In March 2014, Ibraaz and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation launched an online media partnership with Art Dubai 2014 for the eighth iteration of the Global Art Forum.

In this transcription from the Forum, panel participants Hans Ulrich Obrist, Shumon Basar, Hisham Qaddumi and Sophia Al Maria discuss the Sheraton Hotel, which opened in Doha in early 1982 – a decade after Qatar’s first development plan was unveiled. Designed by the American architectural firm William L. Pereira, the hotel looked like a spaceship that had time-traveled and landed in the desert. In this discussion each of the speakers relates their individual, personal relationship to the Sheraton Hotel building. Al Maria presents a specially written short story set in the Sheraton Hotel, which she describes as 'a mothership of Doha'. Qaddumi explains the working process of creating Doha's master plan and more specifically about the architect William Pereira. The panel also discuss the current restoration and preservation efforts of the hotel.

Shumon Basar: Good evening. Welcome to the Global Art Forum 2014, thank you so much for being here. My name is Shumon Basar and I'm commissioner of the Global Art Forum. It is an endeavour that has been put together by a multi-tentacle team, and this team includes Omar Berrada and Ala' Younis, who are the co-directors this year, Uns Kattan and Miriam Butti, and also our wonderful new colleagues here in Doha which include Miguel Blanco Carrasco, Jean-Paul Engelen and Malak Hassan, as well as Tariq Al Jaidah and Mayssa Fattouh from our host – the Katara Art Centre. We are very grateful for all their support and extremely happy to be here. Over the last six months many people have shown us fierce generosity in sharing their intelligence and their inspirations with us. I would also like to thank our benefactors, the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority, and Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC). We are currently being live streamed on the Ibraaz website and the Art Dubai website and this is courtesy of Ibraaz and the Kamal Lazaar Foundation, who are also kindly providing the simultaneous translation at the back. Our gratitude to the New York Times our international media partner, and a pre-emptive thanks to our audiences, real and virtual – without you we are literally just an empty room and a sound system.

Over the last few years the Global Art Forum has been taking pleasure in thinking – the modes of thinking, the modes of address – and it makes these public. It tries to pay attention to the rhythms of attention which, as we know, is something that is being increasingly attacked, eroded, and threatened by Facebook feeds and email inboxes, many of which you may be checking this very minute.

(Video 1): Enemy of historical continuity and historical memory. Yes, because for one thing see the mechanisms by which the young generation is linked with the old generation. For instance, Marc Bloch the great French historian once pointed out that in actual fact in agrarian societies' continuity is maintained by jumping generations. Children are brought up by grandparents, the parents go out and work in the fields. And so consequently children immediately get used to what grandparents remember of their past and so on in turn.

And that's been broken up in our society?

It's been broken completely, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the experience of the past is quite often no longer relevant and no longer seems relevant to the younger generation and consequently becomes something different. The only past which very young people really recognize is their own personal past, the rest seems like olden times.

(Video 2): Can you travel in space? Or rather, can you travel in time?

We don't know. Of course, we do travel in time all the time, we move back and forth. I discovered a man named J.W. Dunne who analysed time in a book called Experiment With Time (1927), and he found that dreams not only consisted of the past but the future as well. I have found this to be true since I write my dreams down and very often I will dream something which then later happens. So in that sense yes, I think it is easier to travel into the future, in a real sense, than into the past.

SB: That last line is very important. The first person that you saw was the great historian Eric Hobsbawm and the second speaker was American novelist William S. Burroughs. It goes without saying that history is about the past. But history is, in fact, also a portrait of the present moment and a manifesto for the future. Is there history without historians? Without documentation? Without prejudice? Someone once said that a historian imagines the past and remembers the future. This year, our theme, 'Meanwhile…History' imagines a time-line of transformational turning points, many of which have been lost, forgotten or erased. We're very grateful to Sophia Al Maria who gave us this wonderful title and we will hear from her in a minute. Over the five days of the Global Art Forum we will be time travelling through 778AH, which is when Ibn Khaldun wrote the Muqaddimah; through to the second week of 1920, when Soviet orientalism was shaped; and then we will arrive in 1955, which is when dOCUMENTA was founded. We then move to 1966, which was a telling time for the CIA, Sudan and the Gulf; then through the short 70s in Iran, Chile, Greece and the newly formed UAE; via four decades of Kuwait's cultural experiments; Iran's art history exported to Dubai; and pan-Arabism's lesser known derivative of Pan-Kafeerism. Here in Dubai and Doha today and tomorrow we will be looking at the master plans of the 70s that culminated in the spaceship-like Sheraton and at the ethnography of pearling and the Arab migration experience in Brazil as it was historiographed in cinema and in video art. And we have produced six fantastic badges with various slogans – 'Meanwhile Meanwhile', 'Meanwhile Crisis', 'Meanwhile Art Fair' and 'Meanwhile Zombies'. They are available at the back with a number of globe books, which are from the Global Art Publishing initiative. Please feel free to take them on your way in or out. So that concludes my opening remarks, I'd like to invite up our guests for this evening, Hisham Qaddumi, Hans Ulrich Obrist. And a little reminder please, of course, mobile phones should be switched to silent, please. Thank you. And if you're tweeting this evening the hash tag is #GAF8.

