounds, elite subdivisions, and

equestrian enclaves may, as Frampton suggested, mark a kind of critique, but it is worth keeping in mind

just what sort of critique this was: hardly radical or progressive, but romantic and reactionary. (Eggener

234)

However, this is Critical Regionalism, too. Barragán submitted his environment to critical

scrutiny and chose the elements he preferred. He did not make use of Pietilä-style surrealism

and estrangement nor did he choose nostalgic clichés and stereotypes. Critical Regionalism

does not need to look progressive or anti-colonialist in whatever context. If the conclusion

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(the result) would be fixed before the premises are solved, the procedure could not be called

“critical.” What matters is the critical reflection that led Barragán to choose this particular

aesthetics. He was not reinstating romantic clichés for their own sake.

The real problem (and Eggener’s main criticism addresses this point) is that Critical

Regionalism very often does seem to think that good architecture must look resistant,

progressive, and anti-colonialist. Ironically, this is not even the “fault” of Critical

Regionalism but, this time, simply of regionalism. Harwell Harris (2007) has explained that

any regionalism seeks liberation, expansion and diversity simply because the region is in

conflict with the nation. Historically speaking, regionalism is not only about “conservative”

items like soil, community (Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft), and romanticism, but paradoxically, it

also is inherently progressive. While nationalism seeks consolidation of existing structures,

regionalism attempts to break those structures. This means that any regionalism is critical to

some extent, and Eggener’s thesis about the intrinsic colonialist attitude of Critical

Regionalism needs to be revised in accordance with this fact. The reason why so many

people tend to think of regionalism as apolitical while they see theories defining the nation as

critical, is that within our relatively stable, uniform and highly centralized political entities

called “nations,” random, unstable and unpredictable regions are allowed to flourish (as long

as they do not claim independence).

Of course, as mentioned, it cannot be denied that Critical Regionalism very often does

think that good architecture must look resistant. In order to circumvent this problem, I have

suggested to shift the focus of attention from Critical Regionalism to Transcultural

Architecture. If Critical Regionalism does really stress “place, identity, and resistance over

all other architectural and extra-architectural considerations” (Eggener: 234) and therefore

becomes a “revisionary form of imperialist nostalgia” (of which I am not convinced), we are

definitely on the safe side with Transcultural Architecture. Transcultural Architecture merely

attempts to see the individual in the general in a hermeneutic fashion. It does not submit the

other to the self (through protest and resistance) but simply tries to design a transcultural

language in which individual attributes can subsist.

Let me come back for one last time to the paradox of “imperialist anti-imperialism” and

the idea that anybody who asks non-Western people to think critically is colonizing them,

even when the critical thinking process is directed against colonization. Eggener quotes

Marina Waisman who insisted that “Latin American architecture of a regionalist character is

not primarily a reaction to the West, or to ‘world culture’, as the word resistance would

imply, but a response to local circumstances. It should be seen not as a marginal practice, but

as a development parallel to contemporary architecture in the industrialized West” (Eggener:

233). This means that Latin Americans can enjoy their regionalism without producing it

“critically;” they produce it merely in the form of cultural continuity. There is only one

possible comment to this. If the result of this Latin American regionalism comes close to

what Westerners can attain only by submitting themselves to an immense effort of critical

thinking, then this should be fine with everybody. What would be the use of forcing Latin

Americans to adopt a critical protest culture if their architecture is perfect the way it is? It

would be absurd to require that regionalism always be a critical response to the dominating

and imperialist west. Regionalism can flow “uncritically” and directly out of cultural as well

as religious conditions. The problem is that on a more general level, critical thinking

becomes more and more important during the age of globalization. Most regionalisms are

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exposed to transcultural movements and a critical spirit has become necessary almost

everywhere.

The same goes for Faramarz Hassan Pour’s critique of regionalism that he formulates in

the context of an analysis of Iranian Qajar architecture. The Qajar dynasty of the late Persian

Empire lasted from 1781 to 1925. Qajar architects attempted to revive traditional styles and

to “strengthen the credibility of their government within the public by emphasizing Iranian

identity.” At the same time, the influence of Western technology and aesthetics is obvious.

