Dubai Creek in 1977. Courtesy of John R. Harris Library.

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

From October 2021 through March 2022, Dubai hosts the world expo. The event takes place in a city that has been deliberately on display for 70 years. To memorialise history, Off Centre/On Stage, an exhibition of photographs in Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, curated by Todd Reisz (Sept. 29 — Mar. 21, 2022), is being hosted. It shows an earlier Dubai, much of which has now been bulldozed or cast in the shadow of a new city.

The exhibition, which is accompanied by a new book, reveals traces of the older city found on photographic slides. The images — seen here for the first time — preserve moments from 1976 to 1979, when two architects, Stephen Finch and Mark Harris, traversed the city and its construction sites. Both were affiliated with John R. Harris & Partners, a British architectural firm that at the time was delivering transformation to Dubai. The presented slides are not commercial, documentary, or art photography.

 Deira Souk as seen in 1977.

They are visual notes taken by professional architects and are observations recorded of city life made by those ultimately contracted to shape a future city life. Reisz shares material collected over more than a decade, as he became a leading authority on Dubai’s 20th-century urban transformations. The exhibition is a chance for residents and visitors to explore up close some of the gathered evidence of the early ambition and toil that created today’s Dubai. Reisz speaks to Gulf Today.

What led you to work in Dubai?I came here first as an architect in 2005. While my colleagues from OMA, the firm I was working for, came to talk with potential clients, I was sent to start looking at and understanding the city, so that any projects that we might secure, would be informed by the city’s history and social makeup. Did Dubai have its trademark braggadocio in the 1970s also? Was its relentless persistence in getting things done evident then too? Can you give examples?Yes. That is the whole messaging behind the exhibition Off Centre/On Stage. We often describe the neighbourhoods around Dubai Creek as “Old Dubai”.

 Todd Reisz, curator of Off Centre-On Stage exhibition.

They might be older than districts further out: but these neighbourhoods also include bold and assertive efforts to express Dubai as modern, comfortable, and “world-class.” These older districts might seem more authentic or endearing today, but they were meant to impress in the 1970s. Look, for example, at the photograph of the Bank of Baroda building going up in Bur Dubai. People seeing that going up from the souks must have known that people in power had big ambitions.

Would you call Dubai one of the first cities that embraced globalism through architecture? Even as early as the 1960s, Dubai was a place where one could see how ideas in architecture and urbanism were already circulating globally. In the 1960s, these circulating ideas had to do with British New Town Planning. By the 1970s, even before World Trade Center was a global franchise, the complex going up in Dubai was already exploring the ideas involved in creating the World Trade Center in New York City. How did/does architecture define Dubai’s place in the international sun? Even the first town plan for Dubai, from 1960, was used in marketing materials to sell the city to investors and people who might move to populate the city.

No one in the 1960s or 1970s referred to buildings as “icons”; instead, they used the word “showpiece.” That’s why I named my book “Showpiece City.” And showpieces were not, at least at first, flashy or photogenic buildings. They were buildings like banks, hotels, hospitals that demonstrated that the city offered certain amenities associated with a modern city. A photograph of a hospital in a marketing pamphlet was just as convincing as an office tower: it was the evidence that one could be healthy in Dubai, that one could be born in Dubai. There is a complaint that architecture in Dubai is a mish-mash of many styles, that it doesn’t have a singular identity.

Comment. There is no great city in the world that adheres to a single style. Dubai’s architecture, like other world cities, comes about through the global circulation of ideas and expertise. Global architects, for better or for worse, are hired by developers — many of whom are also global actors — not necessarily to present buildings that distinguish Dubai from other places, but to position the city as among other world cities that offer and maintain the expected “world-class” standards.

What are the qualities in the photographs that made the cut for the exhibition? These are photographs that have helped me write about Dubai in the 1970s. I have looked at them to give me a sense of the city’s textures, colours and people. I am an architect and so are the two people who took these photographs. For me, to write an urban of history through architecture, it was terribly helpful to see the city from the perspective of these two architects. Should a guest leave the exhibition with feelings of elation — that Dubai has been designed out of the sands to what it is today — or feel humbled by the efforts of trailblazers? I certainly do not endorse the idea that Dubai has risen from the sands.

It has come about through great bouts of effort, mistakes, and reattempts. There are people captured in the photographs who came to Dubai to find a better life, believing that they were helping to create a future city. Their daily work, whether serving tea in a cafe, bringing cargo to Dubai Creek, or laying concrete at the World Trade Center, was what made Dubai grow and expand. It didn’t happen on its own, and certainly not through abstract planning. It took the commitment of hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions.