Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History

Join Ali Karimi and Hamed Bukhamseen of Civil Architecture for the launch of Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History, a book that revisits the founding principles of architectural and landscape discourse in the Arabian Peninsula. 

The session addresses the book's central provocation: that the oil economy's narrative has overwritten older traditions of landscape and territory – highways cutting across the desert, reclamation works reshaping the shoreline, agricultural land cleared for new cities – rendering earlier spatial narratives as a distant pre-history, more fable than precedent. Against that mono-myth, Karimi & Bukhamseen trace an alternative genealogy of the region drawn from instances of pre-oil planning, from desert kites to fish traps to water channels, and from narratives of geology, agriculture, mariculture, and seasonality. Together these upend the toolset for thinking through architecture's relationship to its context, and open onto possible trajectories for architectural intervention – a spatial history of the Peninsula offered as a ground from which to reimagine it. 

The conversation will be moderated by George Massoud from Material Cultures, followed by audience Q&A and a book signing with the authors.

Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and ends at 7.30pm.

Image credit: Cover of Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History, courtesy Civil Architecture