I'd like to say just a few words about this inaugural event that we are going to be holding now. As I mentioned earlier, one of the periods we are interested in is what we call the 'short 70s'. This is 1971 to 1979 a time when, it might be argued, much of where we are in the world today seemed to be put in place, politically, economically and culturally. 1971 marked the independence of Qatar and the next decade or so witnessed the process of doubled nation building. On the one hand there was the establishment of ministries and institutions to govern this new country and on the other hand there was the physical building of the nation: its infrastructure, its schools, its hospitals, its shops, its malls, and so on. Much of this, of course, focused around Doha and we wanted to take the Sheraton Hotel which you can see here, where it appeared as if it were like a slow alien landing between 1978 and 1982. We wanted to take the Sheraton Hotel as a kind of time machine, or indeed a spaceship, to visit this foundational era of boldness and innovation, some of which perhaps has either been forgotten or literally erased. For Hans Ulrich Obrist and I, the Sheraton – which many of you will know, of course – has just been closed for refurbishment, and we will talk about this during this evening. The Sheraton has been a very special touch-point for us in Doha. Hans Ulrich is the co-director of the Serpentine gallery in London and one of the world's most prolific interviewers. Hans Ulrich once said, 'at the Sheraton there is always a fire or inundation', and, in fact, that evening there had been a fire. It led to a power cut that meant that we ended up enjoying our buffet dinner over candles and the light of our mobile phones. So we have remained absolutely insistent over the last few years that we have been visiting Doha that the Sheraton, like Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, is a portal to other dimensions of the universe. Therefore, it gives us great pleasure to be able to discuss the Sheraton and the seminal 70s with Hisham Qaddumi, who is one of the key protagonists of the era and our second 'time traveller'. Hisham Qaddumi is the president of the Arab Architects and the HQA Consulting Group. During the 1970s and 80s he served as the planning and development adviser at the Amiri Diwan as well as the director of the Diwan's technical office in Qatar, which was responsible for the major developments in that period. We really could not have anyone with better firsthand experience of this incredible period than Hisham Qaddumi so thank you so much for being here.

Hisham Qaddumi: Thank you very much.

SB: We will speak to Hisham shortly, but first I'd like to welcome Sophia Al-Maria. Sophia is a Qatari American writer. Her book The Girl Who Fell to Earth was published in 2012 and she is currently working on a film called Baretta. The Sheraton, in her words, is her 'mothership' and Sophia is going to explain to us why and how. So will you please join me in welcoming our guests this evening, thank you.

Sophia Al-Maria: Thank you, commissioner Basar. I have written a short story in honour of this event. It is a sci-fi short story and William Pereira, the architect of the Sheraton was a great fan of science fiction. I hope he would approve of this because The Sheraton is a place that I really think of as a 'mothership' of Doha and an emblem of the time travelling that we have done as a country. The story is a bit sad, I hope that it doesn't lower the mood. It's called The Silent Verse:

This is a story about a woman who was born into the dateless world of stunning affluence. Her girlhood coincided with the pinnacle of wealth. Speed was the hallmark of this impatient improbable time. The sun rose and set in a sky knotted with jet travel. Cities nestled in the clouds and the deserts were made to be green. The sun rose and set…It was then, in a metropolis like ours, that the woman of this story would live to see the end of time and the end of seasons. Before her eighteenth year, air conditioning, polar bears and the interval called Spring had gone. By the time she was married, the sea was dead and the day she gave birth acid rained from the sky. But from her bed she was comforted to see a sturdy Ziggurat that had landed before she was born. It was herald to the future and a promise to the past, but that future turned out to be a mirage. The world's leaders had led them into a trap. People strained to understand what was happening. They looked to the wise men of their time to explain this explosion in reality. They could feel it shattering into particles, dissipating from their vision like a cloud of cosmic dust. But the leaders did not heed their fears and instead abandoned the earth to fend for itself. Obsession with attainment gave way to belated atonement. Humanity withered, war spread and with it the darkness. Everyone suffered and most died but somehow this woman lived. Although, in truth, she did not want to. She was unwilling inheritor of an empty empire. A dowager queen, mourning the past, fearing the future and she existed in a present without purpose. Now she can recall very little but there are three memories that remain and they are all gathered in the same place. A hotel at the end of a jetty – the Sheraton.