Hassan Pour states that “Qajar architecture may look like a mere misinterpretation of

European architecture” (Hassan Pour 2013: 17) and he believes that Frampton will dismiss

those styles because they are neither “critical” nor modern enough to be classified as Critical

Regionalism. Like Eggener, Hassan Pour is convinced that Western Orientalism can speak

the regionalist language and is therefore suspicious of all attempts to impose a critical

attitude in non-Western cultures. In the end, for him, Frampton’s system of regionalism is not

comprehensive enough because it does not accept popular architectural expressions such as

Qajar architecture.

I would counter this by using the same argument used above in the context on Latin

American architecture: Transcultural Architecture does not have to go the way of Critical

Regionalism. On the other hand, Hassan Pour’s further explanations that “Qajar architecture

truly represented Qajar society, which aspired to a Western appearance while it was

ideologically traditional and even anti-Western” (p. 17) shows that it actually is amazingly

close to Critical Regionalism. It is not the spontaneous, popular movement that it appears to

be at first sight. It is not merely driven by unreflected eclecticism. Instead it has also thought

critically about its position within the larger colonial picture. The conclusion is that this

Transcultural Architecture did go the path of Critical Regionalism, even if the critical input is

not obvious at first sight.

The Kuwait case is distinct from the Latin American and the Iranian ones. Pietilä asked

Kuwaitis to adopt his pluralizing aesthetic anti-system of anti-hierarchy and disentity and this

was simply “too much” for the consumers. However, a lack of critical thinking on the

Kuwaiti side is equally flagrant and it would be wrong to talk it away by insisting on the

colonizing effects of Critical Regionalism.

There is another reason—closely linked to the one above—why Pietilä’s language could

not be accepted: it is too abstract, and here it actually moves away from classical precepts of

Critical Regionalism. Traditionally, abstraction is allowed and encouraged in Arab culture in

the form of ornaments; but in Pietilä’s vocabulary, the concreteness has been taken out of

“the Arab” as well as out of “the Western.” Both Arab culture and Western culture are

represented in an utmost abstract fashion and subsequently combined. To understand such

forms requires an intuition shaped by a critical culture. It requires, for example, some sort of

critical thinking if one wants to recognize, as does Sikander Khan, that Pietilä’s cutout arches

might be “voids of a lost reality” (Khan: 130). Other examples are the mosaic with large tiles,

reed soffits with aluminum sticks, and arches presented as strange cutout holes … Not

everyone can appreciate this abstract kind of aesthetic play. It takes a reflective mind used to

swift leaps from concrete facts to abstract concepts.

5.5. The Limits of Critical Regionalism

In the Kuwaiti case, the Ministry has been built in the spirit of transcultural architecture.

During the thirty years of its existence it has been transformed by the Kuwaiti authorities into

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a vehicle of populism and a relatively simple means of gratification. Pietilä’s thoughtful

eclecticism has been transformed at least partly into a pastiche similar to the buildings by

which the Ministry is surrounded. The failure of Pietilä’s Sief Palace Area project makes us

stop and ponder because here it has not been just any architect who failed. Pietilä was the

contrary of a starchitect but he demanded of architects to “suppress individuality in order to

transmit the genius loci and feelings of the people, and the ‘people’ is not limited to one

generation” (Lehtimäki 2007: 90). Pietilä’s failure indicates the limits of Critical Regionalism

as well as transcultural architecture in general. When the critical side of critical regionalism

is not supported by a consensus of the receiving side, mutual understanding is impossible.

Connah predicted all this in the 1980s by asking “how legible in an Arabic manner was such

a project?” pointing out that the Kuwaiti “people” would most probably have preferred “the

more accommodating shift to a scenic referential project and architecture” such as the

“parodic” precedent of the Hubbard Sief Palace (1989: 338). Critical Regionalism, as it flows

out of postmodernism, post-colonialism, post-industrialism, post-communism and still some

other “posts,” is dependent on ironies and playful attitudes that will not necessarily be

understood in countries in which more straightforward histories tend to shape expressions in

more literal fashions.

As mentioned, it is difficult to estimate what the “general” Kuwaiti public has been

thinking of the building because the premises have never been public. To some extent the

decisions of the “authorities” might reflect the tendency of “the public.” However, I have

also been talking to many Kuwaitis who expressed regrets and found the present

modifications, as far as they were aware of them, very unfortunate.

