The First 50 Years by SSHDesign

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Acknowledgements

Editor: Rod Sweet Interviews & writing: Rod Sweet, Sarah Chalabi Graphic Design: Dana Zabalawi Research & coordination: Dana Zabalawi, Nansy Kahala, Waleed Shaalan Thanks also to

Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait (CRSK) - Dr. Abdullah Al-Ghunaim Kuwait Oil Company Ministry of Information Bashar al-Essa Divya Menon Enrico Canosa Enric Ruiz-Geli Siby George Dr. Tarek Kazzaz

Printed and bound: Al-Khat Printing Press, Kuwait

Vol. 1.0

Contents Foreword 1. 1960s: Youth, creativity, ambition 14 BEGINNINGS 20 THE COURSE IS SET 26 RAW ENERGY 32 PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES 38 AND DOWN TO EARTH AGAIN

5. 1990s: Reconstruction and hope 98 WILDERNESS YEARS 102 CONFIDENCE RETURNS 104 RENAISSANCE 110 TRIUMPH AND CRISIS

2. 1970s: Growing out, growing up 42 THE PERFECT PARTNERSHIP 44 A NEW PATH 48 DECISION TIME 52 TRIUMVIRATE 56 CHALLENGE AND STRATEGY 58 GROWING UP

6. 2000s: Maturity and experience 116 A NEW OWNER IS FOUND 120 WEATHERING THE STORM 130 KUWAIT’S SMARTEST BUILDING 138 TAKING STOCK

3. 1980s: Golden decade 64 PROGRESS IN TURMOIL 70 HIGH HONOUR, TOUGH CHALLENGE 74 FULL STEAM AHEAD

7. The next 50 142 New opportunities, new challenges

4. Invasion 84 THE UNTHINKABLE 87 DISINTEGRATION AND ESCAPE 91 SSH IN EXILE 94 PICKING UP THE PIECES

Our people 159 People and moments SSH Timeline 191 A glance back

Foreword By George Abi-Hanna

n 2011 we celebrated an important double birthday: the 50th anniversary both of the founding of the independent State of Kuwait, and of the architectural practice by Sabah Abi-Hanna that would come to be known as SSH. In 1961 Kuwait negotiated a formal end to its status as a British protectorate. Its birth as an independent nation state came amidst a dramatic transformation, occasioned by the start of oil exports in 1946, from a pre-industrial walled town of low, mud-brick buildings into the vibrant and modern city state we see today. The remarkable burgeoning is captured by the Palestinian architect Saba George Shiber in his 1964 book, Kuwait Urbanisation: “The discovery of oil in Kuwait impinged with potent, sudden, and great force on the desert. Conventional urban growth patterns were shattered. The harshness of the desert succumbed to the forces of the machine.” Sabah was just 22 when he opened his practice in 1961. He threw himself into his work with passion, skill and commitment. From the start he distinguished himself with technical innovations, the use of sustainable, local materials, bold new forms and sensitive recasting of traditional ones. As a result, he has had a lasting influence on the physical face of Kuwait. He also had a vision that encompassed uncompromising professionalism and ethics. It was a vision that drew remarkable people, both colleagues and clients, who in turn expanded the vision in new ways. Key among these were Salem al-Marzouk, firebrand reforming politician and talented engineer, and the pioneering planner Charles Bosel. Fifty years on, this vision continues to animate SSH. The two narratives – of the country and of the company – are intertwined. SSH enabled the development of Kuwait, its buildings, infrastructure and development plans, and in turn Kuwait enabled the development of SSH by providing major opportunities and historic challenges. In these pages we’ve tried to capture and reflect on this fascinating dynamic as we prepare for the next 50 years.

Before oil, Kuwaiti merchants pearled and traded across the Indian ocean in their unique dhows, which gave them a competitive edge (Kuwait Oil Company archives)

Merchants counting money in what used to be one of the most active trading and pearl diving hubs in the region (Kuwait Oil Company)

1960s: Youth, creativity, ambition 13

BEGINNINGS Early life, education and a brush with destiny

Young Sabah Abi-Hanna receiving his high school diploma on graduation day

First Year AUB Engineering Summer Camp, resting with classmates after a day’s field activities, Zgharta , 1954

abah was born the youngest of five children to a family of modest means in Hamat, a seaside village in northern Lebanon. Three older brothers had emigrated to Australia in the 1950s and they sent money to help pay for his education. He applied himself rigorously, at one point in high school completing three academic years in the space of 12 calendar months. He was readily accepted into the American University of Beirut (AUB), the top university in the Middle East at the time. To say that Sabah had been consumed from birth by a passion for architecture would be picturesque and useful for the telling of this story, but it would not be true. He enrolled in a general engineering degree, and then sort of fell into it. Here is how he describes it: “During the first summer we went to the Zgharta district to do some surveying. We camped under the olive trees, measuring with the rudimentary equipment. A week before the end of the programme, there was a posting on the board: ‘Any student who wants to sign up for the architecture department, write your name here.’ I had no guidance. I put my name down. I was one of ten students.” Sabah is equally candid about his first brush with architectural instruction: “I remember it well. Our teacher, Professor Assem Salam, was a comfortable man and made us very comfortable. Our first assignment was to draw the basic design for a log house that could be built with only a saw, hammer and nails. I did not know how to design so I made a simple box shape. “I was never an artist by nature. What skill I have in architecture and design, I acquired.” He was drawn to the work of Richard Neutra, a Viennese modernist architect who had risen to fame in California designing homes with stark geometries and integrated landscapes. “When his works inspired me, I earned a lot of praise from my teachers,” Sabah says. In his third year he failed mathematics, which in those days meant forfeiting the whole academic year. Looking back he attributes this “bump” to his young age relative to his classmates and to the accumulating pressure of the workload. It was a blow, but the setback turned to his advantage. That year Lebanon suffered an earthquake and with the university’s help he found a position with a government reconstruction company. “I worked there until I could resume my studies,” he recalls. “I had an Armenian boss, an engineer, and I went with him to the villages to help people assess the damage. It was a very interesting experience and it was good to have a responsible, professional job. I earned a decent salary and my first pay cheque I gave to my father. It was a big feeling. It meant a lot to me even if later I continued to receive money from my brothers.”

Young Sabah Abi-Hanna, summer internship in Kuwait, 1958

Sabah Abi-Hanna, second from the left, with his collegues during graduation from the American University of Beirut (AUB) 1959

Sabah in front of the main entrance of the Bechtel School of Engineering and Architecture, AUB, 1956

In the summer of 1958 Sabah got his first glimpse of the world outside Lebanon. He and six other students from AUB flew in a twin-prop DC-3 Dakota to Kuwait to participate in a summer internship with the public works department. He had barely heard of Kuwait before. “I was young, and felt very little fear. It was the start of a new life and I was happy to let things happen,” he says. He spent the summer attached to the design section, run by two British architects. He worked on designing a clock for Safat Square and visited a few villas under construction. A Palestinian architect, Mr. al-Khateeb, the man in charge of designing and detailing all joinery and woodwork for government projects, made a big impression. He was so effective, Sabah recalls, that he did single-handedly and without computers what would normally take a whole team to do. It was a pleasant time, Sabah’s first stint away from home, and he made friends, particularly with senior engineer Yehya Mazboudy, also from Lebanon. When the summer ended, he boarded the Dakota to fly home to complete his studies. He may have thought that was the end of his association with Kuwait. But I like to imagine the desert wind whipping up a little sand dervish to grab at his shoe as he mounted the steps to the plane, because that wasn’t the end at all.

I went with my boss to the villages to help people assess the damage. It was good to have a responsible job. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Sabah Abi-Hanna

Sabah, second from left, as an intern at the Department of Public Works, Kuwait, summer 1958. On either side are fellow AUB interns, Fawzi Germanus and Souhayl Bathish. With them are engineer, Negroni, and architects, Khateeb and Nielson

THE COURSE IS SET A world tour costs Sabah his job, but it’s the chance he has been waiting for

First sea-loading line laid in 1946 (Kuwait Oil Company)

fter graduating in 1959, Sabah idled around the university, wondering what to do next. Australia was a possibility. His brothers were there. He had written to Harry Seidler, an architect in Sydney from the Bauhaus school, who replied with an offer of a job, but without a salary. Then one day at the famous restaurant near the university gate, Faisal’s, he ran into Yehya Mazboudy, the senior engineer he’d met in Kuwait. It was a happy reunion, and a fateful one. It turned out Mazboudy was in Beirut precisely to recruit young engineers and architects for the public works department in Kuwait. An offer of a job with a salary of 1,600 Gulf rupees (the currency in Kuwait pre-independence) soon arrived in his university mailbox. Sabah leaned towards Australia, but he needed advice. With his two offers in hand he went to his professor (later dean), Raymond Ghosn, who was an established architect in his own right. But Ghosn only confused matters. “He told me I actually had three offers because he was considering me for a post in his office. This was difficult. He was a good designer. But then he advised me to go to Kuwait. He said opportunities like that don’t come very often and that I’d improve more in Kuwait than in Australia or Lebanon.” What Sabah may not have fully appreciated during his previous summer was just how much and how rapidly Kuwait was changing. Since its first commercial shipments of oil in 1946, Kuwait had increased production exponentially and was now very rich. The Amir, Sheikh Abdullah al-Salem al-Sabah, was determined to distribute that wealth. The government bought vast tracts of land at high prices, both inside and outside the wall surrounding the old town, and sold it back to Kuwaitis at discounted prices, causing a tidal wave of residential and commercial property development. Roads, schools, hospitals and factories were also being built, and the population was expanding rapidly. Against this backdrop, Sabah returned, taking up his post with the Department of Public Works on 5 October 1959. He was assigned to planning, and a few months later the planning department, with Sabah in it, was moved over to the Kuwait Municipality. There he checked development applications against building regulations. For only one year would Sabah remain a faithful cog in the machinery of government. He was eager to see the world. In the autumn of 1960, having saved some money and some holiday time, he took a trip to Australia. It was an eye-opener for the young designer, giving him first-hand exposure to architectural flair of an international standard. In Sydney, construction of Harry Seidler’s iconic Australia Square was about to start. It was to be the city’s tallest building and the world’s tallest lightweight concrete building. And controversy over the Sydney Opera House was raging, with British engineers

Sydney Opera House under construction

Ove Arup frantically trying to work out how to build the roof shells, the hallmark of Danish architect Jørn Utzon’s design. Sabah was riveted. He bought and read everything he could on the subject. (Six years later Utzon would be driven from the embattled project by the state government. Tantalisingly for Sabah, Utzon would go on to design Kuwait’s new National Assembly building, completed in 1982.) “It was my first trip to a faraway land,” Sabah says, “a big leap for a simple villager.” Having caught the travel bug he extended his itinerary, taking in Manila next and then Tokyo. He was late getting back to the office at the beginning of 1961: 17 days late, to be exact! Meanwhile his employer, the old Kuwait Municipality, was strict, and had policies for everything, including how to deal with junior staff who go missing for 17 days without explaining why. It counted as a resignation. They were nice about it, though. When he went to get his final pay they told him he could contest his dismissal and get his job back, but something stopped him. In his mind he heard a creak. It was the opening of the gate of opportunity, foretold by Professor Ghosn. On the spur of the moment he decided he would set up his own practice. He was 22. On 19 June 1961, Kuwait formally gained its independence. In December of that year elections were held for a 20-member council tasked with drafting the constitution. In January 1963 Kuwaitis elected their first 50-member National Assembly, which had genuine legislative powers. The most democratic state in the Gulf was born. Young Sabah paid only fleeting attention to these momentous events, because he was busy. Staying for a time as a guest in the apartment of a friend, his office his friend’s dining room table, Sabah landed his first fee-paying job: to prepare

Al-Jahra Gate, from the east, the fourth of five Gates within the third wall of Kuwait during the 18th century. The wall has been demolished, but al-Jahra Gate is still standing in what is known today as the Sheraton roundabout (Kuwait Oil Company)

Old Kuwaiti traditional houses moulding the narrow street topography, pre 1960s (Kuwait Oil Company)

Aerial view of Kuwait city in the early 1960s. Modern multi-storey buildings emerging among clusters of old-style courtyard houses (Kuwait Oil Company)

drawings of the layouts and elevations for the renovation of White Palace, the home compound of the late Sheikh Abdullah Mubarak al-Sabah. From then on he was never out of work. Kuwait was a great place for construction at the time. The old town, an organic complex of low, mud-brick buildings, was bursting out through the old wall. It was during this time that Palestinian architect Saba George Shiber, whom we quoted earlier, was brought in by the government to try and instil some planning discipline and limit the damage of rampant development. Shiber could be described as the grandfather of planning in Kuwait. As the 1960s wore on practically every street corner sprouted a new design or engineering consultancy. Few, however, were to last out that first decade, let alone subsequent ones. Sabah had a gift for selecting upwards. He chose projects well, with a view to making not only a mark on the burgeoning cityscape, but fruitful, long-term relationships as well. “The circle of my acquaintances widened very fast,” Sabah says. The White Palace job shows this fertile web in bud form. He was in close touch with the professional team at the Department of Public Works. Through a friend there, a Lebanese civil engineer, he was introduced to Najib Najjar, founding partner of Ahmadiah Contracting Company, a prominent firm in Kuwait to this day. Ahmadiah had been approached by the Sheikh Adbullah Mubarak family to renovate the palace, and Najjar decided to give Sabah a try. Sabah quickly moved up in the world. He opened an office, and got himself a place to live. “I stayed in the Carlton Hotel downtown because my office was next door. I thought it would be easier, but I couldn’t cope with being on call 24 hours a day, like a doctor. It was like a diwaniyah, with people dropping in to chat whether to do with work or not.” He bought his first car, a Fiat, and, on his first drive, on Abdul Nasser Street, disaster struck. “I hit a goat!” he recalls with genuine dismay nearly 50 years later. The goat died on the spot. Sabah was mortified. He made the owner go with him straight to the police station at Shuwaikh. Seeing how upset Sabah was, the duty officer set a fine of 30 rupees and the goat’s death was absolved. The story resonates for me because it shows two things. First, it shows the clash of eras as the goat-owning Kuwaiti householder is rudely confronted by the age of the automobile, in the form of an Italian car driven by a Lebanese expat. (The incidence of road accidents was skyrocketing during this time, and would continue to rise.) Second, it provides a glimpse of the moral hard-wiring of the young man: a conscientiousness and sense of accountability that would likewise be hard-wired into the growing firm. This would set the firm apart but also cost it. One more story of the young Sabah bumping sharply against life: “I bought a motor boat, a simple one for fishing and waterskiing. I took my friends one day to the island of Failaka. We tied it to the jetty among the boats of the fishermen. It was high tide. In the afternoon we came back and the boat was dangling straight down. The tide had gone out and my rope was too short. I asked the fishermen why they didn’t do anything. They explained that it was a code of honour not to touch a boat unless asked. We had to wait hours for the tide to come back so we could get off the island. My lack of experience showed again. The week after, we tried the boat and the engine seized up. It was was all rusted. Nobody had told me that when you use an inboard motor in the sea you have to rinse it with fresh water to remove the salt.”

