Urban Psychogeography

On Meditative Wanderings,
The Energy of Spaces and
License to Build and Destroy

Psychogeography (noun): “…the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” —Guy Debord

We have all played ‘spot the most beautiful house’ while cruising around an upscale residential area or the ‘spot the most ugly house’ version for makeshift houses that should clearly get a demolition notice. Do designers reflect public taste or create purely out of their imagination? In both cases, creation requires design sensitivity and sharpened awareness. Absorbing the environment and visualizing potential buildings is a complex and energy taxing task. Building spaces people will live and work in is deeper than design.

Introspectively and physically, psychogeography is situated within the topography of everyday urbanism and geography. Out of these open and closed spaces the wanderer weaves between culture and society, the formal and the informal, the public and the private, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the abstract and the concrete, all the while absorbing the scene—and unseen. Traversing through the city with no guard leaves us vulnerable to personal space intruders and annoying acquaintances but allows us to feel the ebb and flow of the city’s energy. Walking aimlessly and taking the path less traveled builds our spacial awareness and decompresses the tension that builds in us—caused by leading idle urban lifestyles. We move with our body but our eyes also move, and rapidly take in the environment. The awareness behind our eyes converges and diverges from one point of focus to another, making us examine where we are and how we feel about it. Here we arrive at what is loosely called the vibe.

Psychogeographical shifts can occur when milestone-feeling-changes happen inside us. Getting our driver’s license and navigating freely for the first time, alters our relationship with the city as we more fluidly navigate from point A to B. Going out for the first time after graduating, getting a job, getting married, starting a business, suffering a great loss or having a baby are always memorable—as our active and updated identity finds new ways of interacting with the environment. A renewed awareness arises in us and some spacial vibes change as things that happened to us come to mind. These personal pivotal occasions change the way we experience familiar environments from those moments onwards and can expand us, allowing us to hold multiple perspectives and layers of the same map at the same time. There are many ways to walk through a city.

“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” — Winston Churchill

Can we have the impression of a city we visited implanted in us in the form of a vibe? How long does it stay? Can we recreate it in our minds? Do we ever really leave the places that are impressed in us? Are our impressions the same? How do different cities affect our behavior? Do we unconsciously adjust our behavior as we walk through different parts of the city?

From my very limited seat of observation I can see manmade structures that will stay around long after their architects and developers are gone—imprinting their subtle beauty or ugliness on several generations. New world wealth on the Arabian Peninsula means new money corporate towers, flagship skyscrapers and thousands of budget buildings scattered across the Gulf. True, taste is subjective but when gaudy glass monstrosities are reflecting the scorching Arabian sun on passers-by that are tripping on uneven pavement, we can’t bask in municipal glory. We’ve had our heads in the sand far too long from vision to vision, in denial of this urban aesthetics problem. The culprits are far too many to name but I will try to make an unqualified attempt to analyze the social and psychological effects of half-ass architecture, bullshit buildings and tasteless design.

Taking a step back, or better yet, a bird’s eye view exposes obvious urban characteristics that we have normalized and are blind from noticing. From rooftops we can see unbolted satellite dishes, loosely handing antennas, exposed water tankers–displayed like ornaments–and forgotten family relics discolored from direct sun exposure. Pilots approaching landing see the good, the bad and the unsettlingly vulgar sides of our capitals. What it says about the residents is that they care only for the facade of their homes—what can be seen from the outside and at eye level.

“We must always remember that the fates of cities are decided in the Town Hall; municipal councils decide the destinies of town planning.” — Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (1929)

There are too many government bureaucrats, accountants, engineers, and executives on public and private building committees that are impediments to the design and planning process. This army of ‘experts’ have a definitive roll only after urban planners and architects present their project vision. Here I am referring to practicing urban planners and architects, not armchair urban planners and architects; who don’t personally survey and sense the areas they uproot with overcharged delegated designs.* Having ridged white collars at the beginning of the vision process is oxymoronic and limits free thinking. Cancer begins with a group of cells within a culture that fail to communicate with the conscious signal of the organism. When those cells grow out of control and spread to other areas, the organism becomes diseased and shuts down. We have cancerous municipality policies, absent public officials, exclusive zoning codes, corrupt construction companies and a Jurassic housing authority. The toxicity of these entities is not seen on the surface but manifests years later as dysfunctional communities in broken living areas. Most people don’t understand how easily we are influenced by our environment. Our work surroundings, daily conversations and living conditions are environmental signals that add up in our unconscious mind and shape who we become. It’s our responsibility to be aware of these environmental factors and how they affect behavior. On a cellular level, studies on isolated stem cells in different petri dishes show evidence of different kinds of gene expression. All stem cells were the same at the start of the experiment, the only difference was the environment. If this environmental influence exists in us on a microscopic level, how are human values, attitudes, opinions and behaviors impacted on a perceptual psychogeographic level?

Why do we have social taboos but not design taboos? Why do we have such a large taste disparity? Does this have a psychological effect on the neighborhood? How does the layout of the home affect its inhabitance? Can a space have a ‘vibe’?

Inspiration, realization and materialization come in differences, distinctions and deep design divides. The commodity fetishism side effects of this materialistic era’s capital markets have given us far too many options to juxtapose—which distorts reality through deceptive advertising and false signaling. A lot of us have lost the ability to recognize the quality of things we let in our minds, bodies and physical surroundings. Like the contrast dependent colorblind, many see the world only in binary oppositions, while those who believe they’re open minded find themselves grossly grappling in the greyscale. Even with all our progress and historical lessons as humans and conscious beings, the dominant default mental position is still an us vs. them black and white view. When looking closely at the spacial experience disparity in regard to psychogeography, Derridean deconstruction is appropriate here:

Tasteful vs. tasteless, original vs. copy-paste, traditional vs. progressive, continuity vs. discontinuity, abridged vs. unabridged, walkable serene sidewalks vs. injury laden pavements, expansive vista vs. tunnel vision, soothing scenic drives vs. agitating car commutes, unsustainable green lawns vs. Japanese rock gardens, organic undulating paths vs. artificial gridlocked grazing grounds, concrete gardens of Eden vs. Dante’s gentrified boulevard of broken business models, entrepreneur vs. bureaucrat, Nesspresso’s corporate coffee capsules vs. single origin slow brewed Arabica, red pill vs. blue pill, live orchestra acoustics vs. compressed MP3 audio algorithms, Nas vs. SoundCloud rappers, Westminster’s Mandrake vs. West Hollywood’s Motel 6, Islamic Andalusian Mashrabiyas facing olive trees vs. Ministry of Awqaf Mosques in Andalus facing the Avenues, islam vs. islamism, science vs. scientology, the path of least resistance vs. the slope of Sisyphus, the Apollonian vs. the Dionysian, Pythagerians vs. Wahabis, Popperian empirical falsification vs. Othman Al-Khamees societally destructive clerical sectarianism, pantheism vs. agnosticism, passionate love vs. arranged marriage, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling vs. your aspiring artist aunt Ma’souma’s untitled works, Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne vs. the infamous house with the two lions, flatland vs. multi-dimensions, fractal geometry vs. linear vectors, power law distributions vs. classical economics ‘efficient market’ bell curves, academic dogma vs. empirical observation, regenerative spaces vs. degenerate design, work ethic vs. half-assmanship, creative architects vs. arrogant assholes with delusions of grander.

Are our modern cities only a lavish display of current economic prosperity? Will they really survive the test of time or are they just grandiose maintenance bills? Were they built to last or built under the umbrella term ‘vision’? Are urban housing projects social containers or a cultural melting pots?

Close-Up on Kuwait (1961) commissioned by Kuwait Oil Company

There’s an old adage in Kuwait that can be paraphrased as: ‘if Kuwait was built with the right foundations from the 60s, the roads would be paved with gold.’ This reminds us once again that we had and continue to have administrative and ignorance issues, not talent or financial issues. We return to Kuwait’s favorite C word: corruption. Disorienting deconstruction and reconstruction, with embarrassing wrongly built roads has dropped the local bullshit tolerance from dizzyingly demoralizing to does it matter any more? It does matter. The average person might not be an architect but is not blind. Most of the ‘golden-era’ modern style houses have been destroyed or rebuilt with ugly facades, because they were unmaintained. With maximum capacity ‘Kirby’ parking spots, we should start to question our urban building style—or even if we have one.

Local architectural firms need to get into the habit of properly documenting their completed buildings with a professional photographer. The photos of the exterior and interior can be used for publishing, archival purposes and as a snapshot record to compare with any future renovations or remodeling—that will change the building’s status from a piece of architecture to schizophrenic real estate. Buildings that have been defaced by the input of multiple contractors and designers lack the uniformness of how a completed building is supposed to look and feel like.