The first memory is of a visit to a menagerie, she's very young. There is an ostrich, there is a fennec, and there is an Oryx, the last doe. The girl stands, fingers laced in the wire of the cage. The animal's pupils are horizontal and it sees that which is coming. At the edge of her vision a man raises a gun and the gazelle rears up curved horns piercing the roof of the cage. In a single second, that man poaches what took 200 million years to perfect. In the second memory she is nearly grown. She stands on a chequered chessboard overlooking the lagoon. It is hot, a blazing noon, and she is waiting for someone. And then a fighter jet passes low. She seems to see the air ripple around its nose and herself reflected in the pilot's visor. She thought he waved to her from the cockpit but then the sun reflects into her eyes and she is blinded by the colour blue. In the last memory, and the strongest, it is night time in a hotel room and she is holding a little boy. Before he slept she had told him a story that had once been told to her and now he is awake trembling from a nightmare and it is her fault. The story concerned a child who had slept too soundly and when he awoke his family had moved camp leaving him alone in a desert full of wolves. The story did not comfort him and that was not her intention. She wanted him to be brave, to be smart and vigilant. But he is so small and so afraid, so she tells him he will be safe from all the unknowable if only he recites. But before she can teach him the words of the verse, the blue flash, the bomb. She doesn't see it but hears the sound and is deafened by a blanket of silence. When she next looks down her arms are empty, the little boy is gone. Since then all time has stopped. The sun is stuck in a perma-noon, drowning what is left in indifferent whiteness, burning shadows into walls and carpets and leaving the woman in a dead world without night. And one day she leaves the compound to revisit the cage, the hotel, the lagoon at the end of the jetty. Perhaps it will help her. She follows the glinting track of rippled glass treads of tanks melted into the sand, the guilty war traces condemning mankind, clues to what happened in this abandoned abode, al-atlal (the ruins). She comes to the jetty unchanged, as it has always been in the museum of her memory. And at the end sits the Sheraton, her mothership, waiting for her, welcoming her back. It is radiating a golden warmth that turns everything around it rubble-grey. She gazes on it and she feels she is home. She never thought that the sun was wonderful until it fell on the wall of this building, still squatting on 3,000 piles and pillars, sinking its steel shafts deep into the reclaimed coast. She walks through the windless garden, she sees the cages are empty. She goes to the chessboard and looks out across the lagoon. She enters the lobby and is dazzled, and polished filigree of the domes remain intact. The elevator takes her to the crown of the hotel and it opens onto a maze of foxed mirrors. She follows the curvature of the room to its core.

Here is a raised platform nooked with loveseats. Here are ordinary things that are now upsetting to her. A pair of speakers, an empty ashtray, the rippling crystal pond of a chandelier. She goes to the western window to look out at over the remains of the city and then, when she sees something is wrong, it is not there. Instead of Al Dafna there is a place of eternal greyage there is silence and there is only silence. It thickens around her like gelatine and then a pale blue light blooms from the east, burning into a blaze and then vanishing. A woozy feeling of sick washes over her, perhaps it is the radiation, perhaps she shouldn't have come here. At the window she looks down to the still garden, did she see someone run past the cage? A black streak of movement with no face? This alarms her and for the first time she wonders if there might be others. Hundreds of rooms are stacked beneath her bedchambers, kitchens and toilets and corridors, she runs downstairs but the lighting is dim and when she glimpses movements she again assumes it to be a shadow. But then she remembers when the sun stopped and how the shadows became fixed, colourless shapes built from layers of darkness. Why were these moving? What are these mirrors in her shape? Like a black void sucking the breath from her lungs. There is another one standing at the end of the hall. It seems to be waiting, awful and empty. Her sickness mounts and she bolts herself in a room on the seventh floor. She tries to catch her breath, hoping it will go away. Later on she hears words, somebody is whispering. She finds she is on the bed in the room. Has she fallen asleep in the sun? The voice is coming from a vent near the ceiling, it is a flickering mutter. It is reciting Ayat al-Kursi (the throne verse). The silence never knew how lonely it was until it heard a voice cry out. The woman has not heard anyone in a very long time, not even herself. She cries knowing she is outnumbered, one living to one billion and so the voice is impossible, it must be her fantasy. The flash of blue again, another wave of vertiginous sick. It reminds her of the jet, the pilot and the mirrored face. She looks out the window and sees that the sun remains fixed in the sky. It is glaring down on her like an unseeing eye and she notices that the voices have stopped and the familiar silence has returned, unwelcome. And that is when a terrible beckoning begins to sound inside of her and her curiosity trumps her fear and she steps onto the landing and looks over the balustrade into the cavernous lobby. At its centre she sees that a light is on where there had been none before, illuminating the velvety red of the spiral stair. Concentric circles, squares and hexagons tessellate on every surface. Time has crystallized in this perfect space in the opus sec-tiles on the floor. And then it appears again, a hovering figure made of uniform blackness. The woman thinks it is facing away from her but then it turns, back the same as the front. A veil of shadow is thrown up over the head occulting the face. It reminds her of the way girls used to do when she was young and wanted to remain unseen. And the blue light comes again and the building twists around her, a vaulting vessel, churning time. And the being vanishes and she is dizzy and she counts her steps to the stairwell: four, here a step, four, here a step. Three, here's the bottom and here's the underground passage she did not know was there. Might she not be alone? She did not answer this question because the recitation returns, this time from an unlit passage, hailing her baited beacon. She does not know if she is moving towards it by choice or if she is being dragged there by fate? She comes to the end, only this time she's not afraid because now she knows she has been here before, in this bunker in this safe place beneath the hotel, built perhaps for leaders who once came here to meet. This is where she came the day of the bomb. Her pupils dilate and then she sees the order and unity of this material world and how it has cleaved us under by ghostly approximation of a spiritual world. Perfection in four dimensions the hyperoctahedral symmetry, impossible to comprehend by anybody in the third. And here she meets herself, the time traveller, cradling in her arms the emptiness of space, she has always been here and she will come again. It is a cruel epiphany refracting to infinity but she has been annexed from her time, from her place, and from her child. Slipping in the glare of a blue light, one day long ago through some rift in her dimension into this cul-de-sac in time beneath the hotel at the end of the jetty.