HH the late Sheikh Abdullah al-Salem al-Sabah signing the independence agreement in 1961 (Kuwait Oil Company)

RAW ENERGY With a skeleton staff, drawing by hand, the practice’s workload quadruples

uwait’s Central Statistical Office records that the total number of buildings in Kuwait nearly doubled between 1965 and 1975, from 72,464 to 137,639. Sabah’s fledgling practice was capturing an increasing share of that activity. He had 26 commissions in 1965, and the following year, 76. As Kuwaitis from the entire social spectrum started benefitting from land, loans and outright grants from the government, it was natural that villas and apartment buildings would form the bulk of his work during this period. However, Sabah was marked out for distinction. That year Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber alSabah, a key member of the ruling family, Prime Minister at the time and, later, Amir, appointed him for works on the Jawhara Palace, his residence in Dasman. It was a success and Sabah would go on to receive many commissions from the large and influential al-Sabah family. Other key, long-term relationships formed that year. The National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) approached him to design new rented spaces for its quicklymultiplying branches. And the Kuwait Transportation Company asked him to design a series of bus stops, his first foray into the realm of the public space. In the commercial sector, the government had given land in Mirqab to the Association of Cloth Merchants, and money to build a new market. Before the mall came to Kuwait, the qaysariyah, or covered market, was the traditional way to offer specialised goods – a shopping arcade under one roof. Sabah updated the qaysariyah concept by giving it four levels: basement, shops opening onto a central courtyard, a mezzanine plus an upper gallery, all covered. Abdul Aziz al-Masa’id, owner of the influential daily newspaper, al-Rai al-Am, asked Sabah to design a new headquarters with an integrated printing press. He drew a factory design for the Kuwait Packaging Company. His first significant parcelling and planning project was in the area of Furjah, what is now Salwa. And, at the behest of Sheikha Badriya al-Sabah, he designed a mosque. “I had not designed a mosque before,” Sabah admits. Sketching freehand, he gamely started drawing according to requirements given by the sheikha, who had been inspired by travels to Egypt: columns, square minarets, a dome and so on. An assistant at the time helpfully pointed out a problem: six arches for the entrance porch. It would be better, the assistant suggested, to have an odd number of arches to avoid having to put a column in the middle. “I learned a golden rule of classical architecture!” says Sabah, to this day an ardent believer in learning on the job. Two other lessons were learned with the Sheikha Badriya mosque. One had to do with a word in fashion today, but not then: “buildability”. Sabah had specified a dome made of reinforced fibre composite – fibreglass, in essence. It had to be manufactured in Lebanon, but how would this large thing be transported 26

Classical faĂ§ade of an NBK branch, mid 1970s. The rapidly expanding bank was a loyal client of Sabahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s for over 30 years

Jassim Mayahi joined the busy office in 1967, and is still an indispensable part of the team

and installed? Cranes were scarce in those days. After much head-scratching he decided the dome should be manufactured in four sections, like a quartered orange peel, which could then be welded together on site. On top of the dome was installed the crescent, and there lay the other lesson. When they thought it was finished someone noticed that the crescent was pointing in the wrong direction, away from Mecca. A hasty operation had to be launched to un-install the crescent and get it pointing the correct way. The mosque remains an icon. A word about Sabah’s style: I believe his success from such an early age stemmed from his insistence on quality, which meant, for him, avoiding flashy design for its own sake. “I never set out to be a signature architect,” he says. “I followed trends, but carefully. I was often stubborn in my ideas. I always designed from the inside out, from function to concept. I start thinking of the function, then I dress it. Many signature architects are poets. They think of the form, the material, from the outside. I’ve always started with the body.” The volume of work in that decade peaked in 1968 at 93 jobs, nearly quadruple the volume of three years earlier. Yet he still ran a skeleton staff of mostly freelance draughtsmen and one engineer. All the drawings were done by hand, down to the minutest detail. A very important addition to the team came in 1967, in the form of a 17-yearold administrative assistant, Jassim Mayahi. Jassim spent every hour of his spare time studying, first to get his high school diploma in the evenings, then to learn English at the Polyglot Language Institute. He quickly made himself indispensable to the busy firm. (Forty-six years later, Jassim Mayahi is still indispensable to the busy firm.) From Jassim we get a glimpse of the hectic office. Sabah, a strict perfectionist, had to be a team player. “He was very close to them,” Jassim says. “He gave his opinion on a regular basis. He gave constructive criticism and encouragement in equal measure.” He also worked like crazy. Says Jassim: “You’d come to the office at 6 am, he was there. You’d come at 5 pm, he was there. You’d pass by at 10 pm, he was there. At one in the morning, he was there. That is a persistently energetic, hard-working man.” I put this to Sabah recently. He admitted: “I don’t understand how we handled so many projects with no mass production.” But then he shrugged. “I don’t remember the pressure. It felt easy at the time.”

Sheikha Badriya al-Sabah Mosque, Salmiya, with square minarets inspired by the Sheikhaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s travels to Egypt, designed by Sabah

He gave constructive criticism and encouragement in equal measure. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Jassim Mayahi

Fahd al-Salem Street, Kuwait, 1960s. The governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land redistribution policies led to a boom in commercial and residential property development (Kuwait Oil Company)

PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES Building regulations rush to keep up as Sabah makes his mark on the landscape

ome of us are lucky in life to be founders of something new and worthwhile, which, I expect, might go some way toward explaining Sabah’s remarkable energy during this time. He would need it. The first decade was drawing to a close, but there was a lot more for the young designer to experience and achieve. His fame grew. An important client of Sabah’s, the government minister, developer and entrepreneur, Khaled al-Issa al-Saleh, travelled the world and often came back inspired by new concepts. Returning from Italy, he dreamed of having an equivalent of the Galleria, the famous shopping arcade in Milan. Sabah, we will recall, was a function-first architect, so he listened to what Khaled wanted, accounted for the setting – Salmiyah, Kuwait, not Milan – and designed the alRiyadi Showroom, a bold, u-shaped building which maximised street-fronting retail display space, and which was nothing at all like the Galleria. It drew wellknown anchor tenants immediately and Khaled and Sabah could congratulate themselves for creating one of Kuwait’s first prestigious retail addresses. Boundaries, first, those of his own technical capabilities, had to be pushed. In 1968 he designed “The New House” (al-Bait al-Jadeed) and for the louvres specified something very untraditional – yellow and silver stainless steel. Today we might ask what the big deal was, because today a great deal of a building’s design is delegated to highly-skilled and expert specialist suppliers, be it cladding, curtainwalling, glazing, lifts, ventilation, whatever. Not so in those days in Kuwait. “We had very little support from the construction supply chain,” Sabah remembers. “If you did something even a little non-standard you had to start from scratch. Search the world for samples, work with them to test their viability, all through trial and error, until you got the result you wanted. Our expectations were modest.” But the louvres worked. They retained their colour for years. Explosives came next. The National Industries Company asked Sabah to design a warehouse for explosives in the oil-producing enclave of Ahmadi. Quickly, he had to come to grips with a completely new design paradigm. How do you design a building that prevents bombs exploding, and if they do explode how can the structure best protect the people and property around it? He had to scour every reference book he could lay his hands on for the right specifications. His influence on the character of Kuwait’s built environment grew. Some of this influence was subtle. The National Industries Company had come round to his view that sand-lime bricks, al-tabouk al-jeeree, could and should be used in the facade of high-end residential buildings. For one thing, they actually looked quite nice. For another, they withstood the sandblasting of Kuwait’s desert winds. And finally, a growing market in such bricks would provide a viable local manufacturing venture. So the company asked Sabah to research and write a technical guide explaining and promoting the use of the bricks, which he did. 32

Issa al-Saleh Commercial Galleria in Salmiya, early 1970s. Inspired by Milanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Galleria, it was one of Kuwaitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first prestigious retail addresses

Some of this influence was not subtle at all. For instance, Kuwaiti officialdom at the time was not ready for tall buildings. Regulations limited structures outside the city to three storeys, but one client, Khalid al-Marzouk, an influential developer who owned a point of land in Salmiyah, wanted something taller. In 1968 he and Sabah came up with the idea of making each storey split level, which obeyed the rules technically but in practical terms doubled the allowable height. When complete in 1971 the al-Marzouk Pearl was indeed the tallest building outside the city. “The regulations actually had to scramble to catch up with us,” Sabah says. It’s still an important reference point in Kuwait’s built heritage. The al-Marzouk Pearl was fateful for another important reason, but we’ll come to that. First, the most resounding mark young Sabah made on young Kuwait in that seminal decade was the Messilah Beach Hotel at al-Bida. With more time and money at their disposal Kuwaitis were starting to enjoy themselves. Pre-oil, the sea had been a cruel taskmaster, a raw, elemental force that only reluctantly gave up its pearls and smashed, sunk or becalmed their ships. Now it was fun to swim in. Developer Mubarak al-Hassawi envisaged something new to Kuwait: a luxury resort, with chalets and full amenities, right on the beach. He went to Sabah. As with the explosives warehouse, the design constraints for the resort were new. The developer wanted the maximum number of units possible but, at the same time, for each unit to feel private and secluded in the lush gardens. Zoning rules allowed only two storeys. Sabah arrived at an innovative solution. He settled on a grid star system of hexagonal units, arranged in hexagonal clusters of units, which allowed windows to be placed so that none faced the window of another chalet. Incidentally, he used sand-lime bricks prevalently, complimenting the cool feeling of the cluster courtyards. It was the largest multi-use project he’d been commissioned to date, and upon opening in 1974 it became a magnet for sea-and-sand seeking locals and expatriates. It’s natural for architects to want permanence for the structures they conceive, but the Messilah Beach Hotel is gone. Badly damaged in the war to liberate Kuwait in 1991, it struggled to make a comeback amid the taller hotels and resorts which new zoning regulations allowed on that prime piece of waterfront. Looking at it through the prism of today I still find the geometry almost unsettlingly modern, but by Kuwaiti standards it was old, and had to go. The resort, renamed the Golden Tulip Messilah Beach Resort in the 1980s, closed in 2002 and was demolished in 2004 to make way for the Jumeirah Messilah Beach Kuwait Hotel & Spa.

With its grid star system of hexagonal units, Sabahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s strikingly modern Messilah Beach Hotel at al-Bida, which opened in 1974, was one of Kuwaitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first beach resorts

With the al-Marzouk Pearl Building in Ras Salmiya, built in 1971, Sabah skirted height restrictions by making each story split-level

AND DOWN TO EARTH AGAIN Sabah’s first attempt to expand overseas leads to overstretch

s the 1960s drew to a close, Sabah was riding the crest of a wave. He had succeeded in the first tests of his technical and artistic capabilities, and demand for his services was growing. Now he wanted to go international. “If I felt pressure at all in those days it was more about expanding out of the box and seeking new opportunities,” he says. The chance came when the Messilah Beach Hotel developer, Mubarak al-Hassawi, lined him up to design his next project, the Sharjah Carlton Hotel, in the Emirate of Sharjah. So in 1970 he opened an office in neighbouring Dubai. Before long Sabah received commissions to design a hotel in Abu Dhabi for Sheikh Saif bin Mohammed al-Nahyan, and modern villas for the famous ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed al-Maktoum, the man who articulated the vision, and set it in motion, of turning Dubai into a global commercial and transport hub. That’s when it went wrong. “It was okay with projects for Kuwaiti clients,” Sabah recalls. “I knew the owners and I could follow up project-related matters partly in Kuwait. But for Dubai-owned projects, and government-owned at that, it required substantial presence and follow-up on my part. In the case of the villas, I started enthusiastically, and my team in Kuwait spent 24-hour days preparing the presentation boards – A0 colour drawings, hand drafted, rendered and glued to styropor boards over a metre wide. It was exciting. I had my chance of presenting the proposal to His Highness the Ruler, but then there was a long wait for any kind of a feedback, which I could not afford. This pattern eroded all the enthusiasm. To cope with on-site supervision of the projects under construction I employed a team of four engineers and architects. Controlling their performance by only telephone was itself a difficult affair, and I lost a lot of money when clients would not settle final fee payments.” He learned an important lesson about his personal limits, and also this universal truth: that with architecture as with any trade or art, being good is one thing, but making a profit in its pursuit is quite another. These lessons were timely. It’s 1971. For Kuwait and for him, things are about to really kick off.

