John Harris Comes to Dubai
The arrival of the architect—at the site and onto the stage—can make for a loaded performance, a clarion moment deployed to signal that disorder capitulates to design. Before any such rite, there is an intractable and erratic landscape. And after it, there lies a designated place for premeditation and foresight.
Writing architectural history often requires appraising a heightened arrival. It is at its best when it can look beyond the individual expert and place the event within vaster currents that flow through and around the event. Modern architecture, though, is often recounted through discerning the architect’s arrival not as coexisting with time but changing it: the historical accounting seeks junctures of impact and, most preferably, breakage. In this way of telling, the architect enacts the making of site, the distinguishing of now from then and here from there.
In my book Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai, I grapple with an arrival, that of British architect John Harris in Dubai, on November 19, 1959 (Figure 1). He landed to create a town plan for the city. To do that, he examined the city as no other recorded person before him in order to infer from it a logic that could be harbored and capitalized. After that day, Harris helped shape Dubai, yet on that day nothing significantly changed about the city. His presence was hardly noticed.
Figure 1. Houses and wind towers along Dubai Creek, as seen by John Harris during first trip to Dubai in November 1959. Courtesy John R. Harris Library.
As many have realized before me, part of the challenge in depicting arrival is determining how much context to write, without losing the architecture in the history. It’s not just a matter of writing prehistory: Preceding events did not simply lead to the architect’s arrival; policies and decisiveness did not result in it. There is no line that directly connects Harris to the city we experience today, but there are backdrafts and airstreams that do. Impending transformations were shaped by many political and economic tendencies and thousands of people assembled. And still, even when considering these consequential factors, I had to consider Harris as the effectual individual on the landscape, because that’s what he was paid to be. Despite clear, functioning systems of governance and trade strategies already in existence, the architect was engaged to shape a new order formed around British desires to control any oil reserves in the surrounding 200-mile radius. Harris’s arrival was arranged to initiate Dubai’s own as an oil-industry city.
“Modern architecture, though, is often recounted through discerning the architect’s arrival not as coexisting with time but changing it.”
The British Foreign Office officials, however, made no great effort celebrate architecture’s arrival. They sought to administer the transformation without appearing to do so. That resulted in convincing Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, that the city needed a town plan, but then bungling the search process for finding him the right planner. Blunders accumulated into an apparent strategy of purposeful mismanagement. After a jumble of correspondence and phone calls chronicled in the book, Harris flew out on two weeks’ notice to negotiate the contract, but the British official in charge was two days late to greet him and then departed again after only a short meeting. The architect used his first stay to take notes and photographs that informed the plan, but the British government fumbled again in getting him the aerial imagery he needed to draw it (Figure 2). Each aspect of Harris’s potentially meaningful arrival was pleated with negligence. The historical record neutralized the potentially mythic moment before I could.
Figure 2. On May 19, 1960, John Harris presents Dubai’s first town plan to Sheikh Rashid, ruler of Dubai. Dubai’s first accurate map is also a blueprint of its future. Courtesy John R. Harris Library.
That meant if there was any mythologizing to happen, it would come from me. Still, the facts were clear. Harris delivered the 1960 town plan as scheduled the following May. The document directed how Dubai would expand (Figure 3). Moreover, it was the first project of Harris’s two-decade career in the city, during which his firm completed works essential to Dubai’s delivery of both built and imagined landscapes. Even if most of his contributions have been demolished and his town plan has been overridden, it is difficult to find another such instrumental architect in creating today’s Dubai. Was my work meant to bring a moment to the fore that had receded from view? How could I portray the importance of his arrival without falling for a mythology trap?
Figure 3. The Dubai 1960 town plan, drawn by John Harris after his November 1959 visit to the city. Courtesy John R. Harris Library.
The question of Harris’s arrival was more than about narrative and emphasis; it was also about structure. Should the book begin with arrival in November 1959? I realized the book had to reach back to before then, but just how far? There was a propaganda film in 1958 whose production prior to Harris’s selection betrayed the missteps of a British-led modernization program. Further back, there was the posting of Christopher Pirie-Gordon in 1954 as the first British political agent for Dubai whose mandate included formulating the modernization program. To account for Pirie-Gordon’s arrival, I found myself reaching still further back to the nineteenth century when British forces pummeled the region’s coastline into submission.[1] All of these scenes determined how Dubai grew, but so far back would have diluted the story of modern architecture in Dubai.
In the book’s final form, the architect appears in the first pages, but he quickly exits stage until the fourth chapter. In fact, the book’s first chapter opens with a refusal to arrive near Dubai, on November 21, 1903. George Curzon, viceroy and governor-general of colonial India, had come to display his embodiment of British power over the region. Upon approach, however, foul weather discouraged him from alighting the launch prepared to escort him to land. Instead, he had the coast’s leaders come to him. Curzon’s non-arrival, brought on by nothing more than an evasion of moderate discomfort, stunted the intended, ostentatious effect of exhibiting power over land. Even his large battleships remained invisible from shoreside. Curzon’s absence from Dubai helps establish more than that weather can mold power gestures; it sustains that there was a cloudy counterbalance to any clear attempts at messaging British control of Dubai. A non-arrival can offset the significance of any subsequent arrival, including Harris’s fifty-six years later, almost to the day.
“A single arrival took its cues from countless misaligned arrivals before it but quickly was lost in the sea of ensuing arrivals.”
November 19, 1959, was not historic because the architect had arrived, at last, but the subsequent town plan did set the format for countless arrivals after his. A single arrival took its cues from countless misaligned arrivals before it but quickly was lost in the sea of ensuing arrivals: including tons of cement dug from African quarries; kilometers of steel rebar forged in Britain; dozens, eventually thousands, of consultants from Europe, the Levant, and Asia; and millions of people from the Arab world, Iran, and South Asia who sensed that the gathering of wealth and materials signaled the chance of a better livelihood. The architect might not have severed time for the sake of new history, but his plan did encourage installation of new units of time that measure Dubai. No longer just beholden to tidal cycles, pearl market reach, and palm-date yields, Dubai was set to price curves, demographic flows, and traffic counts. Each brought its own past and its own future (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Travelers steered by abra boatmen across Dubai Creek, May 1960. Photograph taken by John R. Harris during his second visit to Dubai. Courtesy John R. Harris Library.
Below is a link to the book’s prologue. It opens with the caveat that a book’s beginning—the reader’s prescribed arrival—is a writer’s licensed choice, a subjective act of explaining what comes next.
Note
[1] Rosemarie Said Zahlan, Origins of the United Arab Emirates: A Political and Social History of the Trucial States (London: Macmillan, 1978), 14.