Every week of my secondary education I heard: “failing to plan, is planning to fail” echoed in the auditorium. My school director, Mrs. Rhoda E. Muhmood was relentless in seeding this message into the young minds of her students. Her efforts weren’t in vain, as many of my classmates have become social activists, mindful doctors, culinary artists, aware engineers, industrial leaders, conscious entrepreneurs and brilliant architects. All these roles require meticulous planning and serve a small part in a shared collective vision.

“I think that urban planners, policy makers, or anyone implicated in the spacial policing of cities has to first understand and acknowledge that planning is a settler-colonialist project — the whole idea of cartography arose with imperialism and colonialism. Planning is the conscious effort to achieve strategic goals. It’s about predicting the future — or more favorably, guiding the future. We can say that cities are features of the imagination. Whose imagination, visions, and philosophies get materialized — at least so far — has been based on heteronormative, patriarchal, paternalistic domination. And by that I mean: white, male, upper-class, heterosexual. This maintains the status quo of white supremacy, capitalism and regulated sexuality — so that things are always measured against deemed deviants from the established philosophy. You implicitly find zoning codes that state ‘this is a single family residence area’ — in other-words, you cannot house more than x amount of people related by blood in the same place. This is one separation mechanism that didn’t (at the time) conform to a monogamous, procreative, desert/sea dwelling society. In the U.S. there are many famous law cases in which zoning codes implicitly exclude others — Euclid v. Ambler and Berman v. Parker are two examples. I think planners need to consider identity politics as a central pillar to everything that they do and question the modes of layered intersectional oppression of minority groups who are vulnerable to targeting. Not all groups navigate cities in the same way, we need to interview them to understand their urban mobility struggles and really see the city from their eyes and minds. Planners who are interested in ideas like social justice or urban justice are deluded because this is not really happening in the neo-liberal capitalist system that we have today.” — Shahab Al-Bahar on the institution of zoning [Architect, Environmental Policy & Urban Planner]

There was friction in the post-oil boom to move polygamous Arab tribes into modern housing zones, that were initially drag-drop blueprints of Western nuclear family dwellings. This rapid Western-driven-industrial ‘modernization’ shocked large families and had psychological implications that still span over generations. Zoning drew social lines and distributed blood relatives, clustered family residences, tribes, religious sects and sub-sects across residential areas. Decades later, many families still hold onto kinship practices when it comes to marriage — to maintain ‘original’ kinfolk lineage. In the age of CRISPR, online DNA ancestry tests, and a very interconnected and aware youth with access to high quality information and options, these tribal genetic lottery rituals are falling out of favor. This is one of the indirect effects of local separation zoning mechanisms. Generationally compounded genetic control under the pressure of an accelerating transparent global collective culture will only blow up. When women connect online through hashtags on a shared issue, they transcend local barriers. Through the power of digital interconnectivity, a local issue can become a global issue, and through collective solidarity barriers dissolve. To juxtapose the digital with the physical, this shows how barriers and mechanisms of systematic inbuilt control are slowly coming down.

Zoning laws are outdated and not set in stone, we have to adapt the laws to the needs of the changing population before we slip deeper into the quicksand of the growing housing crisis. The current generation is feeling the squeeze of the ‘tuna can’ living arrangement: inflated prices, smaller land plots, tighter roads, lower quality, less freedom, and extreme discrimination towards singles. The needs of the next generation are completely different from current and previous generations’ — who received 1000m sq government villas. Young people feel marginalized and compressed which is further emphasized by the recently disgraceful (at time of writing) ‘bachelors’ crackdown campaign’ shamelessly advertised on public roads (124 billboards) right next to fast food and cosmetic products ads. Spearheaded by Kuwait’s Municipality and the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs this unusual campaign encourages citizens to report undesirables that are living alone in Kuwait’s residential areas and evict them by turning off their electricity. This campaign is the cherry on top to the housing crisis circus. Living in Kuwait under the current real estate market, broken infrastructure, and inflexibility towards young people is pushing more and more talent abroad. Those who are settled end up paying grotesquely large sums of money for land to build a house, and have to again settle and resettle for cheaper designs that are aesthetically baseless and cheaply finished. Construction innovation, cheaper home technology, an abundance of freelance interior designers, and a rise of architecture studios should all point towards competitive and affordable pricing but we are experiencing the opposite. The whole housing ecosystem is price fixing and trying to take maximum advantage. It becomes obvious that tacky taste, cheap finishing, unmaintained neighborhoods, crumbling roads and claustrophobically tight residential areas are the results of the entire population surrendering and turning a blind eye to whats going on in plain sight.

“Money can be no excuse either. Though Bath’s crescents and Edinburgh’s New Town were not cheap to build, we would be unfairly blaming a lack of inspiration on poverty by proposing that a tight budget ever condemned a building to ugliness — as a visit to the wealthy suburbs of Riyadh and the shopkeepers’ houses of old Siena will rapidly and poignantly attest.

Fed up with hearing that no great cities could be build in the modern era because the necessary funds weren’t available, Le Corbusier asked sarcastically: ‘Do we not possess the means? Louis XIV made do with picks and shovels… Hausmann’s equipment was also meagre; the shovel, the pick, the wagon, the trowel, the wheelbarrow, the simple tools of every race before the mechanical age.’ Our cranes, diggers, quick-drying concrete and welding machines leave us with nothing to blame but our own incompetence.” — Alain de Button, The Architecture of Happiness (2006)

Policy makers need to understand how urban principals have changed from city planning according to artistic principals, to city planning according to efficient principals, then city planning according to marketing principals. Society enforced delusion surrounds us everyday and has reached a point where we are being affected by what the dominant culture falsely believes is an appropriate living arrangement. Young people in the Middle East are marrying prematurely just to create a spacial sense of privacy and break away from the dysfunctions of the multistory Arabic family house—which is rooted in economic anxiety from the rigged real estate market mentioned above. We need new public policies that will regulate residential real estate prices once and for all to solve the increasing housing problem. New generations will not understand what community means if their parents are too overworked trying to secure a living space than create a home. Pseudo-planning, zoning and state housing experiments have failed and ruptured the social fabric. The societal dysfunction spillover will not stop until city planning is conducted by those who are actually qualified and have direct experience with the culture’s norms, needs and speed of healthy progress. A recent example of planning failure and citizen marginalization can be found in the area of North-West Sulaibikhat—a residential project in a strategic location but executed devoid of strategic thinking or accountability. We must examine the myths that govern our daily lives and question the functionality of planning policies on our—new and old—cities, neighborhoods, homes and conclusively our quality of life and mental health.

Urban Pathology & City Stress

For reasons that are still being understood, the now common kaleidoscope of physical and mental ailments are a lot more common in urban cities. Vitamin D deficiency, respiratory problems, chronic stress, substance abuse, anxiety disorder, psychosis, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and premeditated violence are steadily increasing in city dwellers living in negative urban environments. There are many reasons for these adverse effects, encompassing: city planning failure (mismanaged government), socioeconomic stress (social inequality), economic anxiety (wealth gaps), family instability (high divorce rates) and environmental factors (pollution).

Smart cities are leveraging data by harnessing the power of IoT sensors to map out pollution problems and their severity. Proper use of technology can mitigate the global environmental crisis from airborne pathogens to toxic water from poor waste disposal and other undetected contamination. For vital information to flow to the right entities tech giants, environmentalists and governments have to work together and not in isolated silos.

Some studies suggest that lack of authentic neighborhood interactions can inhibit social development in children and contribute to the above mentioned range of physical, psychological and sociological issues. Social cohesion is important for human development and has shaped humans since pre-industrial and pre-bronze age times. Today’s walled up and tightly packed residential areas and apartment units, literally force people in and out of mental boxes which confuses psychological evolution. Arabs are especially plagued with this switching mental states disease when unexpectedly approached by nosey neighbors while trying to keep up social norms and appearances. No one is themselves if everyone is projecting a fake persona and too paranoid to step out of uniformity for a genuine interaction. Additional neuroscience studies suggest that ‘crowding’ such as that in city living, can disrupt brain activity. City living forces brains to have heightened responses to social context resulting in anxiety. Crowding triggers social stresses as we attempt to adapt our behavioral patterns to those around us. Brain imaging shows that chronic social stress can affect key brain areas. This neurologically means that keeping us appearances (mojamalat) and too much fake personality can inhibit brain function. But for many, the social costs of being themselves is too high and they don’t realize that this leads to mental health issues in the future. This taxes the body by keeping the brain in a constant environmental alertness state of stress. The ancient sympathetic nervous system (SNS) doesn’t know it’s not in the African savanna but living in comfortable luxury (compared to previous civilizations) so doesn’t turn off its fight or flight response. Navigating through road rage scattered traffic, caffeinated work boundaries, new social spaces, digital over-availability, and emotional manipulation by internet ads, overstimulates natural defenses and pushes daily stress limits—leading to burnout, crashes and chronic fatigue.