A commission to design the Carlton Hotel, in Sharjah (built in 1971), led to a premature attempt to expand overseas

1970s: Growing out, growing up 41

THE PERFECT PARTNERSHIP Enter Salem al-Marzouk, engineer and firebrand reformer

alem al-Marzouk was born into a leading merchant family in 1941 that traced its origins back to the founding of Kuwait: the original migration from the Nejd in the 18th century. His father started in the pearling business in the early 1900s and then made his fortune shipping foodstuffs and timber from Africa and India. Salem’s upbringing was cosmopolitan by unfortunate necessity: at the age of three he was taken to Karachi and then to Bombay for the treatment of polio. When he came back in 1945 he had to learn Arabic from scratch because he spoke only Hindi. The Kuwait of his boyhood and teenage years was changing rapidly both physically, as roads and buildings sprang up everywhere, and culturally, as the country modernised and looked outward. His father, unlike many of his peers, didn’t grumble about the changes but embraced them enthusiastically. He didn’t object when Salem’s sisters started going out without a veil or the abaya, and even allowed one sister to attend university in Egypt and the UK. Inspired by the metamorphosis of the country around him, Salem decided to study civil engineering in America. He went first to Parsons College in Iowa, and then to Iowa State University, where he got his degree. “My father said: ‘Why study engineering?’” he recalls. “‘You’ll be there four or five years and by the time you get back everything will be finished!’” Of course it wasn’t, and when he returned as a graduate he joined Kuwait’s Ministry of Public Works in 1966 as a highway engineer in the roads and drainage department. This was not a happy time. All around him in the ministry he saw bureaucracy and corruption, a dismal affront to this young man of ideals. It caused him to resign after two years, which led to a certain amount of publicity. 1971 was an election year, only the third for the young National Assembly. Twenty-four hours before the registration of candidates closed, a group of friends and associates rushed to him with the news that one of the political blocs was boycotting the election, thereby creating an opportunity for them. They wanted him to run, and said he must register as a candidate right away. “I laughed,” Salem says. “That was my first reaction. I said ‘Why don’t you ask somebody else?’ Standing for election to the National Assembly was the furthest thing from my mind.” But his friends insisted. An argument ensued. Finally they convinced him to register as a candidate and if he changed his mind later he could withdraw. So he registered. And as soon as his name appeared in the newspapers he was inundated with telephone calls and people dropping by to offer their support. He found he couldn’t withdraw. He was elected without a clear platform but quickly found his political voice, becoming an outspoken critic of corruption, landing blows over bribery and shoddy infrastructure work. He also pressed for 42

the preservation of Kuwait’s lifeblood – oil. The achievement he is proudest of was a bill he introduced to limit production to the levels at the time, three million barrels per day in 1971. The oil companies wanted to boost that to five million in the short term and then to eight million. There was strong public support for his bill and the government immediately enacted the limit. “I felt we needed to protect our reserves for future generations,” he says. “Back then oil was two dollars per barrel. The price rose dramatically. Saving our reserves translated into hundreds of billions of dollars for Kuwait.” Salem was also the first MP to present a bill giving women the right to vote. That was going too far, however. “Nobody took it seriously,” he says. It wouldn’t be until 2006, 35 years later, that women’s suffrage was finally granted. “I wasn’t a natural politician,” Salem admits. “I was an engineer. When I see problems I want to fix them and politics is a very blunt tool for that. I always had this internal conflict going on.” It was this firebrand reformer that strode onto the beach one day in early 1972 to have a look at his cousin Khalid’s famous development, the al-Marzouk Pearl, taking shape as the tallest building outside the old city. As usual Sabah, the architect, was on site and Khalid introduced him. The two young men hit it off. Sabah needed a Kuwaiti partner, but he couldn’t have hoped for a match like this. They immediately fell into discussions about joining forces and hammered out a deal over the next 48 hours. “It was as if God had sent him to me,” recalls Sabah. “I was ready for this partnership and his style of thinking. And his ethics were very close to mine.” “All these years we argued over many issues,” says Salem, looking back over a partnership that spanned more than three decades. “But not about ethics and straight dealing with clients and staff. We worked on the company like brothers.”

Sabah Abi-Hanna, left, with engineer and reforming MP, Salem al-Marzouk. “It was as if God sent him to me,” says Sabah

A NEW PATH Sabah and Salem raise their sights from private villas to major government projects

n preparing for this book we took a trip down to the archives and found, eventually, the carbon copy of the letter, headed Sharikat Salem al-Marzouk and Sabah Abi-Hanna, (“the practice” of Salem and Sabah), telling the Ministry of Commerce, the Kuwait Municipality and the Engineering Association of Kuwait about the creation of the new firm. Sabah marvelled as he held the crackly old pink document up to the light. “I was hard-headed about quality control and tracking,” he said. “I imposed the rule that we keep a carbon copy of all documents that went out of the office, from draft to final version.” The letter was typed by a young secretary, Mira Abu Jamra. She is still here. I mention that because when Salem says “straight dealing with clients and staff ” it’s not just the usual ‘our-people-are-our-most-important-asset’ stuff. They believed it. “We knew that behind the tools, behind the machines, and later, the computers, there are people,” says Salem, and they worked to nourish and recognise talent in whatever form it took. The company was no longer just an architectural practice based on one man. It was now a multidisciplinary firm. And it was time to move away from what was still the bread and butter of Sabah’s practice: private villas. “This was for a simple reason,” Salem says. “Small villas had a small return and clients used to change their minds a lot. They never understood that a line on a piece of paper costs money. Changes in the design meant redoing the work once, twice, three times, and the clients were always unhappy. We lost a lot on these villas.” In the early 1970s Sabah continued to attract clients needing commercial, industrial and residential buildings. The National Bank of Kuwait was expanding its office network and Sabah designed the Qadisiya branch. The United Real Estate Company commissioned him to design its commercial and residential complex in Hawalli, and it is still a prominent feature there. He designed a furniture factory in a new industrial zone for Mahdi Habib & Bros. Occasionally he would accept a commission for a villa in exceptional circumstances, such as one in 1974 for client Basima Samuel Antar. But with Salem on board as a civil engineer the pair charted a new strategic path for growth – they would target major public sector schemes: new towns, infrastructure, planning. They also prepared to branch out from design to the supervision of major projects, because it offered higher revenue potential. The opportunity here was vast. Kuwait was bursting at the seams. Its population more than doubled from 467,000 in 1965 to just over a million in 1975. This boom was of global significance. Between 1963 and 1972 Kuwait’s rate of population growth was surpassed only by very small populations in the Western Sahara and on Ascension Island, as noted by the authors of Kuwait’s first review of its master plan in 1977 (the authors being Sabah Abi-Hanna 44

Villa designed by Sabah on Arabian Gulf Street, demolished recently to make room for high-rise development

The villaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interior plan hand-drafted by Sabah with China ink on transparent paper

The letter, dated 3 April 1972, informing the Kuwait Society of Engineers of the formation of the new practice of Salem al-Marzouk and Sabah Abi-Hanna. SSH is born

and Salem al-Marzouk, as it happens, in partnership with British firm Shankland Cox). There was a housing shortage caused by the huge influx of expats but also by government promises to house a swelling number of naturalised tribal Beduin, who were flocking to informal settlements. Historian Jill Crystal records that by 1975 Kuwait had a shanty population of around 131,000 people, mostly Beduin. This was not just a growing population but a modernising and consuming one. Multigenerational households were splitting up and going nuclear, increasing demand for houses and flats. The master plan review report warned that 16,000 new dwellings were needed each year to meet the demand and ease overcrowding. Between 1970 and 1975 the private construction sector delivered only 6,840 per year and the public housing sector hadn’t yet started producing. Meanwhile, car ownership was approaching saturation point, so secondary roads had to be upgraded to a network of expressways. Rubbish was piling up on the streets, attracting rats and flies and causing enteric disease. Electricity demand nearly doubled between 1970 and 1975, the master plan review said, noting that “an almost continuous programme of power station construction may be necessary to keep pace with demand”. It was a very thirsty population, too. We see today how much expensivelyproduced fresh water goes on washing cars. Well, this wasteful trend began then. In 1976 per capita consumption of water stood at 169 litres per day, more than double what it was in 1965. It wasn’t that people were drinking more, they were just watering their new gardens. By 1976 the report said there were around 1,250 hectares of private gardens under irrigation, and that figure was expected to more than double in 15 years. The rising demand for water meant increasing demand for both effluent treatment capacity and seawater desalination plants. For the latter, the report forecast distillation capacity to shoot up from 272 million litres per day in 1977 to over 1,000 in the mid-1980s. That meant the design and construction of desalination plants plus the pipelines to carry the water to the new urban centres. Increased water consumption also meant increased sewerage capacity. There was an awful lot to do! As it turned out, the country’s growing infrastructure needs would coincide with a huge boost in its oil revenues, so there was also the means to pay for it. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Kuwait and other oil-producing Arab countries announced that they would cut production by five per cent each month until

Israel withdrew from Arab territories occupied in the 1967 war. Oil prices tripled, even quadrupled, as a result of the crisis, and the cash flowed in. Salem and Sabah faced a problem, however. In those days there was a bias in government toward foreign firms, as if Kuwaiti firms couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be trusted with big jobs. Throughout 1973 Salem, ever the activist, went knocking on doors to ask officials to require that foreign companies hire local firms at least as subconsultants. He reasoned that this would ensure that international expertise and best practice would be transmitted to local firms and wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just evaporate when the job was finished and everybody went home. But everywhere he encountered scepticism and a lack of confidence in home-grown talent. So he went higher. He managed to secure an audience with Abdul Latif al-Hamad, government minister with responsibility for finance and planning. Al-Hamad immediately saw the sense of what Salem was saying and the next day he issued a circular to all departments saying that from now on foreign firms had to team up with local ones if they wanted to work in Kuwait. Thanks to that decision, Salem believes, Kuwait developed over time the best indigenous design and construction sectors of all the Arab countries. It certainly helped SSH, as the firm was now being called. After ten years the pattern reversed: instead of SSH working for big international consultants, it became the main consultant of choice in its own right and relied on good foreign firms for specialist assistance. SSH was about to enter the big league.

Samples of technical report covers designed and printed by SSHâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in-house graphic design department, 1970s

DECISION TIME The Sabah–Salem formula works, but their ethical code forces Salem to choose between politics and business

or a long time Kuwait’s master plan included a clear vision of a corniche, a stately road following the subtle curve of the Gulf from the old town down to Salmiyah and beyond. Such a feature would provide access to the sea and confer an orienting sense of place. Saba Shiber’s vision of 1964 called for more: a grand corniche along the entire coast. The waterfront from the city down to Salmiyah was already designed, with sea walls, reclamation of land and pedestrian walkways already laid out. In 1975 the minister of public works, Khaled al-Issa al-Saleh, decided it was time finally to send in the bulldozers. The Kuwait Municipality appointed the team of Brian Colquhoun and Partners (BCP) of the UK and SSH, which had about 40 staff at the time, to supervise the first phase, known as The Waterfront, which featured four beaches and extended from the Shaab roundabout down to the towers of Kuwait in Dasman. Sabah registered the shift required as they moved from single-client architecture commissions to infrastructure projects. “When we went into government projects, the client was no longer an individual but a group of decision-makers with complicated webs of accountability. There were a lot of chain reactions to monitor and more risk for us. We had to evolve our management system. The better we recorded our implied expenses, the better chances we had of claiming it back.” Salem’s expertise, as a civil engineer, in the delivery of projects now complemented Sabah’s expertise in design. And they took care to learn from the foreign firms, unravelling and absorbing standards and procedures that gave them an edge. In 1976, the team of Shankland Cox of the UK and SSH were appointed by the Kuwait Municipality to undertake planning studies for the Second Major Centre at Fintas. Their vision of expanding along with an expanding Kuwait seemed secure, but there was a problem. It had to do with their code of ethics, a code that included, among many things, the determination not to abuse influence. As a well-known and popular politician – he’d been re-elected in 1975 – Salem alMarzouk had influence, and it was getting awkward. “When I was in the National Assembly I had to be careful to avoid any conflict of interest situations. I didn’t try and get projects out of my seat. Obviously we knew that, but it had to appear so as well.” It didn’t help that Salem’s brother, Jassem al-Marzouk, was rising in government at the time. By then Jassem had become education minister, with control over a large capital budget. SSH had politely to reject offers to tender for any education-related work until Jassem moved on to another department. “It was clear that the office wouldn’t be able to expand properly until I resigned from parliament and we were able to make it on the market as an independent entity,” Salem says. As luck would have it, the matter would be decided for him. The 1975 election had been hotly contested, with the largest ever number of 48

Fahaheel Residential Towers, built with an Outinord tunnel formwork system that allowed casting walls and slabs together (Late 1970s)

candidates competing for seats in the Assembly. Tensions in the Middle East were running high, and were reflected in tensions between the Assembly and the government. In 1976 the government dissolved the National Assembly, and MPs were sent home. At last Salem was free to focus on the business. He was relieved. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I never really fit in with politics,â&#x20AC;? he says. 49

Souk al-Salmiyah, retail shopping arcade designed by the al-Marzouk and Abi-Hanna office (Kuwait Oil Company)

