ABSTRACT

A handful of The Architects Collaborative (TAC) and Pan-Arab Consulting Engineers’s (PACE) institutional buildings in Kuwait have achieved prominent places within contemporary understandings of modern Kuwaiti heritage. The local-foreign binary is challenged in particular by an examination of the more dedicated joint-venture framework that developed between TAC and PACE after 1973, as an example of the changing legal and financial relationships between local firms and foreign architects seeking to operate in the Gulf. The design competition for the Cultural Foundation began in 1973, a year in which Ashkouri worked at TAC in between finishing his master of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and a master in urban design at Harvard. It should be clear that the simplistic dichotomy of local and foreign precludes the ambiguities of authorship through which the material reality of the Cultural Foundation took shape.