In is book Places of the Heart, Colin Ellard, an experimental psychologist uses multidisciplinary methods to investigate the influence of buildings on our psychology, the restorative effects of nature, way finding at the urban scale and human defense responses. Ellard describes how residential buildings and close quarters affect social behavior, the strategic interior design of casinos and how ancient places of worship were not merely symbolic but emotional waypoints.

Designing our social, work and living spaces in consideration with everything we currently know about human nature and the environment seems like an obvious way to shape our urban cities. But if it was really that obvious to policy makers, architects and contractors we wouldn’t have the cesspool of problems we are currently living through today. Ancient brain circuits prefer curved contours and aversion of straight lines. Designing curved surfaces into interiors, homes and the environment has been observed to have a calming effect with the people interacting with the space. University of Toronto neuroscience researchers have shown how curves and jagged contours in architectural interiors changes patterns in our brain activity. Sharp edges trigger our fear detection in the amygdala. Curved interiors activate the orbital frontal cortex and cingulate cortex, areas associated with reward and pleasure. This can explain the mixed sense of awe we feel inside a grand mosque, domed cathedral or ancient sites that house holy temples.

Therapeutic Geometry & Hidden Complexity

These days our excessive buildings — meant to impress rather than be practical — carry literal tons of structural stress. Ancient monuments were built with geometric stress in mind, that is why much of monolithic ancient architecture outlasted the civilizations who constructed them — and will probably outlast some of our modern cities too. Modern cities are stressful by design, with their sharp angles for maximal volume use or spectacularly built towers — used as symbols of economic power and perceived modernity than actual living needs and sustainability.

The Ancient Greeks knew there was a connection between numbers on a line and numbers in higher dimensions but were limited in their understanding to explore this geometric connection further than Euclidean space. Building on this idea René Descartes extended the concept until he discovered the Cartesian coordinate plane, and founded the field of Analytical Geometry. The Cartesian plane is an important mathematical tool but more familiar to the average person as the 4 quadrant x/y plane. More advanced applications of the coordinate plane include the z dimension used in 3D mapping, car guidance systems and video game worlds. We can easily perceive live stock market charts — or not so easily technical analysis charts — on a 2D plane and instantly switch windows on the same screen to perceive a 3D simulation of the solar system moving through space. This mental dimension perception jump is easy for our minds to understand but when we consider 4D, 5D and 6D our minds stutter and crash as we reach our minds’ logical limits of mental visualization. Our failure to visually or mentally perceive higher dimensions than the physical planes in our environment means we have very limited senses and not that other higher dimensions do not exist. We cannot see ultra violet rays, x-rays, gamma rays, etc. but our telephoto imaging satellites do, because astrophysicists equip them with advanced sensory instruments beyond our human detection. What this means is that these rays are all forms of light we are blind to—but exist all around us. So in this light, observing 2D and 3D maps can have different affects on our visual perception and imagination. As we walk through the physical environment we enter and exit spaces that affect our psychogeographic experience of dimensionality and space. If we are open to these experiences we can feel these shifts from physical place to physical place, psychological space to psychological space and mental plane to mental plane.

‘Feeling out’ or ‘feeling our way through’ a space can sound very abstract to the majority. If we replace the multicolored and holographic ‘feeling’ with 2D experiential black and white contrast, it becomes more digestible to the average person. Feeling or experience helps us navigate in a sea of people who are trying to sway our judgment or sell us products, life philosophies and ideas. We should look at buildings and our urban environments with the same scrutiny as we do when we’re shopping for that retail therapy fix or combing the menu when we eat out. We all need to polish (and re-polish) our eyes to seek out the beautiful, functional, and healthy environments that directly affect our spacial experience of the places we find ourselves in. To really see places for what they are, we need to experience all the hidden layers, spacial dimensions and relearn how to feel to understand the differences embedded in every space.

“Beauty will save the world.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Natural Cities & Ecological Awareness

Slime mould network vs. Tokyo rail network (video)

The most successful engineers, inventors and geniuses that humanity has produced have always looked to nature for inspiration. By observing sixfold symmetry in snowflakes, fractal geometry in Romanesco broccoli, the phi ratio in sunflowers, the efficient hexagonal tiling of honeycombs, the double helix of DNA, the spirals of galaxies, we discover that nature’s inherit designs are mathematically perfect and aesthetically balanced. Nothing that our technological innovations have produced can compete with nature’s model of form and functionality, including our digital computational power—which loses in the face of cellular reproduction, swarm intelligence and repair. By rediscovering nature’s building blocks we can rebuild our cities using biomimicry with more awareness (like fungal networks and slime moulds) and interconnectedness (like neural networks and systems biology). This conscious design methodology considers utility, beauty, and sustainability in architecture and city planning.

If you ignorantly believe there’s not enough life support available on planet Earth for all humanity, then survival only of the fittest seems self-flatteringly to warrant magna-selfishness. However, it is due only to humans’ born state of ignorance and the 99.99% invisibility of technological capabilities that they do not recognize the vast abundance of resources available to support all humanity at an omni-high standard of living.

We have now scientifically and incontrovertibly found that there is ample to support all humanity. But humanity and its leaders have not yet learned so in sufficiently convincing degree to reorient world affairs in such a manner as to realize a sustainable high standard of living for all.

There are three powerful obstacles to humanity’s realization of its omni-physical success:
1. The technical means of its accomplishment exist altogether in the invisible realms of technology.
2. The experts are all too narrowly specialized in developing the invisible advance to envision the synergetic significance of integrating their own field’s advances with other fields’ invisible advances.
3. The utterly different, successful ways of metabolic accounting, dwelling, self-employing, cooperating, and enjoying life are unfamiliar and nonobvious.

The great communism vs. capitalism, politico-economic world stand-off assumes a fundamental inadequacy of life support to exist on our planet. So too do the four major religions assume that it must be you or us, never enough for both.

Humanity is so specialized and these epochally significant technological facts are so invisible
that it seems an almost hopeless matter to adequately inform humanity that from now on, for the first time in history, it does not have to be “you or me” — there is now enough for “both” — and to convince humanity of this fact in time to permit it to exercise its option and save itself.

There is now plenty for all. War is obsolete. It is imperative that we get the word to all humanity — RUSH — before someone ignorantly pushes the button that provokes pushing of all the buttons.

What makes so difficult the task of informing humanity of its newborn option to realize success for all is the fact that all major religions and politics thrive only on the for-all-ages-held, ignorantly adopted premise of the existence of an eternal inadequacy of life-support inherent in the design of our planet Earth.
— R. Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants (1983)

The Montréal Biosphère, designed by Buckminster Fuller

When the conditions are right, nature creates branching patterns and communication networks as expressed in — the above and below — life of trees, fungi and crystals. Fungi has a built-in intelligence that expresses itself in the pursuit of food and resources via network growth. Observed from a distance, fungal networks resemble structures comparable to some of our oldest cities; those that spread organically to become nodes of trade, culture, governance, and religious significance. Natures robust structures, geodesic domes and logarithmic patterns are efficient, elegant and entrancing blueprints for architects, engineers and designers to draw inspiration from. Buckminster Fuller’s fullerenes (geodesic spheres) have a closed mesh topology of single and double bonds, more familiar to us in the structure of the classic football (C60 buckyball). More advanced fullerene structural applications were used in Montréal’s Biosphère, which was designed by Fuller himself for Expo 67. Synthetic fullerene family structures are also being used by scientists at the nano-scale—in the form of cylindrical carbon nanotubes and graphene—to tackle problems in microfabrication, medicine, computing and astrophysics.

“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” ―R. Buckminster Fuller

When we ink in visions — on neatly catalogued binders — we must remind ourselves that infinite growth projections will exhaust our finite land. Future generations will scorn the visionaries of today for fraudulent delivery and unsustainable building standards. Working against the rhythms, cycles and forces of Earth will only end in our destruction. We are tasting some of that destruction today through natural disasters, as the planet reacts to rid itself of our species’ damage, cruelty and pollution. Building with and around the Earth is the more sensible, sustainable, and civilized direction to take.

Real Estate Opportunity Costs

Below is a rudimentary financial-career-projection of an imaginary model citizen—practicing PhD holder/doctor/professor/academic/etc.—who has worked his/her way to the upper echelons of the system and stayed on a linear 25 year career path. This thought experiment is intended to make the reader consider the financial sustainability and opportunity cost of choosing what Kuwaitis (at time of writing) consider a noble, lucrative and socially acceptable career choice. In this thought experiment the superstar employee saves his monthly wage over a 25 year period without so much as spending KD 2 on speciality coffee:

KD 4000 (very optimistic salary) X 12 (months) X 25 (year career) = KD 1.2 million

500 m² plot within 6th ring road: KD 0.52 million—KD 0.75 million
750 m² plot within 6th ring road: KD 0.65 million — KD 1.6 million
1000 m² plot within 6th ring road: KD 1.1 million — KD 4 million

• Above prices are averages as advertised by sellers from multiple sources.
• Below prices are luxury alternatives to the average Kuwaiti real estate market.

A Beverly Hills mansion starts at: KD 1.6 million (Mulholland Drive)
A Malibu beach house starts at: KD 0.87 million (Pacific Coast Highway)
A London townhouse starts at: KD 0.74 million (Chelsea)
A Swiss chalet starts at: KD 0.7 million (Verbier)
A Monaco flat starts at: KD 1.2 million (Monte-Carlo)
A Bali villa averages: KD 0.07 million (Ubud)
A Greek Island parcel starts at: KD 0.91 million (Kythnos Island)
A Spanish duplex-penthouse averages: KD 0.63 million (Marbella)
A Singapore flat averages: KD 0.71 million (Wallich Residence)
A Dubai apartment averages: KD 0.28 million (Burj Khalifa)
An Abu Dhabi beachfront plot averages: KD 0.46 million (Nareel Island)
A New Delhi farmhouse acre averages: KD 0.85 million (Chattarpur Farms)
A Kuwait house averages: KD 0.75 million (Qurtoba)

The average person needs to think a little before shackling himself/herself in debt. It’s numerically impossible to sustain a ‘normal’ life in the Kuwaiti rigged real estate market. The above thought experiment represents a basic financial breakdown, if you were an academic superstar who made no life mistakes and ended up as a PhD with tenure—which the majority will not reach due to lack of: vision, opportunity, character, focus, grit, energy. Every year more young professionals are thinking of looking for opportunities and settling down outside of Kuwait where real estate prices make more sense and actually come with utilities and working public services—and maybe a bonus scenic view with pleasant neighbors that don’t believe you’re going to ‘hell fire’ (Jahannam) because your home is pet friendly.

Average monthly rent for two-bedroom apartment: (2018 data by Deutsche Bank)

Hong Kong: $3737 (KD 1134)
Paris: $3483 (KD 1057)
New York: $2854 (KD 866)
London: $2410 (KD 731)
Singapore: $1974 (KD 599)
Tokyo: $1740 (KD 528)
Shanghai: $1343 (KD 408)
Berlin: $1160 (KD 352)
Madrid: $1148 (KD 348)
Moscow: $998 (KD 303)
Rio de Janeiro: $771 (KD 234)
New Delhi: $346 (KD 105)

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ―R. Buckminster Fuller

The Home & Secrets of Silence

Advances in tech should make us reconsider the unseen parts of construction that hold buildings together. Smart monitoring devices help home owners save and track their utiltiy consumption. The IoT will enable many possibilities, like: rooms with built in pollutant sensitive filters in the ventilation, mini agri-tech greenhouses for fresh ultra-local produce, windows with smart solarvolatic film, hidden speakers in the walls, temperature data analytics for all rooms, smart cooling for rooms closest to the windows, Ph adjustable central filters, smart pipes with live water consumption monitoring & leak detection, toilets with urine analysis & deficiency push notifications synced to the bathroom mirror, plastic & bio waste recycling compressor linked to local waste collectors etc… These new construction options will create new jobs that will bridge between the architects, interior designers and engineering teams. There’s an untapped market for smart utility engineers, home system integration engineers, smart home data center engineers, solar engineers, recycling and sustainability managers, corporate environmental responsibility officers — there’s potentially a whole ecosystem of new building practices and it starts with updating the way classical architects think about and approach projects.

Rock House by AGi Architects (Kuwait)

The spaces we spend time in have a compounding effect on who we are and who we evolve into. Our curious and educated selves are developed in school buildings, our professional selves in office towers, our competitive selves in gyms, our creative selves in design studios, our compassionate selves within the community, our intimate selves in bedrooms and our deeper selves in private places of solitude. Our spaces can suffocate or expand us, they physically contain our lives and the quality of our experiences. Being mindful of the influence of spaces on our psychology raises our consciousness and makes us more present and absorbed in what we are doing.

Building a home in an unstable world and laboring for a personal sanctuary can be rewarding if approached appropriately, in a present mindset. Of all the sacred places in the world, the house turned home is the most sacred. Home is where our loved ones are, where we drop our guard, where we sleep, where we feel safe to be. We all want to construct a place of stability that acts as our launch pad into the world but also where we can return to refuel, reflect and relax.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” —Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Prolific thinkers, writers and artists are known to create their own secluded private space, to help them tap into the creative process. Whether permanent like Jung’s Zurich lake house and Montaigne’s château tower or temporary like Dalí’s (then Jay-Z and Kanye’s) Hôtel Le Meurice room, spaces we make our own influence thought and drive creativity. When Thoreau needed to clear his mind—away from urban life—he built his Walden shed and secluded himself to the solitary woods, as does Bill Gates during his widely popularized think week. The importance of personal space for self-exploration, self-expression then self-realization is crucial for reaching and developing the creative mind.

Silence is completely forgotten in today’s sleepless urban cities; with that forgetfulness goes our inner silence. Going indoors is no longer a safe-haven and has been invaded by frequencies of digital noise, mental distortion and surveillance capitalism. The pathological technology industry has stolen silence and turned current generations into mindless scrollers and consumers of junk media. The examined life and well-thought-out mind has been replaced by recycled memes, shallow lyrics and retweets. As a result the Instagram generation is in danger of losing themselves in a digital wasteland of trash content, ‘influencers’ and misinformation. Silence is the first door to real creativity, and reclaiming that silence starts in spaces that we cleanse from outside noise and uninvited distraction.

“Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence.” — Max Picard

Buy by Design & Experience Engineering

Young people are choosing to spend their money on experiences rather than material things. This generational value shift emphasizes changing tastes and trends but technology is always one step ahead. Malls are inherently designed to herd consumers towards constructed bottle necks, where stores pay more rent for maximal exposure and customer footfall. More sophisticated department stores, such as Harrods and Selfridges are shopping amusement parks for all our senses. Hooking customers’ attention from the outside—with glitzy window displays—then luring them inside Tom Ford scented IKEAesque labyrinthian passages, requires customer experience engineering that deliver novelty at every corner. Plush brick and mortar stores are losing their clientele to online shopping and have stepped up their game by inviting artists and social influencers to design pop-up shops—that feel more like social events than customer acquisition experiments. Demographic data doesn’t tell companies what customers think, feel and prefer, which has grown the behavioral futures market. Psychographic data is now also a need for retail companies with physical stores—that wishes to remain in the game a little longer, before automation completely eclipses traditional shopping. Mass social engineering, digital targeted marketing and behavioral economics is not in the future, it’s in the now.

Armed with an overflow of market knowledge, developers of future cities will plan with materialism in mind. Human decision making has been hacked and corporate algorithms will create layers of consumption mazes that will wait until we’re most susceptible to popup as we move from point A to B—distracting us from being present and nudging us to make one more 1-click purchase. This will of course only apply to cities that sign up to be part of the big data-smart city experiment.

The Japanese proverb that begins “everyone has three faces”, is talking about the layers of the self and how we shuffle between these layers as we move in and out the arenas of daily social life. Three faces or masks is an oversimplification if we consider the proverb in today’s multicultural, multidisciplinary and multiplatform digital landscapes — where the average person is continuously juggling between professional behavior, unprofessional behavior and the behavioral gradient in between. The universal self exists in an abstract — open-source — mental state.

Expressed in the form of fluctuating psychological states, it manifests as: mood, behavior, attitude and personality. Inner psychological states require physical spaces (now digitized) for outward self expression. This makes the builders of space and the curators of atmosphere also the enablers of the faces that people wear. Most people like to believe that they are self-aware but that self-awareness is lost when they are under the hypnosis of experienced experience engineers. Like building exteriors, interior experiences can be designed and mapped on acoustic and ambient paths; so that guests, patients or customers can float (or storm) through a space and experience something different from the mundane. Shopping arcade designers, Disney resort planners and casino architects, are at a Las Vegas level of sensory wizardry and psychogeography. Virtual reality programmers are learning these techniques quickly and superimposing the digital over the physical, the artificially interactive over the real and tactile.

Walking As Meditation

In his essay On Walking, Thoreau touched on the importance of walking as contemplation and expansion of mind. If we consider it more deeply, walking is a meditation just as yoga poses and free writing are meditations for the body and mind. Monks and ascetics walked the natural terrain as a pilgrimage into ones self, a homecoming of sorts. Outside of luxury Swiss watch sponsored mountaineering teams, the solitarily mountain hike attracts those who need to do deep work on themselves. Looking through the glass of spiritual ascension, the energy expending climb can induce higher and clearer states of consciousness that end in stilled thinking at the zenith point. From Mount Olympus to Mount Sinai, mountains are a recurring theme in religious realization in both mythology and the literary aphoristic style of holy scripture. As humanity ascends so must it descend and fall from grace—but the walk will remain an indispensable activity for the vexed stroller and energized calorie counter alike.