TRIUMVIRATE Top planner Charles Bosel joins the team, creating a powerful new service offering

nother important development happened around this time. In late December 1975 Sabah Abi-Hanna (he’s still only 37, remember) flew out to London where he met senior figures of the Shankland Cox Partnership, one of the top three international planning consultancies in the world at the time. Shankland Cox had of course caught wind of what was going on in Kuwait and was keen to get involved. Sitting down to the partners’ lunch on that drizzly winter day was the lean, debonair and, by that time, slightly world-weary Australian, Charles Bosel, senior partner responsible for SCP’s global business. Bosel had gone far, literally, in the relatively new field of urban planning. He’d become interested in it while studying architecture at the University of Queensland but found, when he graduated in 1960, that it was practically unknown as a discipline in Australia. So in 1961 he went to the UK, enrolling in the University of Liverpool’s renowned Master of Civic Design programme. Before the start of the first term, however, he encountered a delightful problem. He learned that he had been awarded the prestigious Rome Scholarship in Architecture by the British School at Rome, an annual prize open since the early 1920s to all qualified architects in the British Commonwealth under the age of 30. He was the first Australian trained in an Australian university to get it. The prize gave Charles the opportunity to spend a year in Rome, absorbing Italian culture and architecture and studying the development of towns in the Abruzzi hills. It meant he had to postpone his master’s, but clearly it was worth it. In 1962 he went back to Liverpool and completed his degree. He was snapped up by the Shankland Cox Partnership after he graduated in 1964. In 1970 he became the senior partner, resident in Jamaica, for Shankland Cox Overseas, leading major public sector planning jobs in the Caribbean and the Americas. He returned to London in 1972 and became a partner in the main SCP partnership. After that he had travelled the world, directing development projects for a range of clients including the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme and the British Overseas Development Administration. Kuwait, he knew, was special. “They were serious about planning,” Charles recalls. “The first professional master plan for Kuwait was produced in the late 1950s by UK architects Minoprio & Spenceley. They were of the ‘garden city’ school prevalent in the UK after the Second World War. Their plan produced a series of ring roads and radials but that’s as far as they went.” Charles goes on to relate how from the late 1960s a key figure in Kuwait’s development was Hamed al-Shuaib, chief architect for the Kuwait Municipality. Charles knew him. Shuaib had studied architecture at Oxford Polytechnic in England before enrolling in Liverpool’s Master of Civic Design at the same time 52

SSH people and moments, late 1970s to early 1980s

A hand-drawn architectural impression of a city center, early 1980s

Charles was there. Shuaib returned to Kuwait and in 1970 commissioned another UK firm, Colin Buchanan & Partners, to build on the Minoprio & Spenceley plan. Charles remains an admirer of that effort. “The Buchanan report was a fantastic piece of work,” he says. “In those days it took two years, one year on good original research and the next year preparing the proposals. These days it tends to be a six-month intuitive exercise. That was the starting point of modern planning in Kuwait. It was the best basis for the plan of any country I’ve worked in.” Moreover, Charles could see that the time was right to get involved. “After the oil crisis of 1973 Kuwait was rolling in money and Shuaib had the foresight to see that it would have a major impact on how Kuwait developed, either willy-nilly at the whims of all the developers who wanted to do something, or in a fairly controlled way. The challenge was keeping traffic out of sensitive residential or historic areas. Buchanan had already started. Kuwait’s history, built on mud-brick technology, was fast disappearing. It became ridiculous what they would spend their money on – projects that were totally unnecessary. I remember a massive development, a zoo under a glass dome. It never got built, but it was a bit like Dubai later became. “1975 was a turning point for Kuwait. That was the attraction. Shuaib had a good brain, and the money and the political will behind him.” Hence the meeting with Sabah, which followed a recommendation from a UK engineering firm they knew in common. “Shankland Cox’s philosophy was always to have a local associate,” Charles says. “Not just to tick boxes but because we always believed there was a contribution they could make from their own local knowledge.” And of course Sabah worked his charm. Charles flew to Kuwait in January 1976 to meet with potential client groups. He went again in midMarch and met with Ibrahim Shaheen at the newly-formed National Housing Association (NHA). As a result of this visit SCP and SSH were awarded the planning and design studies for the new Messilah District (now named the Sabah al-Salem District). It was a big job. The work involved detailed plot subdivision layouts, plus engineering, design and implementation recommendations for a brand new town of 60,000 people, spread over 1,000 hectares. The contract was signed on 10 April 1976 with Abdullah al-Dakheel, director general of the NHA. Work started right away. “I enjoyed working with Sabah and Salem,” Charles recalls. “They were receptive to the ideas we put forward and the old Arab business ethics prevailed in all our dealings. We set up a joint office in a villa near the Dasman Palace and it worked very very well.” The seeds had been sowed for a powerful triumvirate, but first the partnership had to prove itself.

A growing SSH opens its new Qortoba office in 1985

CHALLENGE AND STRATEGY The practice is now deeply involved in designing and planning the new Kuwait

uwait’s development challenge fascinated Charles. Good planning, a mystery to many people, is all about the reasoned distribution of land use. Which land, and how much, do you allocate for residential? How much for commercial or industrial? Where do you put roads? And most of all, why? “The original Minoprio & Spenceley plan tried to do it but it was vague on the detail,” says Charles. “Also, the ring road approach was probably wrong for a growing, car-loving population because all the radial roads led to the city centre where the commercial and industrial activity was. If everyone drove downtown it would be gridlock.” The Colin Buchanan plan, recognising even in 1970 that Kuwaitis were unlikely to go for public transportation in a big way, addressed this by trying to decentralise, to encourage the growth of alternative hubs, as in the new Fintas Commercial Centre. For Charles, on the other hand, the exercise shouldn’t be too prescriptive. He didn’t see Kuwait as a vast blank slate on which to scrawl the latest planning notion. His philosophy was to be sensitive to an area’s potential and to encourage organic growth. “At the time you had two types of planners,” Charles says. “Myles Wright, the Lever Professor of Planning at Liverpool while I was there, had written a book, The Planner’s Notebook, which aimed to define the standards according to which you designed an urban space. It was all rather mathematical and cold. The other group of planners, which I was part of, saw it differently: that you created a physical and social framework in which towns can grow and evolve. So when we came to Kuwait we didn’t see it as a blank slate. The study by Colin Buchanan was based on exactly the same theories of change and evolution to meet the developing circumstances.” Charles was proud of how he’d put this into practice on the beautiful island of Hvar in the Adriatic Sea, off the coast of Yugoslavia (now Croatia). The island has miles of sandy beaches, dense pine forests and four pretty towns with architecture going back to Venetian times. Clearly Hvar had great tourism potential but as he tells the story, Shankland Cox’s Yugoslavian partner firm in the master-planning project took this potential to its extreme and suggested putting, right in the middle of the island, a big airport for jumbo jets, which were just coming into commercial use. “They wanted to bring in thousands of tourists. They had already started planning how to expand the towns and turn the place into a tourist paradise. And we said no, that’s the wrong thing to do. The people who come here are selective tourists, they want the pine forests, the pretty little towns. You bring in thousands who only want sun, sand and sea and you’ll lose it. Make it a bit difficult to get to. My approach is that you look at what is inherently valuable in a place and 56

build on that. You don’t try and impose preconceived ideas onto an area which is totally inappropriate. One of the best planning victories I’ve ever had is that they never started landing jumbo jets on Hvar.” As it happens the NHA was not, perhaps, quite ready for the visionary partnership of Sabah, Salem and Charles at Messilah. The proposals had many innovative ideas which were not in the end implemented. “The original plan provided for a mixed neighbourhood with a range of dwellings from lower to high socio-economic groups,” says Charles, “but the NHA decided to house only limited income Kuwaitis there. We also proposed innovative architectural solutions for the various buildings but the NHA went ahead with only standard designs, leaving little architectural variety in the final project. We also suggested using gatch pits in the area to create recreational lakes by pumping in seawater. Some pits could also have been used to store rainwater to irrigate the extensive landscaping proposed, but these ideas were abandoned by the NHA.” Nevertheless, the SCP – SSH partnership went on to provide more major planning studies for the NHA in 1976 and 1977, including for the new city of Subiya across the bay to the north of the old city. The work included the site location studies and the master planning of a new community for half a million people, deemed necessary to accommodate the predicted metropolitan overspill. They also returned to Fintas in the south, undertaking for Kuwait Municipality planning and urban design studies for a major new shopping, commercial and recreation centre incorporating some 500,000 square metres of building area on a site of 70 hectares. After this, Charles had had enough – not of Kuwait, but of globetrotting. He was still running Shankland Cox’s global business and making working visits to Kuwait. He had four children whom he never saw. In every ten weeks he was away for eight. He resigned from Shankland Cox in March 1977 and was preparing to return with his family to Australia where a settled life beckoned and a post as professor of planning had been offered. When Sabah and Salem learned of his plans they contacted him right away and pressed him to come back to Kuwait. They needed his help developing SSH. He had the right experience, which they lacked, of both executing major projects and operating a major consultancy. I have no doubt he would have made a great teacher. Inspired by him, generations of excellent planners would have fanned out over the globe. But it was not to be. “Because I had enjoyed my time in Kuwait on the working visits,” Charles says, “and because of the relationship I had developed with Salem and Sabah, I agreed to a management consultancy agreement with SSH for a period of three years.”

GROWING UP New discipline in management and finance, and expansion overseas – at last

ith Salem now focussed one hundred per cent on the business, and with Charles on board and SSH having proved itself in the central arena of Kuwait’s development, it was time for the company to grow up. The jobs were getting bigger and they were bidding for everything. “We were very aggressive. We forced ourselves in,” Sabah says. There were more directors and more staff: the headcount was approaching 100 around 1977. It required better systems. “The old way of managing by personal attention and relationships, which worked in the 1960s, could not continue,” says Sabah. “I knew about the people on the projects I was in charge of, and so did Salem and Charles, but beyond that one’s visibility ended. Our liabilities were growing and so was the risk of serious mishap.” Their minds no doubt focussed by Kuwait’s stock market crash of 1977, they appointed as their first financial controller David Taylor, who worked for a UK accounting firm. On regular trips to Kuwait he imposed discipline, collecting data, calculating hidden costs and setting half-yearly and yearly budgets so they wouldn’t overspend on marketing and bidding. Taylor helped them make the jump from basic accounting to strategic financial management. The financial department was boosted in later years by legendary figures such as the tough John Kinloch and Sabah’s nephew, Stephen Abi-Hanna, a finance graduate. They imposed a system for managing jobs as well. With the government projects they appointed a supervising principal to oversee the project, monitor fees and keep a closer eye on contractual rights and obligations. Recruitment was a chronic problem. They literally had to scour the globe for skilled, quality people. Having won the job of supervising construction of the Sixth Brigade’s new military base at Mujailis in 1978 (a major project, in partnership with an Italian contractor), Charles flew to India to round up surveyors and engineers. The SSH team on any given project comprised up to 15 different nationalities. They had to rely on overseas recruitment agencies, as did everyone else, but the results were mixed. The Jahra-Ghazali Expressway project was huge – 38 kilometres of expressway cutting through the dense industrial area of Shuwaikh – and needed a lot of recruits. In 1979 SSH teamed up with Freeman Fox International to bid for the job of carrying out conceptual studies, detailed design and contract document preparation. They won the bid and would later go on to supervise construction with Freeman Fox, applying a number of engineering breakthroughs on what was, technically, a very challenging project. This heady, late-70s mix of challenge and opportunity led Sabah, Salem and Charles to make a move which even today strikes me as bold, unusual and really 58

SSH working practices evolve with technology in the 1970s and 1980s

In 1978 SSH designed and supervised the construction of its own materials testing laboratory in Subhan, which became the operational head office of SSH in 2003

quite clever. You’d have thought that after his adventure in Dubai nearly a decade before, Sabah would have been wary of expanding overseas. But by the time 1979 was over the triumvirate had set up an office in Bristol, England. Normally it works the other way around: big Western firms setting up branches in developing markets. But here was a punchy little firm from a developing market planting its flag in the motherland. Why? The initiative had Charles’ fingerprints all over it, so I’ll let him explain: “We found it increasingly difficult to recruit good quality, experienced professionals from the UK. They saw Kuwait as risky in terms of job security, overly conservative in lifestyle, and lacking in good schools. So we decided to open a branch office in the UK and recruit senior staff to provide design and cost consultancy for us from there. We were also working with several major UK consultants now so an office in the UK made sense.” Nowadays we talk about the ‘outsourcing’ of services, and it usually means West to East, getting cheap talent in India to answer phones or develop software for European and American firms. This is the only example of East to West outsourcing I personally have heard of. It made sense because the UK market was heading for recession at the time, so wages were in a downward trend and there were plenty of designers, surveyors and engineers looking for work. Bristol in particular was attractive because property costs were 30 per cent lower than in London, it was only an hour’s drive from Heathrow, and it had one of the highest percentages of professional staff per capita of any major UK city. Oh, and one more thing – they had trusted alumni on the ground ready to run the office. Barry Robertson, former head of the SSH building services department in Kuwait, had moved back to Bristol and was available. He would later be joined on the board by Peter Plunkett, former head of SSH’s quantity surveying department in Kuwait. Esmond Murray, a Bristol architect, was the third director of the start-up, which was called SSC. SSC’s first home was in Bristol city but it moved in 1980 to a beautiful but rundown Georgian mansion on the outskirts called St Georges Hall, which Salem, Sabah and Charles bought and renovated to a high standard. Treated by the UK tax authorities as a wholly-owned branch of an offshore company, SSC provided much needed design services for its parent, but more than that, it became a locus for assimilating new skills and technology, such as computer-aided design (CAD). Farouk al-Hayek, an architect who joined the firm in 1976 and is still with us now, went for training to the SSC office in 1980, after SSH had won the contract to design the futuristic new headquarters of the National Bank of Kuwait. He recalls: “I brought with me the base drawings for the NBK headquarters and with AutoCAD we were able to produce tender documents in six months.” Later in the 1980s SSC would start winning work on its own.

1980s: Golden decade 63

PROGRESS IN TURMOIL Despite war and security threats, Kuwait presses ahead with its development ambitions

John Abi-Hanna supervised construction of the Jahra-Ghazali motorways project

he 1980s was a difficult decade. Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 sparked serious political unrest at home in Kuwait. The eight-year Iran-Iraq War, starting in 1980, saw attacks on Kuwaiti shipping and generally heightened security concerns. Kuwait’s decision to give financial aid to Iraq in the war led to a spate of terrorist bomb attacks, including attacks against the Amir. Kuwait also suffered a financial crisis with the crash, in 1982, of the unregulated stock market known as the Souk al-Manakh, which dampened the investment climate for several years. Despite these difficulties, however, the 1980s would turn out to be the golden decade for the physical development of Kuwait as the government pressed ahead with ambitious improvement schemes. It was the golden decade for SSH, too, as we pressed ahead along with it. In April 1980 Sabah and Salem tore up Charles’ management consultancy agreement and asked him to join them as a full partner. This he did. He was ready to commit. Then, working together, but also from their unique centres of expertise, the partners launched their three-pronged push into the 80s, focussing on infrastructure, building design and planning. Salem led the way on roads and infrastructure as SSH now had a hand in the country’s biggest projects. In 1981 the Ministry of Public Works commissioned SSH as the main consultant for the Outer Bypass and 7th Ring Road jobs, approximately 80 kilometres of the overall planned expressway system of some 340 kilometres. SSH did route location studies, preliminary and final detail designs, plus tender and contract documentation. We also supervised construction. This wasn’t just a few long, straight roads: there were 11 cloverleaf interchanges with bridge structures to design and build. SSH appointed UK heavyweights Brian Colquhoun and WS Atkins as subconsultants. The team chalked up some great technical breakthroughs. “On one spot we found that the seawater table was very close to the surface,” recalls Salem. “Engineers always want to stay away from water. Normally to cope you would pour five meters of concrete. However, we pioneered in Kuwait the use of stainless steel anchorage cables which permitted a pour of only 60cm. The anchorage cables are non-oxidizing, non-breaking, guaranteed for 100 years. It was a very economical and practical solution, but a design challenge for us.” Construction of the Jahra-Ghazali motorways was now underway as well, giving one young civil engineer, John Abi-Hanna, his first taste of supervision and technological advancement. Technically this was an important project for SSH. To understand why, we need to hear from engineer Ali al-Abdullah, who was in charge of roads at the time for the Ministry of Public Works, and who would later play an important

A concrete pour for a highway project in the 1980s

role in the company. “The Ghazali viaduct was constructed using a technique known as match-cast segmental post-tensioning,” Ali recalls. “This was adopted by the main consultant following a far more sophisticated application of the technique in 1976-77 by French firm, Bouygues, in the design-build project of the Bubiyan Bridge, crossing Khour Abdullah Channel. It was done as a space frame in concrete – for the first time – without any scaffolds or support. Moreover, to assess the suitability of the technique in the geological formation of Kuwait’s sub-strata, the Ministry commissioned independent entities to investigate the suitability of ground anchors in Kuwait. Hence, it was applied.” Instead of the traditional in-situ pour, these complex structures could be assembled like Lego, with segments manufactured off site and delivered just in time for assembly, which vastly reduced disruption in the busy industrial area of Shuwaikh. In 1981 SSH submitted designs for Kuwait’s first major sewerage renovations. This was done with a UK firm as the main consultant, but SSH ended up completing the project on its own. Carried out under the direct supervision 65

SSH consulted on the Mirqab Approach Roads project to integrate Kuwaitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inner expressway network

Jahra-Ghazali motorways

of Salem, it was not only the largest project in Kuwait, but the largest of its kind in the world at the time, and one of the most complicated and technically sophisticated projects in Kuwait’s history. To determine the condition of several kilometres of the sewerage network, self-propelled CCTV cameras were used to measure slopes and gather images and data. The actual renovation involved either impregnated fabric inversion or the insertion of flexible pipes. The project manager in charge from SSH was civil engineer Mr. Ridha Sukhni. In 1982 main consultants WS Atkins appointed us as subconsultants on the Mirqab Approach Roads, part of the 1st Ring Road project. This was an ambitious project to link the ends of two major north-south radial motorways to the Kuwait Inner Ring Motorway. The design work included 5.5 kilometres of two- and three-lane motorways together with collector-distributor roads, ramps and minor road junctions. The job involved two grade-separated interchanges, three pedestrian footbridges, reinforced concrete pedestrian subways, along with positive drainage and highway lighting systems. Sabah led on building design, notching up many prestigious commissions that deepened relationships with influential public and private clients, including a new HQ complex for the National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) and for Kuwait Insurance. For the new headquarters of the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), SSH submitted a proposal in partnership with German firm, Wiedleplan Consulting. The design was fairly modern, with a double skin for lighting and shading and a huge arch. Their entry came second, however, mainly because finance minister Abdel Latif al-Hamad, who had helped SSH the previous decade, disliked extravagance. This was the time of the Souk al-Manakh crash, after all. He prioritised more conservative values of constructability and ease of maintenance. This Sabah understood completely: “I respected the motivation behind these requirements. They are always in the best interest of a project. When a project didn’t land in our court I wished our competitors the best and went looking for opportunities elsewhere.” 67

A bold vision to get people out of their cars

In 1982, when designing the new VIP terminal at Kuwait International Airport, Sabah interpreted the brief as requiring big entrances and ornate decoration, at a cost, which he thought modest enough, of 18 million dinars. “In Saudi Arabia at the time they paid 100 million for their VIP terminal, so we thought we were okay,” he says. But the design died on the desk of al-Hamad, who would not be budged from his budget of five million. Sabah adds that ministers were actually very keen back then not to emulate the oil-fuelled largesse evident in Saudi. Kuwait Insurance had been assigned a site in the old city to build its headquarters and they asked SSH for a design. With the help of Canadian firm Arthur Erickson Associates, SSH put forward a concept of four 10- to 12-storey buildings situated around a plaza, a reference to Kuwait’s traditional courtyard houses that were closed to the harsh light, heat and dust of the outside, with rooms opening in to the quiet, shady interior. “It would have been a modern building in a regional setting,” says Sabah. It’s the nature of architecture that much of one’s fee-paying output is never built. The same is true for planning. Architects and planners are called in to give shape to a client’s impulse, but many factors affect how and even whether that impulse is acted on. The Kuwait Insurance complex was an example of this, as the SSH design was never built. Another example from the early 1980s sheds fascinating insight into Kuwait’s conflicting responses to its own development challenges. Invited by the Kuwait Municipality and the Ministry of Planning, SSH and WS Atkins submitted plans for the ambitious Mirqab Transportation Centre. I mentioned earlier that we worked with Atkins on upgrading two major radials into the old city. At some point officials realised that this would be like pointing two huge traffic hosepipes directly at the metropolitan area and opening wide the valves. So they entertained a radical idea, a massive park-and-ride facility where more than 5,000 people at a time could drop off their cars and be shuttled by bus to their work or shopping destination. SSH submitted designs for the proposed and somewhat futuristic Mirqab Transportation Centre as early as 1980. But Kuwait’s love of the car and ambivalence to public transport prevailed. The transportation centre plan was still on the cards in the 1983 review of Kuwait’s master plan but, along with even earlier mooted plans for mass rail transit, it gathered dust on the shelves. In planning, led by Charles, SSH continued to lead in the articulation of innovative responses to Kuwait’s development challenge. In 1981 we submitted plans and design studies for the proposed new city of Subiya, across the bay from the old town. However, the second review of Kuwait’s master plan (KMPR2), done in 1983 by Colin Buchanan and Ove Arup, cast doubt on the Subiya plan. Based on population growth that was somewhat lower than predicted in the last review, in 1977, and on the direction of development since then, the authors of KMPR2 questioned the ability of Subiya to attract enough basic employment to make it a viable alternative home for people in the fast-filling metropolitan area. Another new town at al-Khiran, down on the southern coast, was identified as more in line with Kuwait’s main development axis, with major infrastructure elements already close by. So, attention switched to al-Khiran, and we would play a major role in its development later in the decade.

In 1981 SSH was appointed as the main consultant on the 7th Ring Road expressway development project. Now, major international firms were working for SSH

HIGH HONOUR, TOUGH CHALLENGE SSH is selected to help design and build Bayan Palace for the Fifth Islamic Summit Conference, and given just over two years to deliver

ate in 1983 the Amir HH Sheikh Jaber offered to host the Fifth Islamic Summit Conference in 1987. Attending would be over one hundred heads of state representing just under a quarter of the world’s population. It was a moment of pride for the young nation, but there was a problem: Kuwait had no suitable facilities for a conference of that scale and importance. With the event scheduled for January 1987, the government had, effectively, little more than two years to get such a world-class facility conceived, designed, built, tested and handed over. And, as a point of honour, the government wanted Kuwaiti firms to do it. The Bayan Palace project was negotiated, starting in January 1984, with a very high level of skill by the Ministry of Public Works. The minister, Abdullah al-Dakheel, wanted it done by Kuwaiti firms, but there were only three big firms at the time: us, KEO and Pan-Arab Consulting Engineers (PACE). So he called all three into a meeting and said, and I paraphrase, “Forget about competing for this job, it’s too big for any of you alone. Form a consortium, figure out how you’re going to split the work and get on with it.” And that’s what we did. KEO had project management capability, while SSH and PACE were mostly designers. So KEO did the project and construction management and PACE and SSH split roughly in half the design of the buildings and SSH did the master plan. SSH and PACE supervised construction as well. Construction began later that summer. Phase One of Bayan Palace (initially called the Kuwait Conference Centre) consisted of a residential complex of 18 buildings for 108 heads of state to stay in, plus the main conference building and assorted buildings for security and staff. It worked beautifully. It was a marriage of convenience because outside this job we were fierce competitors, but it was the biggest job in Kuwait and we were honoured that the minister had come to us instead of bringing in a foreign firm. For Sabah it was a lot of pressure. “It was a mammoth job,” he says. “There were thousands of pieces to pull together, right down to the person designing the forks and spoons.” Six months to handover the contractor suddenly ran into trouble procuring marble from Italy, so the minister requisitioned a small plane from Kuwait Airways for Sabah and a small team to fly to Pisa in order, as he describes it, to “expedite the matter”. This was one of several trips to European cities – Prague, Vienna, Cologne, Seville – to pre-qualify suppliers and manufacturers of high-quality furniture, materials and accessories and to check quality prior to shipping. “In that job, we acquired a whole new set of skills in design and contracting,” Sabah recalls. “Planning an entire complex, designing for heads of state, interiors, furniture, chandeliers and other fixtures, glassware – even linen. I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder than when we handed it over on time.” 70

Sabah, centre, with members of the Bayan Palace project team, about to fly to Europe in 1986 to expedite supply of materials and furniture

On a personal note, I count myself fortunate to have joined SSH in January 1984, just in time to participate in the Bayan Palace project. Admittedly, I had joined somewhat reluctantly. Following high school in Kuwait I studied electrical engineering at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. After I graduated in 1983, Sabah and my parents tried to persuade me to join SSH, as my cousins Stephen and John had done. I resisted because my specialty was in electronic communications systems, and I had done my thesis on fibre optics. I pictured a career in telecommunications, not construction. But my resistance was weakened by the fact that Australia was in recession at the time and telecoms jobs were scarce. Then Sabah sent me the specifications for the new Operations Centre of the National Bank of Kuwait, which SSH was designing. “Read that and tell me if it doesn’t impress you,” he said. It did. I hadn’t realised that buildings could be “smart”, to employ an overused term of today – that cooling, lighting, ventilation, security and other systems could be controlled centrally with a rudimentary form of intelligence. In this building the security system alone used three different technologies for access control and motion detection: infrared, microwave, and ultrasonic. I decided to take the plunge, joining SSH in 1984. I worked on the NBK Operations Centre and then in August that year I went to Bristol and worked for three months as a junior electrical engineer on security, fire alarm, telephone, intercom and nursecall systems for Residence Buildings.

The NBK Operations Centre employed cutting-edge building control technology

Bayan Palace interior, residential complex

FULL STEAM AHEAD Confidence returns with the end of the Iran war, and nobody pays attention to the Iraqi troops massing on the border

he latter half of the 1980s was a period of continuing growth and diversification for SSH. It meant a lot of headaches for Jassim Mayahi who was in charge of managing the affairs of a workforce that had grown to include around 175 people. They needed visas, places to live and means of getting around. “We had something like 80 apartments under management at the time, and about 70 cars,” recalls Jassim. “We would buy the cars and rent the apartments. There were a lot of things to keep track of.” In 1985 SSH opened a second office in Qortoba. As the Bayan Palace project was wrapping up, SSH continued to offer planning, design and consultancy services for projects that were central to the nation’s development. For the Ministry of Planning and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation we prepared a comprehensive master-plan study for Kuwait International Airport, comprising traffic projections and development plans for the next 20 years. We prepared a handbook on the rules and regulations governing the connection of buildings to sewer mains. We had teams working abroad as well, providing design of accommodation for the new Kuwaiti embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and, thanks to Charles Bosel, we provided preliminary design and some project and construction management for a resort in the US, at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It was not an easy time for Kuwait. There were security concerns as the Iran-Iraq war dragged on, and financial concerns as the government increased levels of aid to Iraq at a time when the price of oil dropped below $10 a barrel. However, Kuwait held its course and pushed on with major infrastructure projects. One of these ambitious plans highlighted the unique challenge Kuwait faces. Although oil is abundant in Kuwait, water is scarce. In 1953 the first desalination plant was functioning at full capacity and water has been on top of the country’s agenda ever since. In 1986 SSH, in association with French engineers Sogreah, made a study of conveying into Kuwait hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day for both drinking and irrigation from the Shatt alArab waterway, formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Iraq. “We did the preliminary study with Sogreah, and they had to liaise with the Iraqi government,” recalls my cousin, John Abi-Hanna. A project of this magnitude was a new challenge for SSH. We helped work up a master plan including route surveys, preliminary design of installations, pumping stations, the pipeline, reservoirs and treatment plants. As exciting as this was, however, the plan remained on the shelf. A deep reluctance on the part of the Kuwaiti government to become dependent on Iraq reasserted itself. Iraq had tried to use water to manipulate Kuwait before. In 1956 Sheikh Abdullah al-Salem had rejected a similar water conveyancing project on precisely these grounds. 74

Emad al-Jaouni: “I heard SSH was doing the master plan for Khiran. I knew this was my chance.”

