ABSTRACT
Many of the countries in this area came into being well after World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: Turkey became an independent Republic in 1923, while Syria and Lebanon were placed under French mandate, Iraq, Transjordan (later Jordan) and Palestine (later Israel/Palestine) under British mandate. Among the Gulf States, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was established in 1932, but Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates remained under foreign administration well until 1960s and 70s. Israel was founded in 1948, and continued to expand by occupying Palestinian territories since the 1967 war. By the end of the World War II, the European powers had mostly withdrawn from the region; while the United States’ involvement intensied afterwards, both as a model for aspired modernization, and as an intervener to contain the cold war, to guide oil production and to control the Israel/Palestine issue. The downfall of Iran’s shah regime in 1979 is usually marked as the beginning of the rise of Islamism. War and conict never seem to have ceased in the area during the cold-war period, and later during the post-cold war and post 9/11, even though it hit dierent parts at dierent times. These include the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, the armed battles between left-wing and right-wing in Turkish cities, as well as the three coups d’état in Turkey in two decades (1960, 1971, 1980), the civil war in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990; the Iraq-Iran war between 1980 and 1988; the Gulf War in 1990-91 and the Iraq war between 2003 and 2011, not to mention the continuous Israeli-Palestinian conict. Perhaps no other “region” illustrates the impact of war on architecture and urban development better than these countries at dierent moments between 1960 and 2010.4
At the same time, in no other country but some in focus here (and in China), can one nd as many large-scale and big-budget projects, glamorous and marketable buildings designed by the most prolic international architects of our time. Developers turned their attention to major urban centers and invited cutting-edge architects in the Gulf States during the turn of the century, as well as in Turkey after the adoption of neoliberal policies following the violent 1980 coup d’etat, and in Lebanon after the end of the civil war in 1990. Simultaneously, the gap between the rich and the poor widened, causing some of the world’s biggest squatter developments in countries like Turkey. As contradictory as this might seem at rst sight, both global conict and global glitter shaped these countries during dissimilar moments throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