A simple stroll on the beach releases pent-up body stress through the soles of our feet, while calming our anxious 21st century brains with therapeutic sounds of undulating waves. This oceanic mind-body rejuvenation is maybe why humans are drawn to the water after they have exhausted all their energy and can only sit and stare outwards in silence. Our senses relax and absorb the rhythmic tidal crests and our eyes retune against the vibrant backdrop of hypnotic sky hues.

“To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly. To be a philosopher is to know through long walks, by reasoning, and reasoning only, a priori, what others can only potentially learn from their mistakes, crises, accidents, and bankruptcies — that is, a posteriori.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Staring out at the vastness of unrestricted space or gazing up at the ceiling of a cathedral, calls us out of our heads and limited perspective, to contemplate our smallness in the order (and chaos) of the universe. Holy sites wouldn’t be holy if they didn’t house structures that trigger in our being, the feeling that master builders, artisans and scribes have tried to convey since antiquity. That knowing feeling is not fixed to an absolute context or finite state, and can come in a variety of waves or different variations — as the physics definition of light describes. Esotericism has many names for it, its changing intensity and formless fluidity: true presence, life-force, rapture, the sublime, the logos, Brahman, the God mind, divine inspiration, ultimate reality, the universe, the singularity, the aleph…are but few of the labels that higher orders from different cultures have tried to use as fragmented descriptions for the indescribable. Like infants confined to a cradle, we slowly expand our awareness until our individual consciousness starts to construct a model of the world that we think represents reality.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. —William Blake, fragments from Auguries of Innocence (±1803)

Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543)

Performance artist, Marina Abramović, is most famous for her ‘The Artist is Present’ exhibition at the MoMa. During which, she sat in complete silence with an empty chair in front of her. Museum visitors took a seat and were locked in an intense gazes with Marina. With no escape into the periphery of their vision or the onlooking crowd and recording cameras, they had to look into themselves with Marina acting as a live mirror. Two decades before her stillness performance, Marina walked The Great Wall of China for three months. She did this—with authorization from the Chinese government—to meet her significant other halfway, along the wall. Through the documented walking performance she ended a deep relationship with a symbolically deeper uniting and separating of the genders. By pushing her mind and body through emotional and physical pain, Abramović shows the audience how to break through psychic boundaries. She—extremely and dramatically—reminds us of the lost art of walking and its transcendental effects.

“Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors…disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.” ―Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” ―Friedrich Nietzsche

Public Spaces

As we walk on foot and traverse across the block or tree shaded walk path, we travel with our eyes and in our mind, in parallel with our strolling feet. The erosion of public spaces to make room for grid locked roads—that will invite more car congestion and meter by meter quantified real estate projects—pushes the pedestrian further and further away to the outside of walls and gates. Fear makes us decorate the exterior of our gated buildings with CCTV cameras and guards with repelling gazes. Our choice of architecture is a reflection of our values and the times we live in. It is officially the wall era, be it by the pseudo-United States of America or paranoid neighbors that take their renovation project a little too far. The more hard divides we build around our public spaces the less public and freely walkable these spaces become. Technology and innovation has enabled any person to order any product or meal without going outside, which will add to the disconnect with the outside world.

Speaking for Kuwait — which has unforgiving summers — walking outside is limited by the heat and dusty environment. We are sheltered from the harshness of the weather by our air conditioned homes and climate control tinted cars — as we leisurely travel from private space to private space in private transport. There’s an abnortmal gap between private Kuwaiti life and public life. When it comes to metropolitan visions and construction projects (on any scale) local environmental factors must be accounted for before importing foreign designs by architects who have never experienced a Kuwaiti summer or an orange dust storm.

Lone automobile amidst sand & rain (Unpublished photo by National Geographic: Kuwait, May 1969)

Closing Thoughts

Bordered as a colonial zone, established as an international petrodollar pump, reinforced as a geopolitical plug, and devolved due to land grabs and corruption — Kuwait needs to urgently address the housing crisis before its societal fabric is permanently torn and mangled beyond recognition.

Kuwait’s oil urbanization as a linear, smooth, successful, and virtually overnight leap from ancient to modern, chaos to order, was more of an illusion than the lived reality of its inhabitants. It nevertheless confirms that the state was successful in producing an image of modernity in its capital city after the advent of oil. It was unsuccessful, however, in actually producing the functional, well-planned, modern city first conceived in the 1952 master plan — one with fluid traffic arteries, advanced infrastructure and public services, and, most important, a vibrant city life. —Farah Al-Nakib, Kuwait’s Modern Spectacle: Oil Wealth and the Making of a New Capital City, 1950–1990 (2013)

Our constructions — like our disorganized politics — are subscribing to an ‘it is what it is’ prepackaged narrative rather than a ‘this is how it should be’ and ‘this is how we can build it together’ story. Our politicians are too far removed, obsolete and unqualified to handle nation building in the forth industrial revolution — let alone understand its economic repercussions and interpret it on an elementary level. If you give degenerates constitutional power, don’t expect the Abbasid House of Wisdom, Plato’s Republic or the architectural legacy of either. Minding the administrative gaps is not enough, the development potholes need to be filled by legitimate specifications. Physically removed and mentally detached armchair administrators won’t understand the urban blueprint and the psychogeography beneath it. We need to adopt inclusive strategies to design-politics and build structures that hold meaning and evoke a deeper sense of our shared identity.

Architects have a responsibility as shapers to help direct culture and educate the public—from the hidden intricacies of how structures stand, to the basics of how to look at and appreciate our surroundings.

References:

…Under the stewardship of Guy Debord, psychogeography became a tool in an attempt to transform urban life, first for aesthetic purposes but later for increasingly political ends. Debord’s oft-repeated ‘definition’ of psychogeography describes ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographic environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. In broad terms, psychogeography, as the word suggests, describes the point at which psychology and geography collide, a means of calibrating the behavioral impact of place…

…If psychogeography is to be understood in literal terms as the point where psychology and geography intersect, one further characteristic may be identified in the search for new ways of apprehending our environment. Psychogeography seeks to overcome the process of ‘banalisation’ through which the experience of our familiar surroundings is rendered one of drab monotony…
—Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (2018)

…Perhaps what makes the experience of space so difficult to describe is that it involves not only a complex tangle of sense information (hard enough to sort out by itself) but also the countless other threads supplied by memory and association. As soon as you’ve begun to register the sensory data, the here-and-now-ness of the space, there arrives from somewhere else all the other rooms and landscapes it summons up…the layers of finish and furnishings and trim, each carrying its own valence of memory and allusion, the complexity of experience will only thicken. Here right now was the space of my building, as plain and fresh as it would ever be. And what it helped me to understand is that space is not mute, that it does in fact speak to us, and that we respond to it more directly, more viscerally, than all the cerebral, left-brained talk about signs and conventions would have us think. I would venture in fact, that we respond to it rather more like a wood duck than a deconstructionist. For whatever else you can say about it, the experience of coming into my building for the first time was not foremost a literary or semiological experience, a matter of communication. This is not to say that the experience wasn’t rich with meaning and layered with symbols; it was, but the meanings and symbols were of a different order than the ones the architectural theorists talk about: not key was required to unlock their meaning…

…By offering the eye a hierarchy of intermediate-sized shapes, finish trim helps us to make a comfortable perceptual transition from the larger-than-life scale of the whole to the familiar bodily scale of windows and doors, all the way down to the intimate scale of moldings as slender as our fingers. The mathematician and chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot makes a similar point when he criticizes modernist architecture for failing to bridge the perceptual distance between its “unnaturally” simple forms and the human scale. Mandelbrot suggests that architectural ornament and trim appeal to us because they offer the eye a complex and continuous hierarchy of form and detail, from the exceedingly fine to the massive, that closely resembles the complex hierarchies we find in nature—in the structures of a tree or a crystal or an animal…
—Michael Pollan, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams (1997)

…At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come…
— Henry D. Thoreau, Walking (1862)

…The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery…

…People are quite aware that some neighborhoods are sad and others pleasant. But they generally simply assume elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor street are depressing, and let it go at that. In fact, the variety of possible combinations of ambiances, analogous to the blending of pure chemicals in an infinite number of mixtures, gives rise to feelings as differentiated and complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke. The slightest demystified investigation reveals that the qualitatively or quantitatively different influences of diverse urban decors cannot be determined solely on the basis of the era or architectural style, much less on the basis of housing conditions.