Just as Kuwait sought life-sustaining water, SSH continued to search for the finest talent. Recruiting and bidding for new projects is an ongoing, dynamic process that leads to the gathering in of highly-specialised skills. An example of this came in 1986 with the arrival of Emad al-Jaouni, who had recently graduated with a master’s degree in transport engineering and planning from the University of Salford in the United Kingdom. At the time he was searching hard in Kuwait among the ministries, the municipality and the big consulting firms for a position where he could practise his specialty, a relatively new discipline. “I had heard that SSH had been awarded the contract to develop the master plan for Khiran, a new town for a population that was planned to eventually reach 500,000. I knew this was my chance,” recalls Emad who, as business development manager, is still part of the SSH family. The late Hamed Shuaib, chief architect for Kuwait Municipality until 1984 and a partner in Pan Arab Consulting Engineers, recommended him to Charles. He got the job. “It was a privilege to be on board with Charles Bosel, who had over 20 years of planning experience and an outstanding reputation,” says Emad. “I was immediately put on the job. It was Christmas time and they said to me, ‘please Emad, we have a submission to do, and left me with the work. I used a new software simulation tool to assess road networks, junction capacity, synchronization of traffic signals, road signage, and the overall optimisation of movement. It was interesting to do it on my own, and a joy to work on a design and to see it implemented.” In January 1987, 44 nations attended the Fifth Islamic Summit Conference at Bayan Palace. It was an exciting time and the venues performed well. To have played a major role in designing and building such a world-class facility in 36 months made us proud. When it was over we entered discussions with the Ministry of Public Works for the next phase, which was to develop a site to the west of the conference centre, creating a Guest Palace, a Banquet Hall for 1,500 people, a mosque for 1,000 people and accommodation for 3,200 security and support staff. Again, we worked on this with KEO and PACE. The end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988 ushered in a new period of confidence in Kuwait. With the war now over, and with oil prices on the rise, the government could turn to major public projects with renewed vigour. The end of SSH’s third decade saw it busier than ever and with a spreading reputation. Serge Khalaf joined during this period. “I met and worked with Sabah back in the early 1980s in Lebanon,” he says. “He was famous in the architecture school of the American University of Beirut as a pioneer who went to Kuwait and succeeded in establishing himself.” When he wasn’t jetting around Europe and North Africa to source fixtures and materials for the next phase of Bayan Palace, Sabah was leading major design projects. SSH had won a contract with the Canadian firm Arthur Erickson Associates to design and supervise the new 75

Al-Khiran New Town Master Plan, 1980s. SSH is now helping to set out a new direction for Kuwait’s urbanisation

headquarters for the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. Salem was busy leading major infrastructure projects, such as the upgrade of the second and third ring roads to motorways. And Charles had established SSH’s name in the world of planning. We were conducting the third review of the Kuwait master plan and preparing new plans, including the National Physical Plan, the Metropolitan Structure Plan, and the City Structure Plan. The strategic study for the expansion of the city involved thorough analysis of demographics and population data and land use. For me personally it was a manic time. Sabah was very keen that I should develop properly, and fast. He threw me into the deep end time and time again. “I have faith in you, but be ready,” he would say. In 1989, with just five years under my belt, I was appointed project manager on a contract to renovate a branch building for the National Bank of Kuwait. At the time I was also on the team doing electrical design for the Bayan Guest Palace, where construction began in 1990. This takes us up to the summer of 1990. I’ve tried to provide a snapshot of the time: the country, and us as a company, proceeding full steam ahead. The future looked busy and bright. It’s true that Saddam was pressing in on us with threats and demands. Iraq was billions of dollars in debt after the war with Iran, and Kuwait was one of its principle creditors. At the same time, so Saddam claimed, Kuwait and other Arab countries were producing too much oil, keeping prices low and severely restricting Iraq’s desperately-needed revenues. There were also claims that Kuwait was slant-drilling to steal Iraqi oil. Troops were massing on the border, but we were able somehow to push this to the backs of our minds. It never occurred to anyone that an Arab state would invade another neighbouring Arab state. We knew Saddam was a very aggressive player but we thought he was just flexing his muscles, trying to get Kuwait to waive the loan. Plus, we’d just been through eight years of a major war in our own neighbourhood that often affected us directly. In this part of the world, amid war and rumours of war, you just get on with it.

Al-Khiran New Town. Hand-drawn architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s impression of the city centre

Invasion 79

At the end of the war, around 700 oil wells were left burning, with 80 more flowing out of control (Kuwait Oil Company)

The raging fires would make the sky black at any time of the day, recalls Charles Bosel (Kuwait Oil Company)

THE UNTHINKABLE Somehow, we thought, it would all blow over. Then the nightmare became real

ugust is a time when pretty much anyone who can, leaves Kuwait to escape the heat, but on 1 August 1990 Sabah was doing his best to get back. He had been to Morocco and Spain with a team from KEO and PACE to visit factories supplying specialist tiles for the Bayan Guest Palace. Zillij is a mosaic created from enamelled terracotta tile or marble, cut by hand and inserted in a plaster base before setting on the wall. Sabah and the others were checking the suppliers’ quality control procedures. They finished in Valencia, and Sabah searched for a direct flight back to Kuwait. There were none. The best he could do was fly to Heathrow and try and make a tight connection there with a British Airways flight bound for Malaysia that stopped in Kuwait. At Heathrow he rushed to make the connection, only to be made to wait for several hours. The reason for the delay? Some technical issue, to do with the air conditioning, he was told. Later it was reported that the airline was assessing the situation in Kuwait. Eventually the flight took off. Six hours later, around three in the morning Kuwait time, a bleary Sabah and the other Kuwait-bound passengers disembarked. He had his passport stamped. Then he discovered that his suitcase was missing. Irritably, he filled in the forms. As he made his way home, behind him just out of earshot, Iraqi jets attacked the airport. As he unlocked his apartment and headed for bed, the remaining passengers and crew on the now-grounded plane were herded off by Iraqi soldiers and detained. Some were later taken to Iraq to be used as human shields. The plane was stripped of its engines and destroyed. British Airways Flight 149 was to be the last civilian flight into Kuwait until the country was liberated. Around dawn his sleep was disturbed by helicopter gunships thumping overhead. Then came the call from his nephew, John, who was working on Bayan Palace. “Our project has been taken over by the Iraqi army,” he said. The Iraqi plan, launched just after midnight, was to take control of a functioning country as quickly and efficiently as possible, to keep power stations, water plants and oil refineries running smoothly. It had worked. The Kuwaiti armed forces, vastly outnumbered and outgunned, were caught by surprise. There were pockets of brave resistance – at Dasman Palace, for instance, and at the Battle of the Bridges near Jahra – but by the time we woke up it was basically over. Those Kuwaiti soldiers not scattered or killed had been captured. The Iraqis were rounding up Kuwaiti police, government officials, anybody they thought might not cooperate.

The invasion and subsequent war caused widespread loss and damage to property (Kuwait Oil Company)

I couldn’t tear my mind’s eye away from the falling apart of the company I had built up and nurtured. – Sabah Abi-Hanna

DISINTEGRATION AND ESCAPE By Sabah Abi-Hanna

his was a time of deep crisis for me on every level. To that point in my life I had been lucky. Disorder and violence had always been at least one border away. Now they had arrived to greet me face to face. Nothing worked. Banks were being run by Iraqi managers. You could not withdraw money. Telephones didn’t work. One’s normal web of resources had disintegrated. Safety and survival became the paramount concerns. The insolence, brutality and lawlessness of Saddam and his soldiers stupefied us. Thousands of Kuwaitis and people of all nationalities were seized and taken to Iraq. Many were killed and tortured: innocent young men and women swallowed up forever by the rapacious Iraqi machine. The installing of Ala’a Hussein Ali, formerly a mere lieutenant in the Kuwaiti army, as Prime Minister of the new “Republic of Kuwait” was a grotesque charade, as were all of Saddam’s postures and lies. At the same time I couldn’t tear my mind’s eye away from the falling apart of the company I had built up and nurtured, as one would nurture a child, over 30 years. It was more than just a company. It was a pocket of hard-won civilisation, a life work for many people, and the impact of its collapse was too much to bear. I was sick with worry for my wife and children in Lebanon. I had married late and my young family were so precious to me. There was no way to reach them, to tell them I was alive. I was tormented by the thought that if anything happened to me they would be left on their own. This provided a focus for me: escape. On our third attempt we managed to get out of Kuwait. The border stations were abandoned. Our travel documents were valid for one journey and for four weeks only. I prayed constantly. It took three days to drive through Iraq, a violent police state at the best of times, now on a war footing, and hostile to us. It was equally fraught driving through Syria and Jordan. Every border was a half-day ordeal of grillings and searches. Bribes had to be negotiated with all our wits, as money was limited. Procuring fuel, water and food presented many challenges. In Daraa, Syria one of our cars broke down and we lost a day repairing it. In Syria we were finally able to make calls, and I broke down as well, in tears, as I made contact with my wife for the first time. Many Kuwaitis and many foreign workers managed to flee. For those left behind it was a dangerous and confusing time. There were many instances of selfless actions. I witnessed Kuwaiti women forming committees at supermarkets to prevent panic buying and to ensure everyone got essentials. Young Kuwaitis organised work teams to collect rubbish. Non-government cooperative societies took on a range of other self-help activities. An active and popular underground resistance movement formed. It was the most tragic chapter in Kuwait’s history, but in many ways it was its proudest. That goes some way to explaining why it never occurred to me not to return at the earliest possible moment.

Chaos and destruction following the invasion and war of liberation (Kuwait Oil Company)

I would find one person and ask if they knew where others were. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Charles Bosel

SSH IN EXILE By Charles Bosel

hen the Iraqis invaded I was in Kuwait with my eldest daughter. She was departing for university in the US in September and wanted to spend time with her Kuwaiti friends. Many people fled in the first few days but we had two Filipino house staff, cats and dogs, a whole household – and we’d been told by the British embassy to sit tight because they were arranging an orderly evacuation. So we did, which we regretted

because they were slow to act. The first period was okay. The Republican Guard was a trained, professional army, so as long as you didn’t do anything stupid you could get through the checkpoints. But then they moved down to the Saudi border and were replaced by the People’s Militia, a rag-tag, ill-disciplined, ill-trained bunch whose only interest was to rape and loot. That’s when it got dangerous to drive around because when you got to a checkpoint, if they liked the look of your car, they would just order you out and take it. If you protested you’d get hit with the butt of a rifle or shot. In the second week they also began looking for Australians after Australia joined the coalition movement. They had sealed the country by then. We were stuck. Our escape was lucky. At that time the Eastern European countries were neutral in the conflict and Saddam wanted to keep them that way, so the Iraqis treated them well. We had a friend with contacts at the Polish Embassy. When the Russian and Polish Embassies got clearance to evacuate all their nationals from Kuwait in two bus convoys, our friend was able to arrange places for us, posing as Polish citizens, on one of the convoys. So at the end of August we got on one of the buses, Iraqi buses with Iraqi guards, and drove to Baghdad, and then to Amman in Jordan. From there we flew to Frankfurt and then to London. I could write a book on that journey alone. I made contact with Sabah, who was in Beirut, and Salem, who was in Spain, and it was decided that I would go to Cyprus to set up the SSH office there. The point was threefold: to try and make contact with SSH staff, many of whom had dispersed all over the world, and let them know what was happening; to promote ourselves for work in other parts of the world; and finally to lobby US agencies to make sure there was a role for Kuwaiti consultancies in the eventual reconstruction. The office was modest. An apartment in Limassol was made available to us by a friend from a Cypriot firm we’d done business with. I lived there with a fax machine and a telephone. Cyprus was dead. The two army bases were within range of Saddam’s Scud missiles and no international airlines would fly in. The hotels closed. To keep my sanity I created a rigid timetable. Get up at seven o’clock. Breakfast seven to eight. Buy the newspaper. Read the newspaper. Between nine and twelve go through faxes, write replies. It was all to give myself the impression that I was doing something. I bought a map of Cyprus and put it on my wall and on weekends I would explore. I drove every kilometre of road in southern Cyprus. I had to stay active. I went once to Egypt to discuss the possibility of a job there. I made a trip to Washington and New York to keep tabs on what would happen in Kuwait post-liberation. It was slow work tracking down SSH people. This was before Facebook, of course, and I had to ration telephone use because it was expensive. The only money we had came from the rent on St. George’s Hall, formerly the SSC office in Bristol. I would find one person and ask if they knew where others were. The network extended very gradually. I was there from mid-September to March and much of the time I felt useless.