The end.

HQ: Wonderful

SB: Sophia, could you tell us your first memory of the Sheraton?

SA-M: My first memory of the Sheraton is of the assault on my childhood senses walking into that lobby and I especially remember the green plants that were hanging over the edges of the balcony all around it and bit triangular in shape.

SB: How old were you?

SA-M: I was probably around six, although I might have been there before and not known it.

SB: So around 1988, or 89? Something like that?

SAM: 1989, yes.

SB: When was the first time you thought that perhaps the Sheraton is not from planet Earth? Was it the same time? Was that the moment?

SA-M: No, I think when I was a teenager it was a very special place. It is such a fantasy structure, but really I don't know if there was an epiphany because I think it is from another place, from an amazing imagination.

SB: Hans Ulrich, I was wondering if you remember when the first time Sophia told you about the Sheraton hotel was?

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Yes, actually I have always believed in this idea of friends telling other friends about buildings or houses – the first time I ever came to London was because my friend said that I should go and that led to an exhibition. This is similar to the way I first came to Doha – Sophia said that there was a place I should know about and we went to see the Sheraton. We immediately thought of a project on the very first day – we thought it would be great to do something inspired by the book The Futurological Congress (1971) because I had previously met the author, science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, and that is really what came to my mind. Time travel started with Lem. Our encounter with him in Krakow, Poland was very strange because Lem was very old and he didn't want to be a science fiction writer anymore, he wanted to be a scientist. So basically when we approached him we were told there was no way that someone from the art world could ever see him, only people who have a science background. So I got the chairman of the science academy to write a letter. When we got an appointment it was quite spectacular because we were in his house in Krakow doing this interview and he suddenly realized that I wasn't a scientist.

SA-M: What gave you away?

HUO: It was actually when I quoted Tesla. It was not possible to quote Tesla. Then we made a second mistake and asked him about Tarkovsky and he said he has to talk badly of this, he did Solaris which is nightmare this book and he started screaming. After that it was over and we were thrown out of the house into the cold because we were not scientists. In any case, that came to my mind when Sophia showed me the building for the first time and obviously we thought of The Futurological Congress, which is an amazing book. We thought there could be no better set up than having a 'futurological congress' in this amazing lecture theatre, which is like a congress hall, and to bring all the great science fiction writers together. I think it is wonderful that we can be here with Hisham today and hear about his memories and I was also very touched that Shumon showed us Eric Hobsbawm at the beginning because he always talked about the protest against forgetting and knowing the importance of memory. Obviously we live in a digital age where there is more information but maybe it is not that we have more information but rather that we have more memory – on the contrary, amnesia might very well be at the core of the digital age. So I think that the whole idea of starting with Eric and his idea – a protest against forgetting – very fascinating. We had a pre-conversation today with Hisham about the protest against forgetting and he told us about Tange and the idea of Metabolism. That account was, again, a very interesting connection because the Metabolist movement was the second thing which came to my mind when we walked through the Sheraton and I kept thinking about Kenzo Tange's book on this subject. And we visited Kurokawaand Kikutake and obviously all roads led to Tange but he was no longer there so went to interview his two widows. They told us a lot about the work he did in Doha so that will also be very interesting for the conversation, to find out the connections between this building and Metabolism.

SB: Fantastic. So perhaps to start this time travel, maybe we can move from Sophia's future back in time and I would like to ask you, Hisham, to start. Could you tell us about the moment when you invited William L. Pereira, the architect of the Sheraton, to come to Doha to give us the sense of place then, and for us to understand the context? What was Doha like in the early 70s? What were the challenges and the context in which Pereira arrived in 1975?