The research that we are thus led to undertake on the arrangement of the elements of the urban setting, in close relation with the sensations they provoke, entails bold hypotheses that must constantly corrected in the light of experience, by critique and self-critique…
—Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography (1955)

…Because of ancient arms-accomplished seizure of land by the most physically powerful and the subsequent arms induced blessing of the seizures by power-ordained “ministers of God,” royal deeds to land were written as assumedly God-approved and -guaranteed covenants. Landlordism, first woven into the fabric of everyday life by royal fiat and thousands of years of legal process precedent, has become an accepted cosmic phenomenon as seemingly inevitable as the weather. Humans have learned to play many of its games.

Land “ownership” and its omni-dependent comprehensive thing-ownership involvements and their legal-documents-perpetuations constitute the largest socioeconomic custom error presently being maintained by a large world affairs-affecting segment of humanity. Nothing new about all that. But what is new is that humanity has gone as far as it can go with this significant error and is in final examination as to whether it can free itself from its misconditioned reflex straightjacket in time to pull out of its greatest-in-all-history, error- occasioned tailspinning into eternity. We do have both the knowledge and the technical means to do so if we do it quickly enough. That is what this book is about…

There is no dictionary word for an army of invisible giants, one thousand miles tall, with their arms interlinked, girding the planet Earth. Since there exists just such an invisible, abstract, legal-contrivance army of giants, we have invented the word GRUNCH as the group designation—"a grunch of giants." GR-UN-C-H, which stands for annual GROSS UNIVERSE CASH HEIST, pays annual dividends of over one trillion U.S. dollars.

GRUNCH is engaged in the only-by-instrumentsreached-and-operated, entirely invisible chemical, metallurgical, electronic, and cybernetic realms of reality. GRUNCH's giants average thirty-four years of age, most having grown out of what Eisenhower called the post-World War II "military-industrial complex." They are not the same as the pre-World War II international copper or tin cartels. The grunch of giants consists of the corporately interlocked owners of a vast invisible empire, which includes airwaves and satellites; plus a vast visible empire, which includes all the only eighteen-year-old and younger skyscraper cluster cities around the world, as well as the factories and research laboratories remotely ringing the old cities and all the Oriental industrial deployment, such as in Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It controls the financial credit system of the noncommunist world together with all the financial means of initiating any world-magnitude mass-production and -distribution ventures. By making pregraduation employment contracts with almost all promising university science students, it monopolizes all the special theoretical know-how to exploit its vast inventory of already
acquired invisible know-how technology.
— R. Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants (1983)

…In 1952 the state approved a new master plan for Kuwait that led to the demolition of the pre-oil port town to be replaced with a new modern cityscape planned and built by the state. As such, the “unique creation of oil” that Gardiner observed in 1983 was the particular version of Kuwait’s urban landscape in the making since 1952.

Though certainly the catalyst behind the creation of this new city, oil played a role in reshaping the process of city formation in Kuwait in more complex ways than simply financing state-led urban development projects. The advent of oil wealth fostered a desire for rapid modernization among state and society alike, with the idea of al-nahda (the awakening) becoming the main ideological construct driving the development process. This quest for modernity and progress created a tension between the “modern” as both a visual representation of the urban ideal and a political strategy on the part of the government on the one hand, and the lived experience of the city’s residents on the other, that left a visible mark on the built environment. As a result of the numerous obstacles hindering urban development after the advent of oil that I explore below, the state found it increasingly difficult to produce a cohesive and truly functional city center to replace the demolished pre-oil port town. And so, as the objective from very early on was to create a capital city to serve as the ultimate symbol of Kuwait’s newfound prosperity, the state planning authorities consistently abandoned the many comprehensive plans to create a new urban order for Kuwait City and instead created an urban spectacle that gave a distinct impression that Kuwait was a rapidly modernizing city despite the fact that, behind the scenes, it was stagnating. This article analyzes particular urban development projects produced between 1950 and the Iraqi invasion of 1990 that contributed to this spectacle of modernity and led to Gardiner’s conclusion that Kuwait City was not only the unique creation of oil but also an “optimistic, imaginative, confident and utterly modern” city…

…To justify this erasure of the historic townscape, state rhetoric after 1950 portrayed Kuwait before oil as a period of suffering and hardship, which in turn contributed to legitimizing the new role of government: “Since the State is the only party controlling the oil sector, government interference was imperative from the very beginning because it shoulders the burden of developing the society, modernizing the economy, and fulfilling the individuals’ well-being to make up for years of suffering in the pre-oil phase, and to take a short cut towards the establishment of a prosperous up-to-date society.” This constructed dichotomy between past and present implied that only the government, fueled by oil revenues, had the capacity to civilize Kuwait’s uncivilized past and to “make Kuwait the happiest state in the Middle East.” The promise of “progress,” in other words, needed to be confirmed by the memory of “poverty.” If the past was associated with adversity, then its erasure and replacement with the new and modern — with the state as the principal agent of this modernity — would be easily accepted and indeed welcomed by the public. In contrast to the negative representation of the pre-oil era, the post-1950 period became known in official discourse as al-nahda al-‘umraniyya: Kuwait’s architectural and civilizational awakening, a phrase that itself implies that Kuwait before oil was uncivilized and dormant…

…The urban landscape was the physical embodiment of that life before oil, and the fact that it could now be transformed to improve their everyday lives led many Kuwaitis to “welcome the idea of ridding Kuwait of everything to do with the past.” When Zahra Freeth, daughter of a British political agent who grew up in Kuwait in the 1930s, told a group of Kuwaiti women in 1956 that she had been taking photographs of old houses, the women grew “im- patient at [her] interest in the Kuwait of the past, and asked why [she] wasted time on the old and outmoded when there was so much in Kuwait that was new and fine.” When Freeth mentioned that many buildings were to be demolished, one young woman exclaimed, “‘Let them be demolished! Who wants them now? It is the new Kuwait and not the old which is worthy of admiration…

…One article pointed out that streets inside the city were replete with large potholes that made driving difficult. Both driving and walking were also made tedious by the fact that every available open space in the city, including clearly marked no-parking zones, was being used as a spontaneous car park because of insufficient parking in buildings. The articles consistently criticized the poor quality or complete absence of adequate drainage systems in new buildings and streets, claiming that whole areas of the city center were suffering from the pungent smell of sewage. They also identified that while the city contained some grand new buildings, the vacant lots behind these buildings were often transformed into mass garbage dumps.42 These and several other problems combined meant that the city center was not yet the rational, ordered place it was planned to be. As Bender contends, “Agreeing to dream is insufficient for realization of the dream…”

…this spectacle of Kuwait’s urban modernity was not just displayed in articles, international exhibits, films, or government brochures; the built environment itself became part of the spectacle. The construction of a coherent and functional city center was already, only a decade into the master plan, proving more difficult than initially thought. And so from the early 1960s on, the state planning authorities increasingly abandoned their attempts at creating a usable and sustainable city and concentrated instead on producing a visual spectacle of modernity. As the three examples examined below will illustrate, most state-led urban development projects in the three decades prior to the Iraqi invasion of 1990 focused more on how the city looked than on how it worked, making it a place where image and representation superseded function and lived experience…’”

…The street’s development featured prominently in the aforementioned 1962 film as the definitive representation of Kuwait’s rapidly modernizing urbanism. In reality, however, Fahad al-Salem Street was primarily a cover-up for the chaos and clutter of the city that surrounded it…Most building interiors were beset with shoddy workmanship, bad circulation, and poor engineering: the result of hurried construction and a lack of the government regulations that had guided the building process for the facades. The image of the street had been given more importance than its sustainability, and the buildings began to obsolesce on the inside be- fore they were even completed…

…in 1968 they commissioned another British planning consultant, Colin Buchanan and Partners, to produce a more comprehensive master plan for Kuwait, both city and country. The government also hired four renowned international architectural firms — Reima Pietila from Finland; Belgiojoso, Peressutti, and Rogers from Italy; Peter and Alison Smithson from England; and George Candilis from France — to translate the planners’ strategies for the city center into a physical urban- architectural reality. This was a vital link between plan and city that “had been so tragically missing” following the 1952 master plan and was deemed to be the cause of the haphazard and unchecked building of the preceding years.55 The objective behind the architectural plans was to make Kuwait City function as a coherent urban whole and to re- store life in the center after two decades of decay…

…the Kuwaiti planning administration — composed of the planning board, municipality, and Ministry of Public Works — was ill-equipped to implement the complex and comprehensive plans once the Buchanan team left. Furthermore, the municipal council was reluctant to approve “a document that would have such wide-ranging effect on the market prices of land in Kuwait.” Constant land grabbing and speculation that had been common practices in Kuwait since the late 1940s meant that identifying untouched areas as earmarked for future development would lead to a significant increase in the value of that land to the point of making its development unprofitable…