Sabah was on the last commercial flight into Kuwait International Airport during the night of the Iraqi invasion (Kuwait Oil Company)

PICKING UP THE PIECES Sabah, Salem and Charles lose no time in returning but they find a dire situation – staff gone, their offices wrecked and Americans monopolising the work

y 27 February 1991 the Iraqis had been pounded out of Kuwait by Operation Desert Storm, leaving behind around 700 burning oil wells, around 80 more flowing out of control, and much other destruction besides. The war caused damage to infrastructure and buildings. Shortages of food and medicine were critical. Power, water and oil production had been crippled. Sabah, Salem and Charles lost no time getting back even though Kuwait was still under martial law. “The invasion was the saddest day of my life, liberation the happiest,” says Salem, who had been at his residence in Spain when the invasion occurred. There he had become a kind of official spokesperson on the Kuwaiti situation in the Spanish media. Within days of the Iraqi departure he contacted the Kuwaiti embassy and obtained permission to fly himself and ten Spanish journalists back to Kuwait at his own expense. Charles, eager to get off Cyprus, had flown to Cairo where he caught a military flight to Kuwait. He had been invited by Kuwaiti defence minister Sheikh Salem al-Sabah, who wanted a structural assessment of his palace, which had been burned and bombed by the Iraqis. Getting off the plane he hardly recognised the country he had fled six months before. “It was a strange, eerie place,” he says. “First of all you had the fires. The sky was constantly grey and when the wind stopped, the smoke would settle and it would be midnight, no matter what time of day it was. You’d get covered in droplets of oil and gas and you couldn’t go outside without a face mask. There was no traffic at all. There was very little petrol and the Iraqis had ransacked whatever cars they could. The streets were desolate. There was widespread damage caused by tanks and tank transporters. When it rained, it was black rain, so all the buildings were stained black. There was dead vegetation and rubbish strewn everywhere.” He went to the office in Qortoba and found it ransacked, its glass façade smashed, paper strewn everywhere, computers stolen, SSH’s fleet of vehicles, even a Caterpillar generator, gone. Charles decided to stay. He made calls and people began turning up to help set things in order. “We came in the morning wearing white dishdashas. We cleaned as much as possible. And at the end of the day, the dishdashas were black from the dirt, smoke and fumes,” says Jassim Mayahi, who was among the first to return to Kuwait after the liberation. In many ways it was worse than starting from scratch. Sabah, Salem and Charles agreed that their first priority would be to track down all former SSH staff to find out who was prepared to return and who, if not, needed the backpay they were owed plus the severance package they were entitled to. Unlike most other companies at the time SSH did not excuse itself, by claiming insolvency, 94

SSH Qortoba offices ransacked in 1990

from its obligation to the people who had made the company great. “We tracked down everyone over a period of time,” Jassim says. “We used what we could to find them. It was a tediously long effort. But as soon as the company was financially able, money was wired in batches.” There was also a pressing need to find fee-paying work. Defence minister Sheikh Salem al-Sabah retained SSH to rehabilitate his palace, which, Charles had concluded, was sound. But that would not keep them going for long. The opportunities were scarce, in spite of the fact that much of the country needed to be rebuilt. The Americans had moved in and were getting all the major work, the Kuwaiti government no doubt feeling a keen obligation to them for having given them back their country. American agencies such as the US Army Corps of Engineers didn’t want anything to do with local firms. But Sabah, Salem and Charles persevered. They started with two symbolically important but, revenuewise, minor rehabilitation projects: the airport VIP terminal, and the National Assembly building. There would be many of these. It became routine. We would go in, do a damage survey, contract out the repair work and supervise the contractors. When they were awarded the contract to rehabilitate Bayan Palace in May, Sabah called me. I had gone back to Australia. I found a job right away, as a project manager for GEC Alsthom, a large multinational conglomerate. What Sabah had to say I didn’t want to hear. “We have signed a contract to rehabilitate Bayan Palace. You are to be project manager.” I took the call while watching television news footage of the Kuwait oil fields still burning. Sabah continued: “Have faith that Kuwait will come back to its glory, and SSH will too. You need to be here in two weeks.”

1990s: Reconstruction and hope 97

WILDERNESS YEARS A cynical and pessimistic frame of mind permeates a traumatised society, and the appetite to build and invest has disappeared

may not have wanted to hear Sabah’s message, but his vision has always been hard to resist. Like many others in 1991 whom Sabah, Salem or Charles managed to reach, I took the risk and went back. Kuwait was much reduced. The government had spent some US$20bn funding the war and there would be no oil revenue until the fires were doused and the infrastructure rebuilt. Kuwait University, which had served as barracks for Iraqi soldiers, had been devastated in the liberation. Resident nationalities seen as collaborators were expelled. Many of them had performed high-level administrative roles in government and their departure led to dysfunction and the rapid spread of bureaucracy. A pessimistic and cynical frame of mind permeated, the causes of which were understandable. The country had been severely traumatised. Many households had not just property and businesses destroyed and looted, but family members killed, captured and tortured. The lesson from this trauma for many was this: what you had could be snatched from you at any moment. The fact that Saddam was still in power across the border, more desperate and isolated than ever, didn’t help. An attitude of short-termism replaced the earlier drive to build and invest. Wealth transferred outside Kuwait. It was an especially difficult milieu for Sabah, Salem and Charles, who would not relax their ethical stance. This characterised much of the early 90s, which are remembered as the wilderness years for SSH. “We staggered on for two or three years, picking up small bits of work but really it didn’t sustain us much at all,” says Charles. “We spent all our time trying to get working on projects we’d been involved with preinvasion. The Oil Sector Complex in Shuwaikh, for example. We’d signed the contract in July 1990, just before the invasion, but we didn’t get that going again until 1995.” From the heyday pre-invasion, staff numbers were down to 20 or 30 people. The nation took time to heal. The disruption triggered the need to review Kuwait’s master plan. In association with the international consulting firm WS Atkins, SSH was appointed to review and prepare a new plan that took into consideration needs for the future. “We used the new geographic information system (GIS), which helped in our data analysis and projections,” says Emad alJaouni. GIS merges cartography, statistical analysis and data-mining. The study, led by Derrick Hartley, project director at SSH, was of a new calibre. “Our study gave a clear picture of Kuwait as it was then and a projection 20 years into the future,” says John Abi-Hanna. What changed most were the building regulations and the density of land use. The plan envisaged the 20-year period from 1995 to 2015. The growth rate of Kuwaitis in proportion to expatriates was a major concern, the main challenge being balance and ensuring Kuwaitis 98

Regrouping in the 1990s. From left: Charles Bosel, Sabah Abi-Hanna, Michael Cassidy, George Abi-Hanna, Ali al-Abdullah

participated in employment at all levels. In the mid-1970s the government had encouraged a high birth rate through a range of policies, but the split of 39 per cent Kuwaiti to 61 per cent expatriates looked set to remain throughout the 20year span. The next step was to work out where this influx of new people would live, how they would get around and what their needs would be for education, health and leisure. This period saw an important addition to the partnership. A man of science and a published poet, Ali al-Abdullah had been in charge of roads for the Ministry of Public Works. A prominent Kuwaiti in exile during the occupation, he had been called upon to set up a task force in Washington, D.C. to plan the reconstruction of Kuwait post-liberation. “It was the hardest job I ever had,” he says. “We had no papers, no maps. The worst part was not knowing what was happening in Kuwait and not being able to think of the future.” In 1993 he decided to resign from the ministry because he felt there was a fundamental change of vision within the roads department. “When I started in the ministry we designed and prepared documents. We were in charge, responsible. In 1993, no one really designed, not even a pumping station. It had a different flavour altogether.” Salem heard of his resignation and went to him with a proposal for a partnership at SSH. “I had dealt with SSH as their client, and I knew exactly who they were and what kind of work they produced. I had very high esteem for their record,” adds al-Abdullah. He spent more than ten years with SSH and describes those years as the best of his career.

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His vision has always been hard to resist. I took the risk and went back. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; George Abi-Hanna

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CONFIDENCE RETURNS Re-energised by the beautiful Bayan Palace mosque, the firm looks cautiously to the future

lowly, things began to improve. New building regulations were voted in allowing taller structures, which would lead to a radical change in Kuwait’s skyline. It also boosted land profitability and investment revenue. The oil fields are so extensive in Kuwait that in some communities the only direction to grow is straight up. Meanwhile, the Conference Centre at Bayan Palace was being rehabilitated and Phase 2, including a guest palace, banqueting hall and a mosque had all come back on stream, giving SSH a much-needed source of work. “The new mosque was a major project,” says Serge Khalaf, architect in charge. “It had to house around 800 patrons and it had to be done in a record time of five months.” The mosque alone required 600 workers on site. The design was a Moroccan style with a traditional zillij mosaic decorating the mosque’s wall and dome. Master architect Hussein al-Hreichi, from Morocco, supervised the work. “It was fascinating to learn and see how this was executed,” Serge remembers. Much of the dome had to be built by hand, as were the carved and painted wood for the doors and partitions. The geometric patterns of the zillij, each with a specific name, were determined on the basis of the scale and resolution on a repetitive grid with chipped coloured tiles. This was the traditional craftsman’s equivalent of today’s dots-per-inch. The smaller the tiles, the higher the resolution, and the higher the price. The dome’s external skin was covered with a 24-carat gold mosaic, produced in Italy using a special technique in which gold leaves are trapped between two sheets of glass, heated, and then broken to the size required. The marble slabs used for the ceiling and floors were sourced and checked for colour and purity in the mill in Italy before shipping. “Sabah Abi-Hanna’s strength was in mentoring and coaching a team through a design and concept,” says Serge. “He could make each of us achieve to the best of our capabilities. And he would not accept anything below average. It had to be the best possible product with the best service.” The National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) had been a client of SSH since the 1960s. For the NBK headquarters, SSH had worked with the Bechtel Corporation and architect Hugh Stubbins. Now that the height restrictions for buildings downtown had been lifted, NBK, which needed more floor space, decided to expand vertically. Cutting his teeth on the NBK project of 1993 was Omran Hayat, who would go on to play a central role in the company. “Central role” is an understatement: he is now, in fact, the majority shareholder of SSH. Back then he was an ambitious young Kuwaiti of a new generation. He’d gotten his bachelor of science in architectural engineering at the University of Miami, and a master’s in project management and finance from Boston’s Northeastern University. He then worked at the Kuwait Investment Office (KIO) in London, 102

SSH team lunch

Serge Khalaf, architect in charge of the Bayan Palace mosque, a major project completed in five months

part of the Kuwait Investment Authority. As assistant to the head of real estate, he got a first-hand glimpse of the titans at play in the world of high-end property investment. “KIO was an elite and prestigious outfit,” Omran recalls. “It had holdings in the top assets and companies of the world. The saying went that when KIO picked up the phone, Merrill Lynch started shaking. However, I was not actually doing much. It was a bit dull. After two years I was keen to get a technical grounding and practise my skills in engineering.” He was only vaguely aware of SSH as one of the main Kuwaiti architecture, engineering and planning offices, but he knew Ali al-Abdullah, who encouraged him to submit a CV. “I came in and spoke my mind,” he says. “I had drive and energy but it was no problem being a new guy. All of them were very open. I was surprised they gave me the chance to speak up. I was pushed right out to site, to shadow Hanan al-Sayed, time and cost engineer on the NBK project. The project assistant and the resident engineer were these amazing senior guys. I learned loads.” Later he was to take over as time and cost engineer. “I said to Charles, I don’t know what to do. ‘Don’t you have a head?’ he said. ‘Go do it!’ That was an eye opener.” Around this time the directors diverted some of their focus away from working in the business and started working on it. It was time to set up a governance structure that could steer the company into the next growth phase, which they could see coming. Also, they were not getting any younger. So they made Omran and me ‘Associates’, a new position with heightened responsibility and a stepping stone to becoming directors. The following year we were made nonequity directors. The shift in governance in just a few years from three managing principals, Sabah, Salem and Charles, to a board of six directors – those three plus Ali al-Abdullah, Omran and me – was subtle but profound. It took a while for the metabolism of the company to reflect the shift. I’d started an MBA from Australia’s Deakin University at this time as well, distance learning, for leaders in engineering and technology businesses. In 1994 we saw a glimmer of returning confidence when the Touristic Enterprises Company (TEC) decided it was time to rehabilitate its pioneering leisure and fantasy park, Entertainment City, which opened in 1984 and had been damaged in the invasion. TEC chose us to take on the role of client representative to manage the rehabilitation of the park. It had rides and attractions with fun themes from around the world, from cowboys and Sinbad the Sailor to Outer Space. We forged good relations with TEC, who later gave SSH another leisure project, Shaab Park.

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RENAISSANCE The revival of big, pre-invasion projects sparks a burst of technical innovation

In 1995 Roger Baroudi joins SSH to develop the firm’s mechanical engineering capabilities

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t was heartening, starting in 1995, to get moving on some more good, iconic structures. That year we started working on the new headquarters complex for the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC), for which we, with Arthur Erickson, had submitted the design back in 1989. It threw up some great technical challenges. “The location was a difficult one,” recalls Ali al-Abdullah, who directed the project with Charles Bosel. “The site was a former chlorine and sodium chloride factory. Environmental tests showed that mercury had contaminated the seabed.” We had to do numerous tests and studies before submitting the whole package to the environment agency. “We designed a system to control the pollution with monitoring points at various distances in the sea, and we established criteria for the environmental impact studies,” adds Ali. After this work, the contaminated waterfront site was transformed into a landmark. The complex occasioned another significant innovation: there was some uncertainty over how the concave façade glazing would behave in the strong sea breezes. High winds could have created a vacuum which might induce a smash, so we had the glass structure tested in university laboratories in the United Kingdom to ensure the proper angle, curve, weight and density. The KPC building was also a chance to show off another key addition to the SSH team. “Engineers come in two types: the rigid ones and the ones who think outside the box.” So says Roger Baroudi, a mechanical engineer with a masters in environmental design from the University of London. Mechanical engineering (ME) in our context concerns the respiratory systems of a building, how it regulates its temperature and circulation of air and water. With his background in environmental design, Roger had an important edge. I interviewed him in 1995 and was keen to get him on board. He’d been a consultant in London and was looking for a stepping stone into the region. He became head of our ME department and the stepping stone proved a bit more permanent. Roger’s passion has always been that great design requires a blend of good architecture and sound engineering – a tricky mix to achieve, especially when egos get in the way. When he arrived Roger was less than impressed with our ME department. “It was in an embryonic state,” he says. “We had barely five people. The software was rudimentary, mostly for calculation and for selecting plant and equipment. They had CAD but there were no standards across the company. Design had to be improved. What we did met clients’ requirements but it was heavy. It lacked finesse. There was plenty of room for streamlining.” The KPC complex had to be energy efficient because, as an energy company, KPC had to show leadership. “We proposed a system for using seawater for cooling,” Roger says. “The water would cool the chillers and then be recycled and used in a reflecting pool. It was unique but it hadn’t been done in Kuwait

The SSH-designed new headquarters complex for the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation broke new ground in energy efficiency

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before, so it was never adopted. Still, we were thinking outside the box, mixing innovation with feasibility. That’s what helped us build a reputation for novel ideas.” Roger began a programme of gradual transformation of the ME department. I still find it stirring when he describes how: “We began to standardise how we designed, how we drafted. We upgraded our software. We grew the department carefully, with training and mentoring with senior engineers, not just in methods and procedures but in team spirit. We deliberately fostered a proactive, dynamic, helpful environment. We worked on powerful communication. We even worked on our writing and editing so that proposals were of a higher quality.” Al-Fanar Mall in Salmiyah was another iconic structure. Architect Dino Georgiou worked with SSH on the project and made the renderings freehand. The suspended skylight system flooded all four floors with light, especially the central atrium with its fountains and cafe. A major project during this time was the new headquarters of the Public Institution for Social Security (PIFSS), which we worked on with the Canadian architectural firm WZMH. PIFSS was important because social welfare has long been the key plank of the government’s wealth redistribution strategy. The site chosen was on a prominent intersection on the edge of Kuwait City. Retirees are especially honoured as having paid their dues to Kuwaiti society, which led to an uncommon focus on the parking lot. Emad al-Jaouni recalls: “It started out as a regular parking lot but then there was a great effort to make sure that retirees enjoyed comfort and sensed recognition and appreciation from the parking area and the underground link tunnel.” Roger notched up a success with PIFSS: “The ME was a breakthrough,” he says. “We had to provide a system that was energy efficient and also flexible to allow partitions to be moved. We located plant rooms within the floors so maintenance was easy and minimised disruption. Great design is deceptive: achieving simplicity in the outcome requires long, complex work. All this was new for Kuwait and boosted our reputation.”