5.6. A Brief Comparison with Two Other Buildings

It is useful to have a brief look at how two other official buildings have been conceived by

Western architects in similar situations. Utzon’s National Assembly, located only two

kilometers away from the Ministry down the Gulf Street, is a similar example of Critical

Regionalism. However, this building is regularly put forward in Kuwaiti government

discourses as a building that the nation should be proud on. What saved this building in the

eyes of the Kuwaiti public might be the fact that Utzon applied principles of Critical

Regionalism without taking the imponderable risk of making his statement too radically

transcultural. Mahgoub believes that Utzon “incorporates the essence of the tradition in its

contemporary design. The building was designed as a grand souq covered by a large tent”

(Mahgoub 2007: 78). Also Connah perceives a “noble heroism” (1989: 343) in this building.

Like Pietilä, Utzon uses Arab elements in a very abstract fashion, but the result as well as the

reactions it provokes are almost opposed to that of Pietilä’s Ministry. I do not agree with

Mahgoub’s and Connah’s evaluations. I rather think that Utzon’s abstraction went even

further with the result that any link with the realm of the concrete got almost lost; and that

this is what eventually saved his case. Pietilä’s “skin architecture” could have claimed

Bedouin heritance but Pietilä never attempted to do so. As a matter of fact, Utzon’s Bedouin

tent metaphor is not much clearer than Pietilä’s. However, what saves Utzon’s building is that

it can also look plainly modern and this without any ambiguity. The regionalist input

(especially for superficial observers) remains extremely limited. To the Kuwaiti passerby the

Assembly will most probably appear like a straightforward Chandigarhian modernist

expression, radical in its own right, but clearly “Western” and not at all regionalist. In other

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words, Utzon’s National Assembly can best be interpreted as an example of a Western

modern design that has been “liberated” from certain Western constraints – but not more.

Fig. 1.73: Jørn Utzon’s National Assembly, Kuwait, 1972-82.

Fig. 1.74: Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Legislative Assembly building, 1953-63.

Another parliament building is Louis Kahn’s National Assembly in Dhaka. Like Pietilä,

Kahn believed that the language of form can transcend cultural differences and like Pietilä’s

Ministry, Kahn’s Parliament is definitely “strange.” Also Kahn refused local style while

attempting to mediate between global and local culture through transculturalism (Faruki: 15).

However, what kind of mediation has this been? Much more than Pietilä’s, the building is

overpowering and—even more—it appears as a Western and foreign imposition. Kahn’s

explanation that the water and the mounds employed in this building are essential

characteristics of Bangladesh appears rather facile and far-fetched. However, for some

reason, Kahn managed to establish the emotional dialogue with the local public that Pietilä’s

Ministry could never attain. How Kahn managed to do this is difficult to establish but one

reason might be that the Dhaka building emanates a mysterious and spiritual aura for which

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Pietilä’s was perhaps striving, but which he never achieved. The result is that local architects

imitate Kahn’s style (Ali 1985) and about fifty percent of architects working in Bangladesh

“are in some manner or another coping with it” (Curtis 1985).

Connah concluded already in 1989 that in the future the Kuwaiti public will probably

reject Pietilä’s Ministry building because the “eclectic Arabic taste may not have wanted such

a dominant, directional, literally (willful) modern design” (1989: 339). However, the present

chapter has made clear that the real reason why it has been rejected is not its modernism.

Given that Utzon’s building is equally modern in appearance, this simply cannot have been

the reason. Modern buildings are in general well received in Kuwait. Even more, the

Ministry did contain Arab elements inside and the Kuwaiti architects sealed these openings

by using stereotypical modern geometrical shapes, making the remaining Arab input invisible

from the outside. What the Kuwaiti “public” found disturbing was not the modernist aspect

of the building, but Pietilä’s transcultural interpretation of the Arab elements. What they

abhorred was neither regionalism nor modernism, but the adventurous mixture of both, that

is: they abhorred transculturalism and Critical Regionalism. Paradoxically, a blandly modern

Western building would probably not have produced a culture shock at all, while Pietilä’s

careful transcultural approach obviously did.