…As a result of the numerous obstacles hindering urban development after the advent of oil that I explore below, the state found it increasingly difficult to produce a cohesive and truly functional city center to replace the demolished pre-oil port town. And so, as the objective from very early on was to create a capital city to serve as the ultimate symbol of Kuwait’s newfound prosperity, the state planning authorities consistently abandoned the many comprehensive plans to create a new urban order for Kuwait City and instead created an urban spectacle that gave a distinct impression that Kuwait was a rapidly modernizing city despite the fact that, behind the scenes, it was stagnating…

…While profitability was no longer a primary concern driving state development projects during this period, restoring urban life in the historic city center was not much of a concern either. All the foreign consultants involved in Kuwait’s planning from the late 1960s on urged that residential areas must be returned to the city center “if life there was not to fade away in the future.” Yet out of all the major projects in- side the city center commissioned to international architects in the 1970s, the one that was scrapped altogether was a massive national housing project designed by Candilis…
— Farah Al-Nakib, Kuwait’s Modern Spectacle: Oil Wealth and the Making of a New Capital City, 1950–1990 (2013)

Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment. It was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it. As regards the beauty of Nature, each time it is destroyed by winter it comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our lives it can in fact be regarded as eternal. The beauty of the human form and face vanish for ever in the course of our own lives, but their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm. A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely. Nor can I understand any better why the beauty and perfection of a work of art or of an intellectual achievement should lose its worth because of its temporal limitation. A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire to-day will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.
—Sigmund Freud, On Transience [a conversation with Rilke] (1915)

Social Justice, Spirituality and Architecture

“Transcending Architecture: Aesthetics and Ethics of the Numinous”: At its highest, architecture has the ability to turn geometric proportions into shivers, stone into tears, rituals into revelation, light into grace, space into contemplation, and time into divine presence. It is through this creation of sacred space that architecture holds the most spirituality and support the development of capacities needed for living a fully human life. First, the capability of senses, imagination, and thought refers to “being able to use the sense, to imagine, think, and reason—and to do these things in a ‘truly human’ way.” Including being able to “experience and produce works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth.” All of these come alive within structures that stimulate us and stir our own creativity—and all of these are deadened when buildings are constructed paying attention only to issues of structural soundness, utility, and economic expediency. Most apparent in the construction of prisons, confining elements are also evident in other kinds of institutional settings, such as schools, hospitals, elder care residences, and even whole neighborhoods, when they do not take into account the transformative power of full engaging the senses, the imagination, and free and open thought. Environmental design scholars are beginning to integrate recent advances in neuroscience research regarding how people’s brains respond to different physical environments, highlighting empirical findings on the effect of the build environment on alertness, concentration, and creativity…

…The second central capability addresses emotions, which Nussbaum defines as “being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence…[and to not] have one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety.” The capacity for embracing the full range of human emotions also includes deep-felt responsiveness to whatever is present—another person’s tears; a beautiful sunset; the last breath of a dying animal; the thrill of dancing through space; the soft, quiet comfort of evening. Whatever the experience, architecture has long recognized that the built environment can be incredibly powerful in evoking emotions. In Nussbaum’s terms, planned environments can provide safe spaces conducive to feeling all of our feelings, to honoring whatever emotional challenges we face, to having a sense of connection to people and things beyond the self—including the sacred. We know it intuitively when we enter these spaces and our bodies, minds, and spirits respond by opening to the fullness of our own humanity and to that of others. And we also know immediately when we enter places that are not welcoming of our deepest feelings and we respond to this, too, by shutting down and by turning out. As with senses on both positive and negative emotions at the neurological level…
—Julio Bermundez, Transcending Architecture (2015)

…Others have pointed out the disconnect that can take place between the vision of an architect and the opinions of the users of the finished product. To put it bluntly, the preferences of ordinary people are often considerably at odds with the aesthetic judgments of designers. One can certainly make the argument that this gap is in part a matter of education; this is a point of view that I’ve had expressed to me with considerable fervor by quite a few architects, and it must be taken into account. A building may be a legitimate artistic creation for an architect, but unlike a painting, a movie, or a sculpture, the finishes building must be capable of playing a useful and positive role in the lives of its users on a daily basis and over the lifespan of the construction. The architect has a public responsibility to care whether a building works well for its purpose and whether it makes a net positive contribution to the build landscape; psychological analysis and experimentation can help them to fulfill this responsibility.

But the third part of the system must involve the people—the users themselves. If we acquiesce to bad design, wallow in a shoulder shrugging apathy, and suppose that the forces at play in the construction of our environments are so powerful, so authoritarian, and so beyond our simple understanding, then we will inherit the places that we deserve. Armed with understanding—and I hope that my writing here has made some small contribution to this—any intelligent, well-informed citizen should stand ready to enter the fray, offer an opinion, and contribute his or her own vision to the debate about how our built environment should unfold. And this is one area where our new hyperconnectedness, brought about by the Internet and mobile technology, can help tremendously.

The widespread availability of technology that makes it possible for any of us to collect location-based data on our own responses to our environment, up to and including the responses of our own bodily physiology, for all of its risks, offers great hope for citizen-based contributions to the effort to build better places. More than at any time in the past, there exist mountains of data describing where we go and how we feel while we are there. It’s a rare cellphone application that does not offer us the opportunity to add a geotag to our data—reviews, photographs, walking or driving patterns, heart rates, accelerometery, and even sometimes body temperature and arousal levels. Although many applications send individual data to a central database owned by the company that provides the software, and those aggregated data are not available to the public, some apps at least allow users to look at their own data, and a few are set up so that we can compare our own stats with those of other people. In addition to this, a widespread movement for “open data” is gaining steam, and encouraging municipalities, states, and countries to make available to the public much useful data related to patterns of activity, traffic and economics. Theoretically, such data could constitute an extremely useful tool for the democratization of city design. Access to this new form of information, critical as it is to understanding how places work, should not only be easily available to everyone, but the basic tools for understanding how it can be used and what it can tell us should be available for all. Data science should be taught in schools. Discourse in how cities work couched in visualizations built from big data is becoming so important that the basics should be included in the public education curriculum, just as civics has been now for generations…
—Colin Ellard, Places of the Heart (2015)

I. The Significance of Architecture
…Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places—and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to tender vivid to us who we might ideally be.

We are sometimes eager to celebrate the influence of our surroundings. In the living room of a house in the Czech Republic, we see an example of how walls, chairs and floors can combine to create an atmosphere in which the best sides of us are offered the opportunity to flourish. We accept with gratitude the power that a single room can possess.

But sensitivity to architecture also has its more problematic aspects. If one room can alter how we feel, if our happiness can hang on the color of the walls or the shape of a door, what will happen to us in most of the places we are forced to look at and inhabit? What will we experience in a house with prison-like windows, stained carpet titles and plastic curtains?…

…We may need to have made an indelible mark on our lives, to have married the wrong person, pursued an unfulfilling career into middle age or lost a loved one before architecture can begin to have any perceptible impact on us, for when we speak of being ‘moved’ by a building, we allude to a bitter-sweet feeling of contrast between the noble qualities written into a structure and the sadder wider reality within which we know them to exist. A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hits at is the exception…

…We have to confront the vexed point on which so much of the history of architecture pivots. We have to ask what exactly a beautiful building might look like. Lugwig Wittgenstein, having abandoned academia for three years in magnitude of the challenge. ‘You think philosophy is difficult,’ observed the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus, ‘but I tell you, it is nothing compared to the difficulty of being a good architect.’…

II. In What Style Shall We Build?

…A prohibition against discussions of beauty in architecture was imposed by a new breed of men, engineers, who had achieved professional recognition only in the late eighteenth century, but had thereafter risen quickly to dominance in the construction of the new buildings of the Industrial Revolution. Mastering the technologies of iron and steel, of plate glass and concrete, they drew interest and inspired awe with their bridges, railway hangars, aqueducts and docks. More novel even than their abilities, perhaps, was the fact that they seemed to complete these projects without ever directly asking themselves what style it was best to adopt. Charged with erecting a bridge, they tried to design the lightest possible frame that could stretch over the widest span at the lowest cost. When they built a railway station, they aimed for a hall that would allow steam to disperse safely, let in a large around of natural light and accommodate a constant crowd of travelers. They demanded that factories be able to house unwieldy machinery and that steamships carry cargoes of impatient passengers punctually across heavy seas. But they did not appear to give much thought to whether there should be a Corinthian or Doric set of capitals gracing the upper galleries of a ship, whether a Chinese dragon might look pleasing at the end of a locomotive or whether suburban gas works should be done up in a Tuscan or Islamic style.