HQ: The challenge was to take this country at the beginning of its era of development and infuse this development with a sense of belonging to an international movement but at the same time keep it rooted in its traditions and in its heritage. Basically we started with this idea and this is where the context comes in – the context of the Sheraton is really the development of the greater Doha master plan that was being articulated and produced in the beginning of 1975. Pereira's connection with it was as simple as a young architect coming here, being given a huge responsibility to work with the leadership who were very eager to go forward and to produce a country that has vigour. It was contagious. We would sit with Sheikh Khalifa, who was crown prince at the time, and you could see the enthusiasm bubbling – we wanted something different, we wanted something that was just beyond the ordinary – and that is one of the greatest influences that we had. So we had to decide how we were going to do that. I had read about William Pereira when I was a student of architecture at the University of Texas and he had made the cover of Time magazine later in 1963. What excited me about him was the fact that he was rooted in the Modernist movement of the late 60s but he is more in the late tradition of having simplistic buildings with an impressive 'wow' effect. We thought that this was needed here and it was necessary to have the anchor project in the west bay or in the greater Doha plan and for it to be an exciting place. It answers to all the functions that are needed for what we labelled at the time 'the living room' of Qatar because there were very few facilities that you could use at that scale. So I simply found Pereira's number, called him and got through his office in Los Angeles. I explained to him that I'd been given this responsibility of coming up with a vision, a recommendation, and I asked if he would be interested in getting involved. He wanted to know more about Qatar so I told him about the ministry. He arrived two weeks later - a very elegant man with a tremendous amount of presence and personality, which I think is very important in architecture. He had a passion for excellence, to adopt an idea and carry it. We introduced him to Sheikh Khalifa and Sheikh Hamad, and then we started taking long walks north along the shoreline of Qatar from the Ministry of Information to the national theatre.  We started getting ideas and the genesis, the origins of the greater plan for Doha.

SB: Something interesting about William Pereira is that he was an incredibly prolific architect.

HQ: He was.

SB: There were three versions of his offices, over 400 projects all over the world but, in 2014, he is not someone who would be studied at architecture schools, he has been forgotten somewhat. I think it is really significant for us to talk about that.

HQ: I think it is the age of iconic architects that are producing useless buildings. Beautiful expensive buildings that nobody wants to use.

HUO: What is not forgotten is his LAX which remains legendary and as an inspiration for artists until today. I was wondering was there anything that struck you about Pereira at first? How did you discover his work?

HQ: I was interested in him when I was studying and I was reading a lot about different architects. We were in the early 60s, in the middle of the early or late Modernist movement. We studied architects such as Le Corbusierbut they did not excite me. I just was not interested in the box with the glass outside and I think that this is something that can be debated – how much they contributed to architecture in general. But what excited me about this type of architecture is that it fit the demands of Qatar at the time. I will not go into an analysis of whether he belongs to Modernist, Post-Modernist, Constructivism or Deconstructivism – I get lost in these terms. But to me when I reviewed his buildings, he had done the Irvine masterplan and I studied the plan for Irvine, California and he had done the downtown Houston master plan. I thought he was logical and sensible and he did lots of research. Pereira was not in a hurry – one of the things that he kept telling us in our debates was to take our time, not to rush these things, let them be a framework for 30 years not for 5 years. Those aspects without reference to historicism impressed me and most of all I was impressed by his passion and his commitment. I remember that he believed that small is beautiful and when we were working on one of our walks on the corniche he said, 'I love this place, it is so small I could put my arms around it'. And I thought that was very telling in the end. I think Doha, until now, has that characteristic, relatively speaking, of being reachable – of being able to conceive it all in one look unlike a town like Dubai which is just sprawling dynamism. No one can deny the contribution that Dubai has made but to me I feel comfortable in Doha, I feel you are still in a human-scale setting and these are principles that Pereira stressed repeatedly.

SB: Another thing that I think is very fascinating about him is that he has to be one of the very few architects in the world who has an academy award.

HQ: Yes he has an academy award for designing the set for Reap the Wild Wind (1942). After the award he went on to design the sets of five or six movies and then became a producer. He was a prolific man, a renaissance man – he painted, he drew, he was a great architect, a great humanist, his presence was overwhelming. He was handsome, tall and he possessed the room as soon as he walked in. I think all these attributes helped what was fundamentally a great talent.

SB: I actually wanted to ask Sophia about this because she is also a filmmaker.

SA-M: Almost.

SB: Almost. But his early architecture, his first project, was a set of a retirement complex for Motion Picture Association. He was very active in the LA scene and there is an affiliation on the one hand with cinema and filmmaking and, of course, with science fiction.

SA-M: Yes.

SB: Once you had discovered these things did they retroactively make you explain the Sheraton in a different way?

SA-M: It was a wonderful revelation that all these things that are latent in the building that I was familiar with, were real and true. That kick started a period of research into the Sheraton and into Pereira. I wanted to live there and inhabit it. It is a beautiful place to film in. I have shot there, I have friends who have shot there, there is a science fiction film that was shot there but that hasn't been released. I hope it makes more cameos on camera.

SB: Hans Ulrich, was there something you wanted to ask about Pereira?

HUO: Yes, I have some questions about his unrealized work, such as the unrealized projects for Doha. But before I ask these I want to come back to the question of context because Shumon and I spoke earlier and emailed about exactly this question of context. It is interesting actually that this is not the first master plan for Doha, the first was an English office.

HQ: Yes.

