ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to map a city within a city. Kuwait’s modern urbanscape is but a sequence of fragments, dispersed among shards from different epochs, all reminders of an unaccomplished urban vision: a kaleidoscope of uncorrelated episodes of obsolescence, adaptation, and reinterpretation. Jibla is one of the places where Kuwait’s modernity has tried to come to terms with tradition. Examining a series of projects that took place in the same quarter of Kuwait City, Jibla, and in the early days of the country’s urban transformation, the chapter attempts to demystify the binaries according to which, in the Gulf particularly, ‘tradition’ is only ‘pre-oil’, and ‘authenticity’ is only regional. Al-Amricani stands close to one of Kuwait’s architectural symbols: Jorn Utzon’s Parliament. The façade-controlled design approach generated a photogenic backdrop, but the lack of civic principles made the newest street of Kuwait already obsolete.
