ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the significant inflow of foreign direct investment into the Gulf and competition among cities to establish centres for commerce and tourism fuelled extraordinary expansions of the built environment across the region. The tendency to focus on façades is perhaps due to the rather substantial challenges of addressing the complex socio-cultural contexts of Gulf cities informed by the diversity of inhabitants and their respective communities. The building booms that have transformed the built environments throughout the Gulf have often been accompanied by elegies lamenting the loss of a past perceived to be superior to the present. The diverse approaches to architecture in the Gulf are evident in the range of stylistic tendencies observed within and across the major cities, from the calligraphy-covered Museum of the Future in Dubai to the windmill-bearing Bahrain World Trade Center.