HUO: In 1972 a British firm was actually hired to modernize Doha after Sheikh Khalifa and that took over and in 1974 that was obviously a momentous moment because the oil embargo quadrupled the price of oil and that meant there was suddenly a lot of money. And in 1975 you made this wonderful phone call to Pereira and I think it is interesting to know a bit more about the context to help us understand where the Sheraton fits in. You invited Pereira to think about the idea of a masterplan and you mentioned the idea of the new Doha that is not the old Doha. Together you proposed to complete the waterfront corniche by deep dredging the low line sand deposits. I'm curious to hear more about that context and then how the Sheraton fits into that overall masterplan.

HQ: The masterplan we called 'the greater Doha masterplan', since it was the first time that linked the older Doha with any future projection, any future areas of development. When we were talking about elements of planning, we wanted a strong magnet that would pull people and we both believed in the congregational aspects of space. What makes people come together? And the obvious answer was the body of water. When it was low-tide, you could walk literally one or two kilometres and you could see the sabha and the smells. We wanted to use that body of water as a magnet, as a generator of the design and of the infrastructure system and so on. But we did not think at the very beginning of adding the land. The original idea was just to clean it, make it navigable with a four-meter depth. When we started looking further at the sweep of the corniche, which stopped where the Ministry of Information and the national theatre are now, really was half a sweep not a full sweep. If you want a sweep you have got to complete that circle. We started throwing ideas around and in the end we decided that a fill should be there. One objective was to clean the water; the second objective was to complete the sweep of the bay; and the third objective, which was very important, was to make available the expanses of land that were created at very low cost to accommodate what we called the 'magnets' – ministries and so on. So all these ideas together justified doing it and now it is becoming the actual magnet. This makes Doha concentric in terms of attention. Then we took the radial system and extended it northward to direct growth there. The result is that now you can do low sail – you can do this because we took that system. At the time we only reached the C, now we have the D and E but we are talking about the C. We added the D and the E to the plan and then the regional system that connects it with Umm Said and the north and we turned it near around the new area to the north so the growth goes up. We placed one of the 'magnets', which is the University of Qatar, right up where it is now. So basically we created two systems of movement – one along the corniche with the corniche being low density and low traffic with a support system to allow faster access and then one that connected the corniche to the university. Those two systems with their support roads defined the growth into the future. What you are referring to is an experimentation that started with Pereira, which was to invite different schools of architecture and so we invited Kenzo Tange; Stirling from England; Georges Candilis from France; Boston Associates or Architects Associates in Boston; CRS from Houston and so on. We experimented with them in terms of real projects. The one that was most interesting is the ministerial complex that extended from the palace now to where the Ministry of Information and the national theatre are. Pereira came up with really futuristic concepts where he allowed a circular human people mover overlooking the bay but then that would give access to a series of buildings that could be connecting. One could see this as bearing the characteristics of a common language – created by different designers which act as the vocabulary – and he is creating poetry in a way. In the 80s we started suffering some shortages in funds. Another great project is the tower that Pereira designed. It is an interesting one because it was meant to be where the museum is now. And a third project was meant to be in the place that is now the Laguna housing. In our master plan it was conceived as a public regional park with the same body of water body that is there now because that was way outside the limits of the Doha at the time. When the announcement for the location of the University of Qatar was announced in the papers, people were shocked that we were taking the university outside of the town. They were worried that students would have to drive long distances, but now it is basically right in the middle of the town! We appropriated six million square metres for it and everybody thought that was so huge because it was government land and now of course they are expanding. We did a new master plan for the university and it was wonderful to have that much land to work with.

HUO: So the tower and the Ministry remained and unrealized and the Sheraton became a masterpiece. It was interesting because when we did this Metabolism research in Japan, there was also a lot of talk of this idea of experiments and of laboratories.

HQ: Yes.

HUO: The spirit of that moment is interesting for all the Metabolists. Kurokawa told us that the whole Tange surroundings were deeply interdisciplinary, and tuned in with many other practitioners: with photography, with visual arts, with cinema. They were all obsessed with Godard. The Institute of Social Engineering invited all kinds of fields, bringing them together to do these amazing congresses of knowledge production. Obviously, with the Sheraton many of these interests were brought together – the interesting literature, the interesting architecture and these 40 drawings of plans. The process was very complex one.

HQ: Yes, I still have the drawings. I must find them and bring them to you.

HUO: Can you tell us about the planning process and how Pereira thought of the drawings and then of the building?

HQ: Yes. The process started with a concept – what was the concept we wanted to implement there? Was it going to be a traditional building with a series of arches? Was it going to be arabesque with lots of ornament? The decision was made that we were living in an age of lots of interaction and interfacing between cultures, and Qatar wanted to express that vision. We had to come up with a formula that bridges that gap so if you look very deeply at the basics of the structural composition of the architecture of the hotel, you find that it has two basic influences and they share a lot of common ground. One is a reinterpretation of the Islamic style of design or philosophy of design – the most characteristic aspects of Islamic design are really reduced to concepts, meezan (the order), balance, repetition, the basic shade and light, the importance of the inner courtyard as a collector of activity. The rhythm, the symmetry – when you look at the art of geometric design in Arab and Islamic architecture and the arabesque which tends to be more floral and so on, you find that it is composed of basic geometric forms. The Modernist movement was stressing that concept, that you reduce and take the ornament of the art deco era and the Victorian era and you distil it to its basics, not in the tradition of Gropius or Le Corbusier but post that. And the two met and we took the triangle as the formative unit and we started creating pure shapes. First hexagons, and from hexagons to double hexagons, then to circles. We really employed them in different directions on different materials, different scales, and so symphony is there but it is not the tool that you had before with arches and a bit of arabesque and so on. Then there were the courtyard proportions and the need to see it from a distance and to be contained by space rather than overwhelmed by it, which dictated the shape of the pyramid. And then, of course, there was the genius of Pereira to compose something far more interesting than just a pyramid.

