Building Museums, and a Fresh Arab Identity
An aerial view of the construction site for the Zayed National Museum in Saadiyaat Island, a development zone in Abu Dhabi.
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: November 26, 2010
Blueprints for the MideastABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — It is an audacious experiment: two small, oil-rich countries in the Middle East are using architecture and art to reshape their national identities virtually overnight, and in the process to redeem the tarnished image of Arabs abroad while showing the way toward a modern society within the boundaries of Islam.
A New Silk Road
This is the second in a series exploring how large-scale urban projects are transforming parts of the Arab world.
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TDIC/Zayed National Museum
A computer rendering of the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi.
Here, on a barren island on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, workers have dug the foundations for three colossal museums: an $800 million Frank Gehry-designed branch of the Guggenheim 12 times the size of its New York flagship; a half-billion-dollar outpost of theLouvre by Jean Nouvel; and a showcase for national history by Foster & Partners, the design for which was unveiled on Thursday. And plans are moving ahead for yet another museum, about maritime history, to be designed by Tadao Ando.
Nearly 200 miles across the Persian Gulf, Doha, the capital of Qatar, has been mapping out its own extravagant cultural vision. A Museum of Islamic Art, a bone-white I. M. Pei-designed temple, opened in 2008 and dazzled the international museum establishment. In December the government will open a museum of modern Arab art with a collection that spans the mid-19th-century to the present. Construction has just begun on a museum of Qatari history, also by Mr. Nouvel, and the design for a museum of Orientalist art by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron is to be made public next year.
To a critic traveling through the region, the speed at which museums are being built in Abu Dhabi — and the international brand names attached to some of them — conjured culture-flavored versions of the overwrought real-estate spectacles that famously shaped its fellow emirate, Dubai. By contrast, Doha’s vision seemed a more calculated attempt to find a balance between modernization and Islam.
But in both cases leaders also see their construction sprees as part of sweeping efforts to retool their societies for a post-Sept. 11, post-oil world. Their goal is not only to build a more positive image of the Middle East at a time when anti-Islamic sentiment continues to build across Europe and the United States, but also to create a kind of latter-day Silk Road, one on which their countries are powerful cultural and economic hinges between the West and rising powers like India and China.
And they are betting that they can do this without alienating significant parts of the Arab world, which may see in these undertakings the same kind of Western-oriented cosmopolitanism that flourished in places like Cairo and Tehran not so long ago, and that helped fuel the rise of militant fundamentalism.
Building a New Narrative
A little over a half-century ago Abu Dhabi was a Bedouin village with no literary or scientific traditions to speak of, no urban history. Its few thousand inhabitants, mostly poor and illiterate, survived largely on animal herding, fishing and pearl diving.
After oil production began here in the 1960s, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, who founded the country by bringing several emirates together under Abu Dhabi’s leadership in the early 1970s, made deals with Western oil companies that financed the area’s first paved roads, hospitals and schools. The emirates became a kind of Switzerland of the Middle East, a haven of calm and prosperity surrounded by big, aggressive neighbors, Iran and Iraq to the north and Saudi Arabia to the west.
But by the time Sheik Zayed’s descendants began coming to power in the 1990s, that low-key approach felt out of date. Globalism was the catchword of the moment, and the construction boom in neighboring Dubai was demonstrating, despite its later bust, how completely a city could transform itself in just a few years.
As important, reliance on economic ties with the West began to seem imprudent after Sept. 11, as Western governments scrutinized all sorts of Arab financial dealings with increasing intensity, and even travel to the West became a sometimes degrading experience for Arabs.
In 2005 Sheikh Zayed’s son and heir, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, approachedThomas Krens, who was the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, with the idea of creating a new branch of the Guggenheim Museum — a Middle Eastern version of what Mr. Krens and Mr. Gehry had accomplished a decade earlier in Bilbao, Spain. But the sheik’s ambitions were never so small: within a few years the proposed site of the project, Saadiyat Island, a 10-square-mile development zone just north of Abu Dhabi’s urban center, was being planned as a miniature city built around culture and leisure, with some of the most recognizable names from the creative world.
Abu Dhabi’s blockbuster deal with the Louvre was signed in 2007; another deal, with theBritish Museum, to design exhibitions for Foster & Partners’ Zayed National Museum, was signed two years later. The maritime museum by Mr. Ando and a performing arts center by Zaha Hadid are still being planned. These cultural megaprojects will be joined by a campus of New York University on Saadiyat Island’s southern shore and, in a location to be determined, a four-million-square-foot development for media companies and film studios meant partly to provide job training and opportunities for young Emiratis.
Sheik Khalifa and his government want all this to instill national pride in a new generation of Emiratis while providing citizens with tools, both intellectual and psychological, for living in a global society. The idea, several people told me on a recent visit, is to tell a new story, one that breaks with a long history of regional decline, including the recent upheavals caused by militant fundamentalism, and to re-establish a semblance of cultural parity with the West.
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