Yet, despite this indifference, the new men of science seemed capable of building the most impressive and, in many cases, the most seductive structures of their confused age…

…Of almost any building, we ask not only that it do a certain thing but also that it look a certain way, that it contribute to a given mood: of religiosity or scholarship, rusticity or modernity, commerce or domesticity. We may require it to generate a feeling of reassurance or of excitement, of harmony or of containment. We may hope that it will connect us to the past or stand as a symbol of the future, and we would complain, no less than we would about a malfunctioning bathroom, if this second, aesthetic, expressive level of function were left unattended…

…Any object of design will give off an impression of the psychological and moral attitudes it supports…In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants…The notion of buildings that speak helps us to place at the very centre of our architectural conundrums the question of the values we want to live by—rather than merely of how we want things to look…

IV. Ideals of Home

…Why should it matter what our environment has to say to us? Why should architects bother to design buildings which communicate specific sentiments and ideas, and why should we be so negatively affected by places which reverberate with what we take to be the wrong allusions? Why are we vulnerable, so inconveniently vulnerable, to what the spaces we inhabit are saying?

Our sensitivity to our surroundings may be traced back to a troubling feature of human psychology: to the way we harbor within us many different selves, not all to which feel equally like ‘us’, so much so that in certain moods, we can complain of having come adrift from what we judge to be our true selves. Unfortunately, the self we miss at such moments, the elusively authentic, creative and spontaneous side of our character, is not ours to summon at will. Our access to it is, a humbling extent, determined by the places we happen to be in, by the color of the bricks, the height of the ceilings and the layout of the streets. In a hotel room strangled by three motorways, or in a waste land of run-down tower blocks, our optimism and sense of purpose are liable to drain away, like water from a punctured container. We may start to forget that we ever had ambitions or reasons to feel spirited and hopeful.

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to helpful vision of ourselves…

The architects and artists who worked in the service of early Islam were likewise driven by the wish to create a physical backdrop which would bolster the claims of their religion. Holding that God was the source of all understanding, Islam placed particular emphasis on the divine qualities of mathematics. Muslim artisans covered the walls of the houses and mosques with repeating sequences of delicate and complicated geometries, through which the infinite wisdom of God mightbe intimated. The ornamentation, so pleasingly intricate on a rug or a cup, was nothing less than hallucinatory when applied to an entire hall. Eyes accustomed to seeing only the practical and humdrum objects of daily life could, inside such a room, survey a world shorn of all associations with the everyday. They would sense a symmetry, without quite being able to grasp its underlying logic. Such works were like the products of a mind with none of our human limitations, of a higher power untainted by human coarseness and therefore worthy of unconditional reverence…

…In both early Christianity and Islam, theologians made a claim about architecture likely to sound so peculiar to modern ears as to be worthy of sustained examination: they proposed that beautiful buildings had the power to improve us morally and spiritually. They believed that, rather than corrupting us, rather than being an idle indulgence for the decadent, exquisite surroundings could edge us towards perfection. A beautiful building could reinforce our resolve to be good…

…A second compelling claim was made for the visual when the early theologians speculated that it might be easier to become a faithful servant to God by looking than by reading. They argued that mankind could more effectively be shaped by architecture than by Scripture. Because we were creatures of sense, spiritual principles stood a better chance of fortifying our souls if we took them via our eyes rather than via our intellect. We might learn more about humility by gazing at an arrangement of tiles than by studying the Gospels, and more about the nature of kindness in a stained-glass window than in a holy book. Spending time in beautiful spaces, far from a self-indulgent luxury, was deemed to lie at the core of the quest to become an honorable person.

Secular architecture may have no clearly defined ideology to defend, no sacred text to quote from and no god to worship, but, just like its religious counterpart, it possesses the power to shape those who come within its orbit. They gravity with which religions have at points treated the decoration of their surroundings invites us to lend equal significance to the decoration of profane places, for they, too, may offer the better parts of us a home…

V. The Virtues of Buildings

…In ‘On German Architecture’ (1772), J. W. Goethe declared that Germany was in its ‘essence’ a Christian land, and that the only appropriate style for new German buildings was therefore Gothic. On seeing a cathedral, wrote Goethe, ‘ a German ought to thank God for being able to proclaim aloud, “That is German architecture, our architecture.”’ But, in reality, no country ever either owns a style or is locked into it through precedent. National architectural identity, like national identity overall, is created rather than dictated by the soil…

…If we end up thinking of certain styles as the indissoluble products of specific places, it is only a tribute to the skill with which architects have coaxed us into seeing the environment through their eyes, and so made their achievements appear inevitable. At issue, therefor, is not so much what a national style is as what it could be made to be. It is the privilege of architects to be selective about which aspects of the local spirit they want to throw into relief. While most societies experience varying degrees of violence and chaos, for example, we are unlikely to want our buildings to reflect those features of the zeitgeist. Then again, we would feel uncomfortable if architects abandoned reality altogether to produce designs which alluded to none of our prevailing morals or goals. We no more favor delusion in our built environment than we do in individuals…
—Alain de Button, The Architecture of Happiness (2006)

…Another small example of top-down progress: Metro North, the railroad between New York City and its northern suburbs, renovated its trains, in a total overhaul. Trains look more modern, neater, have brighter colors, and even have such amenities as power plugs for your computer (that nobody uses). But on the edge, by the wall, there used to be a flat ledge where one can put the morning cup of coffee: it is hard to read a book while holding a coffee cup. The designer (who either doesn’t ride trains or rides trains but doesn’t drink coffee while reading), thinking it is an aesthetic improvement, made the ledge slightly tilted, so it is impossible to put the cup on it.

This explains the more severe problem of landscaping and architecture: architects today build to impress other architects, and we end up with strange—irreversible—structures that do not satisfy the well-being of their residents; it takes time and a lot of progressive tinkering for that. Or some specialist sitting in the ministry of urban planning who doesn’t live in the community will produce the equivalent of the tilted ledge—as an improvement, except at a much larger scale…

…Alas, you can detect the degradation of the aesthetics of buildings when architects are judged by other architects. So the current rebellion against bureaucrats whether in DC or Brussels simply comes from the public detection of a simple principle: the more micro the more visible one’s skills. To use the language of complexity theory, expertise is scale dependent. And, ironically, the more complex the world becomes, the more the role of macro-deciders “empty suits” with disproportionate impact should be reduced: we should decentralize (so actions are taken locally and visibly), not centralize as we have been doing…
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game (2018)

Why do we want to redesign the home? What needs to change about how we live today? Our homes are the locus of all our personal and social desires, and the origin of social convention. The home is the very definition of the status quo, which makes it the atomic block for social change…the housing shortage has fueled a feedback loop of intense real estate speculation and capital accumulation that has endangered family formation and basic social security…Artificial shortfall in housing supply is an intrinsic quality of capitalist property systems. And while the social changes taking place today are notably extreme, every generation faces more or less the same obligation to reinvent society and its traditions afresh…

How is the home changing?

“The home is changing in response to the changing lifestyle trends of our generation, with the focus moving away from the tangible space to the intangible value-added services and sense of community, demanded by an ever-increasingly transient population.” —Reza Merchant, CEO, The Collective

“Home, as a physical place, the source and scene of experiences, is threatened by a new ‘connected’ world, virtual, unearned and rootless.” —Crispin Kelly, director, Baylight Properties

“The home is changing from a stage set for domestic life to a space where private, public and professional lives coexist and collide.” —Isabel Allen, design director, HAB Housing

“The home is being progressively designed to achieve regulatory compliance, rather than necessarily to suit the needs of future occupiers.” —Steve Sanham, development director, HUB

“The home is not changing fast enough but priorities are finally shifting: location over space, affordability over investment, a point of life home over a home for life.” —Marc Vlessing, CEO and co-founder, Pocket

“How homes are made is changing, from speculative, cost-driven, mass production of units to individual customer-designed homes; from counting bricks to investing in dreams, the future is custom build.” —Chris Brown, executive chairman, Igloo Regeneration

“The affordability crisis presents a new challenge for homes to be designed for ongoing commercial productivity—spacious enough to enable intergenerational cohabitation, dividable enough to allow Airbnb style asset sweating, indestructible enough to provide a guaranteed future income stream for the kids.” —Colm Lacey, director of development, LB Croydon

“In the main, the home as a physical construct is not changing, whereas social and family structures are, which is putting huge economic and physical pressure on the fabric we are inheriting.” —John Nordon, design director, PegasusLife

“Exclusion from conventional home ownership could give the next generation the freedom to invent new and exciting ways to live — what seems life a struggle now could reform the concept of the home forever as people, places and markets adapt to a new era.” — Rachel Begenal, director, Naked House

“There is a danger that for they many, the ‘home’ increasingly means parents, adult offspring (and partners), grandparents and even complete strangers, living under the same roof in smaller and smaller spaces throughout their lifetimes — our challenge is to make sure that doesn’t become the norm.” —John East, strategic director for growth and homes, LB Barking and Dagenham
—The Spaces, Home Economics: Five New Models for Domestic Life (2016)