In the literature that Pereira publishes about this project, they say one of the most important factors is our continuous dialogue with the client, meaning our group. The fact it took us 40 sketches before we came to this and that I actually still have those. One of these days I am going to unearth them and give them to Hans and we may do a book on the process. The process was influenced by all these features – Islamic architecture, Modernism, the fact that you had a great architect behind it. One impressive aspect of Pereira is that he was so humble and the way he treated the people that were on his team – he would come with four to five people and he would sit with them and then ask them to come and talk about the project rather than taking the credit all by himself.

SB: It was also an important project in terms of its pioneering construction techniques.

HQ: Sure.

SB: The use of steel frames like this, prefabricated concrete and it also had the first escalator.

HQ: Not there. No, the first escalator was in the Salam which was done at the same time. It is still there, they might have changed it but it is still there. We adopted the steel structure because of the shape. That was the very first one and we had a factory under our quality control that produced the panels for the hotel along with the panels for the Diwan Amiri later on and for the University of Qatar student housing. That was a good investment and we brought in quality controllers to produce what is now still the best concrete produced in the area.

SB: Here are some of the construction images.

HQ: These are some of the panels that we used. This is the upper end and this is a solitary impression.

SB: I think it is a little bit blurry but gives you an impression of how little there was there.

HQ: It was the first structure in the west bay, and after the national theatre.

SB: And then the Salam Plaza came after this?

HQ: Yes. The Salam Plaza and then a couple more buildings. We tried our best to get people to go there because it was quite out of town and so we offered a package where you could come by land.

SB: That is the Salam Plaza at the back, a shopping mall and conference centre. But the shopping mall struggled at the beginning?

HQ: Yes it struggled at the beginning.

HUO: Was it because it was too remote?

HQ: Yes, and the offer and then we had some very courageous people who came forward who bought land there – Hussain Fardan, Ali bin Ali, Salam, Jassim Jaidah because from 1976 onward there was a decline and there was a crisis. It stopped but we had to convince people to come and try it and we gave them all the support we could.

SA-M: Did Salam Plaza come before the centre then?

HQ: The Fadl centre? Yes, it came before the centre. The centre was in the late 70s.

SA-M: It brought a new way of shopping.

HQ: Yes, that was a big event at the time.

SB: And the Sheraton opened 1982.

HQ: 22nd February 1982.

SB: Can you tell us how it was received? What was the opening night like?

HQ: Overwhelmingly, I mean there are videos that were made that you can get on YouTube which show the excitement.

SA-M: Weren't there fireworks in Sheikh Khalifa's shape?

HQ: Were there?

SA-M: Yes. I saw the video, it was pretty amazing.

HQ: Yes. That is very true, when we walked Sheikh Khalifa and Sheikh Hamad up to the elevator and looked out one of the windows it was…

SB: And remind us, who was the first guest who was signed in?

HQ: That was Alan Sheppard.

SB: And who is Alan Sheppard?

HQ: Alan Sheppard was the first guest; he is a friend of ours from Houston. We invited him to come.

SB: But Alan Sheppard more importantly was a famous astronaut.

HQ: One of the guys who landed on the moon.

SB: The Sheraton's first guest was an astronaut.

SA-M: Mr Folton told me he was the very first to sign in to the Sheraton so an astronaut was the first guest.

SB: As if you need more proof that this is a space ship. The captain signed in first.

SA-M: Yes, he was piloting it from the Al Shaheen restaurant.

HUO: And now you are renovating the hotel and obviously that is interesting because that building is one of the great buildings and it will be protected. I am very interested in what you told us this morning about how very carefully you are involved in renovating it in the spirit of Pereira, can you tell us about this?

HQ: Yes. We were asked to prepare a scope of work and design the guidelines with the support of the Diwan. We wanted to keep everything from the basic composition of the place and we did not want to touch it at all, but we are in 2014 – the times have to show their impact on it and we thought we could do it best by replacing the furniture and the colour schemes. We had to stay true to the basic characteristics and materials that are very authentic and the transparency of the building – what you can see from the outside and what you can see from the inside have to coincide and the use of the triangular pattern was fixed. We are working with the Private Engineering Office (PEO) on that and they are totally in agreement. One of the great changes that you are going to see is that all of the shops that were added later on around the parameter, especially at the ground floor blocking the sea. The whole idea of the ground floor was that all the windows on both sides of the pyramid should be open to the sea on one side and to the landscape on the other. Now you are going to see a complete clearing of that. Not one single shop, not one single obstruction will be there so that the experience when you walk in is going to be that you are in touch with the sea visually right away. We are trying to keep it as authentic as possible. I know you are worried.

