CFP - Identity, Modernity, and (Post)coloniality in the Architecture of the Arab Gulf Countries from the 1950s to the Present
Matthew Heins
Identity, Modernity, and (Post)coloniality in the Architecture of the Arab Gulf Countries from the 1950s to the Present
International conference in History of architecture organized by SAFIR Institute and the Department of Art History and Archeology, Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, 28 October 2026
The conference examines architectural and urban production in the Arab Gulf countries from the 1950s to the present, in the context of post-oil urbanization and accelerated modernization. It explores how architectural practices, planning models, and international exchanges have contributed to processes of nation-building, and the negotiation of modernity in the region. Particular attention is given to the circulation of ideas, actors, and models across regional and international contexts.
This international conference, organized by the SAFIR Institute and the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, aims to bring together local and international researchers in order to explore the significance of late-colonial and post-independence architecture in post-oil Gulf countries in relation to globalization and postcolonial issues. The papers are expected to address a range of topics, including the dynamics of dependency and autonomy in architectural discourse and practice in relation to engineers or planners; the possible emergence of a specifically Gulf model in building production; climatic design; the role of the welfare state; differentiated processes of globalization, internationalization, and transfer through architecture, urban planning, or specific typologies such as museums; and, finally, the ways in which architects negotiate between postcoloniality and the imperatives of nation-building. Contemporary issues—including heritage preservation, as well as the challenges of housing production and building stock—are also included. Learn more about the conference.
The call is open to scholars at all stages, including graduate and PhD students in the history of architecture, art history, urban planning, and related fields. Papers must present original research and must not have been published previously.
Paper proposals of a maximum of 300 words must be submitted no later than March 2, 2026 to the following email address: dorian...@sorbonne.ae
A limited number of scholarships, in the form of travel and accommodation coverage, will be allocated on a priority basis to independent and emerging scholars and/or those coming from low- to upper-middle-income countries, as defined by the World Bank in 2025. Applications for support may only be submitted after notification of acceptance. Participants will have the option to present their papers remotely via videoconference.
Conference organizer
Dorian Bianco
Postdoctoral Fellow in Art history
Department of Art History and Archaeology
Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi
Schedule (2026)
• Deadline for the call: March 2
• Notification date: April 27
• Paper submission date: July 6
• Returned comments date (if any): September 7
• Conference: October 28
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A fleeting view from the multiple lanes of a motorway into Abu Dhabi’s or Dubai’s urban landscape suggests at first sight a mode of production of the contemporary built environment driven primarily by real estate and engineering. However, rather than presuming the complete absence of architecture—since this attitude eventually constructs design as an attribute of European cities—the motorway onlooker should ask what architectural and urban design mean within the realities of post-oil urbanization.
The discovery of oil in the course of the twentieth century, and its formalization by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Baghdad in 1960, introduced new modes of large-scale urbanization in the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), established in 1981—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—which this conference proposes to focus on. Early on, however, architects responded by proposing conceptualized models of urbanization, such as Palestinian-born Saba George Shiber’s Kuwaitopolis, grounded in the figure of the Arab engineer-architect. This project articulated a framework for identity-building in architecture through the selective appropriation of Western models of urban planning, such as the neighborhood unit, thereby shifting design stances from an overemphasized focus on tradition toward a narrative of adaptation.
Soon after the onset of the post-oil era, the Gulf countries adopted an integral version of economic liberalism for non-national citizens, exemplifying Khalid Zekri’s concept of “disjunctive modernity”, by which Arab states select certain technological or economic attributes of Western modernity while rejecting others in order to affirm their own sets of social and moral values. Whereas modern architecture was, in postwar Europe, primarily tied to social welfare, it served more entangled purposes in the Gulf. The extraordinary growth generated by oil revenues enabled an early shift in Western involvement from an architecture of developmentalism—exemplified by low-cost housing—to an architecture associated with high-income economies. This tendency was further transformed in the 21st century with the commissioning of expensive “iconic” monuments for hard or soft power, while most housing production was left to real estate promotion. These dynamics shed light on the specific logics of architectural production in the region, to the extent that they question the relevance of concepts such as the “Global South” or postcoloniality in countries that are among the most developed in the world.
The international conference Identity, Modernity and (Post)coloniality in the Architecture of the Gulf Countries from the 1950s to the Present aims to address the multiple issues of nation-building through architectural design in the recent historical trajectories of the six GCC countries by bringing together the most up-to-date research on the topic. Architectural exchanges with foreign architects appear as an unavoidable entry point into these issues in countries where building needs largely exceeded the availability of both local qualifications and workforce. The conference seeks to interrogate the comparative roles of Scandinavian, Central European, French, and other Western and non-Western architects who have used these countries as platforms for architectural and urban conceptualization, as compared to the historically prevalent British and American actors. Examples include Peter and Alison Smithson’s experimentation with “mat-building” in Kuwait (1974) and Constantinos Doxiadis’s plan for Riyadh (1967–1972). It also addresses the challenges of historiographical narratives, such as Udo Kultermann’s History of Arab Contemporary Architecture (1999), as well as the education of Arab architects who received extensive commissions in the Gulf countries while relying on Western schools. Active figures in the Gulf such as the Iraqi architects Hisham Ashkouri, educated at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Mohamed Makiya, educated at the Universities of Liverpool and Cambridge, raise questions about the autonomy of both narratives and practices native to the Arab world with regard to their dependence on international architectural networks.
While the Middle East has received a large interest over the past decades in History of architecture, including seminal publications as Modernism and the Middle East (Sandy Isenstadt & Kishwar Rizvi eds., 2008), national study cases as Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Sibel Bozdovan, 2001), or recently Arab Modern. Architecture and the Project of Independence (Nadi Abusaada & Wesam Al Asali eds., 2025), less investigations have specifically focused on the Gulf countries. An in-depth case comparative case-study is Stanek’s chapter in Architecture in Global Socialism (2020) on Kuwait City and Abu Dhabi, in which he demonstrates how the process of globalisation in the second half of the 20th century are not a univocal economic liberalisation, but a process of differentiation in which architects and engineers from the Eastern block played a seminal role in a time of Cold war politics. Regarding Abu Dhabi, Stanek specifically argued how Central European engineering firms adopted capitalist strategies to conquer building markets and contracts during the 1980s. Among the seminal recent works specifically dedicated to the Gulf, both Architecture and Globalisation in the Persian Gulf Region (Murray Fraser & Nasser Golzari eds., 2013) and later Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf (Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi & Roberto Fabbri eds., 2021) offer more comprehensive insights followed by more specific monographies including Building Sharjah (Sood Al-Qassemi, 2021) on the modern heritage of the eponymous Emirate—a preservation concern that has recently gained momentum across the Gulf countries.
This international conference, organized by the SAFIR Institute and the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, aims to bring together local and international researchers in order to explore the significance of late-colonial and post-independence architecture in post-oil Gulf countries in relation to globalization, transnational cultural exchanges, and postcolonial issues.
The papers are expected to address a range of topics, including the dynamics of dependency and autonomy in architectural discourse and practice in relation to engineers or planners; the possible emergence of a specifically Gulf model in building production; climatic design; the role of the Welfare state; the differentiated processes of globalization, internationalization, and transnational transfer through architecture, urban planning, or specific typologies such as museums; and, finally, the ways in which architects negotiate between postcoloniality and the imperatives of nation-building. Contemporary issues—including heritage preservation, as well as the challenges of housing production and building stock—are also included. The call is open to scholars at all stages, including graduate and PhD students in the history of architecture, art history, urban planning, and related fields. Papers must present original research and must not have been published previously.