ABSTRACT
Often relegated to the background, the global pandemic has directed attention to some of the potential pitfalls of geographically and culturally distant professional relationships in the design and realization of ambitious architectural work. Within the specific context of the UAE, this global interdependence also extends to the manual and technical labor. The current paper, which is part of a pilot study, begins to explore through oral histories, the transnational networks of both manual and professional labor across the AEC disciplines between the UAE and the Indian subcontinent which began with the oil boom. As we will see, regardless of the origins and/or intentions of design, the ground reality of execution—vis-à-vis materials supply and construction—was predominantly dictated by expatriate Indians (mostly Malayalees, as in the current paper)—in the form of shop keepers, store managers or engineers; thus, playing a conspicuously important, yet unrecorded, role in the realization of the architecture of this place.