SA-M: I'm not worried now.

SB: Our worries have been alleviated this morning.

SA-M: Yes.

SB: We have time for any questions or comments.

Audience: Thank you very much. I am interested to learn why 1982 is in the title for the space ship Sheraton presentation if it starts in '72 and ends in '82?

SB: 1972 is really when, as Hans Ulrich mentioned, the first master plan for Old Doha is commissioned by Llewellyn Davis, which then has a number of updates in 73 and 74 and then Pereira in 75.

HQ: This is when we created a greater Doha masterplan, adding the west bay that was not in the other master plans and then linked them together and treated the corniche as the connector – as the bridge between the old and the new and what that entails, redirecting the traffic and so on.

SB: I have just put a few images up of some of the other projects that I think happened at the time.

HQ: Yes, this is Georges Candilis project – one of the experimental projects. That was maybe 70 per cent successful. Georges Candilis belongs to the school of the Le Corbusier and modular design and we needed housing very quickly at the time for an event that was programmed there. So we invited him and he was one of the big names in housing in France. He produced what was useful at the time but it had a number of negatives so we are glad that it is not there anymore.

SB: It was taken down in 2005, 2006.

HQ: Yes. It used to be in the place where the QP complex now stands – six or seven buildings in ascending order with a tower in the middle.

SB: And this is the first Kenzo Tange building.

HQ: This is Kenzo Tange's Ministry of Finance. Although a very small building, in terms of quality of design and of significance it is considered to represent a style. The morning after he did this I asked him 'Why didn't you do the palace?' – because we were thinking of expanding the Diwan Amiri at the time. We had brought in Kenzo to give us a design and I said that despite his cubicle approach he had to remember that this is the place where the ruler would be. It had to have some arches and some aspects of the decorative. So we agreed and he disappeared and came back into the office two months later. We opened it and I said I cannot show this to his highness – this is something that fits California but we are in Qatar and this is the ruling palace. So he looks at me and he said Mr Qaddumi, I just came back from Spain, Madrid where I was on a panel of judges to judge the mosque in Madrid that was financed by Prince Fahd. And there were over 300 entries because they allowed open competition and for seven days I saw nothing but arches so I am fed with them.

HUO: I think you have an image of it because you never realized it.

HQ: Yes, that's it there. The courtyard is there. We just thought it doesn't represent the local influences enough.

SA-M: So who built the Diwan Amiri?

HQ: We did it in house. In fact, we brought in a team that worked in the site offices. That's an interesting project and it has received a lot of attention, a book has been published about it in London and that was the effort again to translate Qatari vocabulary in a new way. So instead of basically using the pattern as it appears in the smaller scale houses, we asked a friend of ours, Mohammad Ali to give us an analysis of the Qatari vocabulary and the Qatari approach to design and he came out with his famous blue book that is now a reference to Qatari architecture and we started using it in a different scale. When you have an atrium that is maybe 20 metres high, you are not going to be able to see the details when it is small so we took them and we enlarged them so you could read a pattern that goes across the whole ceiling. So a question of scale is very important, how do you reuse your vocabulary?

SB: Talking of scale, we mentioned it earlier but this is the great unrealized tower.

HQ: This is unrealized.

SB: It is also by William Pereira and from that era and it was meant to be one of the 'magnets'. So why did this not happen?

HQ: I think it was money at the time.

HUO: If you could pick one of the unrealized projects which was your biggest regret?

HQ: After what I have seen happening in Qatar during the last 10 to 15 years – incredible progress and incredible experimentation with architecture and with new thinking – it is hard to say. I would love to see that there but in its place is the museum so who can argue since the museum is a masterpiece by all measures? The work that Sheikha Moza did in the Education City is outstanding and I'm saying this objectively – this is a great accomplishment to bring in architects from all different parts of the world and have them be able to work together and produce such interesting structures. So I cannot say that there is a regret – each time has its own dictates, each period has its own requirements, but there is no question that in the last 15 years the accomplishments have been incredible. I would have loved to have seen the west bay treated slightly differently with less density and adhering more to the original plan but in the end I think it's a reversible process whereas in other countries it is not reversible. The country and the planning department here invited eight companies to submit for the future plan for the next 30 years and we participated with one of the companies but our cost was too high so they took the Japanese, but we pointed out in this that this is a reversible process – you can contain it. It is a blessing in disguise that 2008 came in terms of urban architectural design because it stopped this all over the Gulf. I think now I can follow up on what they are doing and they are doing a good job by going in depth into the environment that we want to create and so on. So there no regrets but there are retro dreams.

SB: Retro dreams.

SA-M: Title for the next Global Art Forum?

SB: I think that is a great word to end the evening on. Please join me in thanking Hisham Qaddumi and Sophia Al-Maria and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

HUO: Thank you so much.