Fig. 1.75: Louis Kahn’s National Assembly in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Chapter One of: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein: Transcultural Architecture (2015) 1 Most of the projects discussed were signed by Reima Pietilä and his wife Raili. Though I normally

mention both where appropriate, for convenience’s sake I refer in some contexts only to Reima Pietilä. 2 Since in Arabic ‘i’ and ‘e’ are the same letters, both transcriptions are possible.

3 This building was supposed to have half the size of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and have about 600

employees. The project was abandoned and the ministry would finally be built inside the compound of the

Ministry Complex in neighboring Al-Mirqab. 4An official permission could never be obtained. Several petitions from official organizations (universities,

embassies, and so on) have been rejected.

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5 Shiber noted that the plan of Kuwait is formalistic like that of eighteenth century Karlsruhe where

concentric radials revolve around the chateau (Shiber: 79). 6 Apart from Kenzo Tange’s Kuwait Airport, these remain the only internationally known buildings in

Kuwait. I.M. Pei’s Hilton Area Housing (1977) and the Al Salaam Plan are not very well known, just like

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Al-Ahli Bank (1987). The Al-Hamra Tower, equally by SOM, has just been

accomplished. 7 Zahra Freeth relates—in a humorous fashion—how the population would perceive the transfer of the harbor.

Seafaring families had been asked to attend a meeting of the Council of Ministers to offer their point of view on

the matter. Here is an exchange: “I hope you told them that we all want the boats along the sea-front, as this is

one of the most delightful and picturesque features of Kuwait.” “No, we all agreed that it was a good idea to get

rid of them from new Kuwait. Then we can have an elegant promenade along the front, and not the untidy mess

that boats make when they come into harbor” (Freeth 1971: 101). 8 The semi-mythical king Gilgamesh is said to have ruled Uruk in the 27th century BC. The city lost its

importance around 2000 BC. 9 The choice of colors seems to have been Raili Pietilä’s work. See Quantrill 1985: 164.

10 A serai is a Turkish or Middle Eastern palace or a caravansary.

11 “Tout rhizome comprend des signes de segmentarité d’après lesquelles il est stratifié, territorialisé, organisé,

signifié, attribué, etc. mais aussi des lignes déterritorialisation par lesquelles il fuit sans cesse. Il y a rupture dans

le rhizome chaque fois que des lignes segmentaires explosent dans une ligne de fuite, mais la ligne de fuite fait

partie du rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 16). 12

It would of course be interesting to not only comment upon the “authorities’” view and treatment of the

building, but also upon its reception by the larger Kuwaiti public. Unfortunately this is not possible

because the complex finds itself completely “locked away,” first because it is not accessible to the public

and second, because the original buildings are hidden behind new structures. Even Kuwaitis with a keen

interest in local culture are often not aware of the existence of the Ministry, let alone its history. The few

Kuwaiti people who have been in contact with the building are visitors of the ministry, and their opinions

are not representative of the average population. 13

The diwaniya is typically Kuwaiti. It is a reception area where a man receives his business colleagues and

male guests. It is an indispensable feature of a Kuwaiti man’s social life. 14

Jacobsen’s National Bank of Kuwait and to Kenzo Tange’s Kuwait Airport have been submitted to

similar treatments. 15

On Pietilä’s defamiliarization and its affinities with the Russian ostranenie will be discussed in Chapter 2. 16

The critical thinking skills were measured by California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST), a

standardized assessment tool. 17

The Blair report, which has been heavily criticized in Kuwait, is not accessible to the public but parts of

it can be found on wikileaks (http://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09KUWAIT1196_a.html). This is

what the report says about education in Kuwait: “The Blair report polled over 40 countries from around

the globe, and cites the results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and

the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). TIMSS measures the mathematics and

science achievements of fourth and eighth grade students in the United States against data gathered from

students of the same age in other countries. In 2007, the last year the test was administered, Kuwait ranked

near the bottom among both fourth and eighth graders in mathematics. Among eighth graders, Kuwait

ranked 44 out of 48 countries surveyed, immediately below Botswana. In the 2006 PIRLS, Kuwait’s

students ranked 42 out of 45 countries surveyed. According to 2008 figures from the Ministry of

Education, recently documented in the press, 50,000 Kuwaiti citizen children between the ages of 10 and

14 (out of a total of 131,000 Kuwaiti children in that age group) have not completed elementary school.”