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The new Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) Oil Sector Complex at night

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Achieving simplicity in the outcome requires long, complex work. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Roger Baroudi

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View from the new KPC Oil Sector Complex car park

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TRIUMPH AND CRISIS The fourth decade ends with a triumph – the Marina World waterfront development – but also a nightmare, as cracks appear in the Bayan Guest Palace

Marina Hotel

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n 1997 we won the contract to master plan, design and supervise the hugely ambitious Marina World waterfront development in Salmiya. It remains one of our greatest projects and is today a hugely popular destination featuring a shopping centre, marina, hotel and resort, seafront public park and cafes and restaurants. Visitors to Kuwait often remark how the place is crowded well into the small hours with families and people of all ages playing, picnicking, dining, strolling, conversing and just chilling out. We fought hard to win that job. It was a build-operate-transfer (BOT) project with Kuwait Municipality as the client. The United Real Estate Company (URC) was invited with other major developers to submit proposals. URC picked us to help develop its bid. Ali al-Abdullah remembers it well: “The study involved many disciplines, including market research and financial viability. SSH was the only local firm commissioned by URC to compete against four famous international names. The person responsible for our bid, and the drive behind it, was Stuart Bosel, Charles’ son. Charles himself and I were heavily involved as well. Our original agreement included the supervision of the project if it was awarded to URC. During this period Mr. Bader al-Bader was in charge on the URC side.” The day we learned we’d won was a great one. Now we had to deliver, and here we came face to face with none other than Omran Hayat, who, having gained the technical grounding he sought, had left us in 1995 to join Kuwaiti developer, the National Real Estate Company (NREC). He would go on to become managing director of the United Real Estate Company (URC). “When SSH won the competition I ironed out the contract agreement,” Omran says. “With me being on the client side, I came in saying, ‘Right! Time to live up to your standards!’ And they did, absolutely, but we fought a lot, too.” URC wanted the shopping mall to be finished first so it could generate income for building the marina, which included a curved promenade with restaurants and cafes. A hotel at the end of the reclaimed peninsula was the final addition. A covered pedestrian bridge over the busy Arabian Gulf Road connects the mall with the marina. A year after, cracks appeared in the concrete beams bearing the dome of the Guest Palace of the Bayan Conference Centre. It soon became evident that this could be a major problem – a nightmare for us as designers and supervisors. Because it was a government project, under the Ministry of Public Works, it “went legal” very quickly. Before we had the chance to get a technical report on the problem they had put the project on hold, shut the site down, and raised a legal case for damages. The government commissioned a couple of studies that recommended demolishing the whole structure and rebuilding it. This was seen

Master plan for the ambitious Marina World waterfront development. Contract won in 1997

as the easiest option so the bureaucratic momentum started rumbling in that direction. Because there were contractors whose work had to be suspended our potential liability was escalating very quickly. It was, without doubt, a companythreatening situation. Salem and Sabah sought, and were granted, an audience with Crown Prince Sheikh Saad. “We insisted that demolishing the building was a drastic and unnecessary course of action,” recalls Sabah. “We held up our hands and said that if there had been a mistake we will fix it and pay for it. But we needed the chance to study the problem and to explore a suitable correction.” Sabah and Salem reasoned that this would be far better than letting the issue drag on in the courts, where SSH would be obliged to defend itself vigorously. The Crown Prince said: “Go ahead, make your proposal, but bring in an international expert to verify it.” Sheikh Saad instructed the Ministry of Public Works to give us access to the site and, if it was backed by the international consultant, to allow the proposed remedial work. We brought in the worldrenowned consultants Ove Arup to do the study. It found that there was a construction deficiency and a design mistake, and the two compounded to cause the problem. Just a few elements needed to be rectified or removed. We removed the dome and stiffened some other elements and the project was put back on track in 2001. The repair cost was nominal and was covered by our insurers. It was a very tough period for me because I managed the process. It taught me some lessons, not least how valuable a good reputation is, for if the Ministry had not trusted us, we would never have been allowed back in to investigate and fix the problem. It was a huge relief when it was over. If our plan had failed it’s hard to see how SSH could have carried on. A great weight was lifted from our shoulders, but then another one descended. That year, 2001, Sabah, Salem and Charles announced that they wanted to retire. 111

Marina mall, the Crescent connected to the main building by the pedestrian bridge, with a view on the harbor, sand beaches and extention

A pedestrian bridge over the busy Arabian Gulf Street leads from Marina Mall to the shops, restaurants and sandy beaches of the popular waterfront development

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2000s: Maturity and experience 115

A NEW OWNER IS FOUND The principals offer their creation to a trusted former director, who is nervous at first

“W

e have grown old, they told us. It is time for new blood.” So recalls Jassim Mayahi of a meeting called by the principals to inform staff of their decision. It had in fact been brewing for some time. In the slow years after the invasion Sabah, Salem, Charles and Ali had all begun developing other business and personal interests. The cynicism and pessimism prevalent in the 1990s took its toll, sapping the vigour and enthusiasm that drove them in the previous decades. Also, the company itself had begun preparing for its next phase of development. I started analysing our company structure during my MBA course, which was designed specifically for business leaders in technology and engineering firms. It was clear that SSH had evolved into the classic studio model in which each of the three main service offerings was led by a strong, charismatic founder – Sabah for architecture and buildings, Salem for civil engineering and Charles for planning. It worked and we were familiar with it but it risked the inefficient use of the skills we had in the company. We needed to be far more integrated just to release the skills and potentials we had. Where I felt we needed to get to was called a “balanced matrix” by the textbooks. This organised the firm in temporary project teams assembled from the various permanent discipline departments. Most of the leadership could see the sense of this approach. We all witnessed it at work in the big-name international consultancies we rubbed shoulders with. However, there was a certain amount of cultural resistance, if only because it was new. It took pretty much the entire latter half of the 1990s for this organisational change to bed in. The news that the founders wanted to retire, however, was still difficult. It signalled the end of an era and the move into uncharted waters. However, true to form, they had a cunning plan. “I received a call from Sabah,” recalls Omran Hayat, at the time managing director of the United Real Estate Company. “They wanted to see me. All of them. They came in, sat down and said they wanted me to take over SSH.” They had thought long and hard about their situation. They needed a Kuwaiti buyer, but it was never a question of just going to the market and selling to the highest bidder. It may not have made strict business sense, but their goal was to bequeath to the right person a slice of history and a stake in the future. “Omran was the right person,” Sabah says. “He was young and ambitious, well-travelled and with a broad perspective. And we knew him. He had worked for us and then we had worked for him. He respected all that we were about. We felt strongly that SSH’s future lay with him. In effect we were giving him SSH, not selling the practice.”

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SSH Subhan office, 2005

Omran was nervous at first. “Architects and engineers have big egos. Because of this, selling a practice is difficult. ‘Why me?’ I asked. They said SSH’s future lies in me. Eventually throughout the discussions it dawned on me that it was not the financial return they were most concerned with: they wanted to secure a bright future for their creation. The idea began to inspire me. We worked together on a purchase sale agreement and they did not negotiate for a better price.” “I decided to bring in another partner,” Omran continues. “We had to have a Kuwaiti leading on the board and I could not be involved in the daily operation of the business. I needed someone talented in networking and getting new business.” That person was Sadoon al-Essa, now executive partner at SSH. Sadoon had worked on the special projects administration at the Ministry of Public Works on the Amiri Diwan (Sief Palace) project, and had held management positions in major real estate companies. He was ideally placed to oversee our strategic and business development. 117

SSH-designed VIP terminal at Kuwait International Airport

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WEATHERING THE STORM SSH becomes the first major Kuwaiti consultancy to navigate safely to secondgeneration ownership – just in time for the financial crisis

he sale took some time to go through. There was a comprehensive due diligence process to undertake, plus we had to ensure our liabilities with the Guest Palace court case issue were defined and dealt with. As the new managing director during this period I had many sleepless nights. Sabah, Salem, Charles and Ali were able to retire in 2003. Although they were on hand to help in whatever way we needed, generously sharing their knowledge, wisdom and experience, each moved on with the next phase of their lives, Sabah in Lebanon, Salem splitting his time between Kuwait and Malaga, Spain, Charles retiring, at last, to his native Australia, and Ali here in Kuwait. The challenge didn’t end after the ink dried on the sale agreement, however. The transition from first- to second-generation ownership is a fraught process. It took the market time to understand and accept that SSH was no longer Salem al-Marzouk and Sabah Abi-Hanna, as the practice was known from the 1970s. Salem and Sabah had long since stopped leading every single project personally, but clients were still surprised to hear that they’d gone. The principals had created a first-class brand and it may sound odd to say it but that made our job harder. We carried on, however, focussing all our efforts on winning projects and doing an excellent job on them. At the same time we put a lot of energy and management resources into modernising our corporate governance. We set up an audit committee and created various checks and balances to identify risk and manage it in a way that is transparent to the ownership so that the company could grow with some peace of mind. There is risk in any sector and in any region, but history shows just how risky this region is. Plus, the business has changed from the days when a handshake sufficed to close a deal. Clients are more sophisticated, with in-house project management teams. Contracts are more complex and allocate more risk to the service provider. Their payment terms are more onerous. Overall, our financial risks are higher than they were. Instituting an international standard of governance was a necessary part of our move into second-generation ownership. With family firms there is a tendency to feel that you don’t need to do all this because you’re all in it together, but these days all it takes is one mishap, one big, bad project, and you stare bankruptcy in the face. The process wasn’t easy. In some ways we had to go into a cocoon while we made the necessary changes. But we came out stronger, and we were the first major Kuwaiti consultancy to make the transition. We emerged from our chrysalis into a decade that would turn out to be every bit as challenging as the post-occupation 1990s. The market’s attention was diverted in 2003 as 100,000 American troops assembled in Kuwait for the 120

Canadian Consortium Architects, in association with SSH, were awarded the project to develop the master plan for the ambitious Kuwait University New Campus in Shadadiyah

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assault on Saddam. It was a relief to see the vicious aggressor finally deposed but Iraq’s descent into chaos and insurgency sapped private sector confidence. In 2006 many major projects procured under the much-favoured build-operatetransfer (BOT) model were suspended by the government amid concerns over the transparency of the process. Those projects remained on hold while the government put new procurement and funding regulations in place. Our work flow slowed considerably in this period, but when the global financial crisis spread to the Gulf shores in 2008, it stopped altogether. The government acted forcefully to prevent the collapse of banks but construction all but ceased as property values plummeted and lending to the private sector dried up. Investment companies were particularly hard hit: five of Kuwait’s biggest defaulted on loans totalling around US$10bn. Real estate companies had borrowed extensively to develop office buildings and mixed use projects and many of these were in progress when the crisis hit. With buildings half vacant and rents on the decline, developers went into hibernation. The ambitious projects we designed but which were abandoned by clients in this period makes for a bittersweet roll-call. The Fintas Commercial Centre was one of these. With its harsh climate, Kuwait took to the shopping mall like the proverbial duck to water. It made sense here because it updated the traditional covered souk by providing a flexible, cool and luxurious space in which to socialise and shop. But it bothered us that mall design to date had unthinkingly adopted the visual language of the West, so that once inside a mall you could be in Kuwait, Kuala Lumpur or Kansas City. The Fintas Commercial Centre, a BOT project commissioned by the Kuwait Municipality in 2003, set out to re-think the mall for Kuwait by challenging this and creating a shopping experience that resonated with Kuwaitis here, today. We worked with celebrated young Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury on this design but sadly the project was abandoned. Another was the Abdallah al-Ahmad Cultural and Entertainment Centre, an ambitious BOT complex comprising a concert hall, cinemas, shops, restaurants, recreational facilities, a business centre and a technology school. We won the international design competition in association with the renowned Ateliers Jean Nouvel but, again, the job was suspended. This was discouraging, but when Kuwait did forge ahead with its development ambitions we were ready. One of the most exciting examples of this is a brand new campus for Kuwait University planned in Shadadiyah, scheduled to open in 2014. Canadian Consortium Architects in association with SSH were awarded the project to develop the master plan. The university has a proud history in modern Kuwait. It started in 1965 as a teacher training college, added a law department in 1967, and has continued to expand ever since. In 2004, Kuwait University identified the need for a campus spread over 535 hectares with separate men’s and women’s campuses and a new medical faculty. It will accommodate 30,000 students and have a teaching staff of 2,800, with 7,700 support staff. Starting in 2004 this comprehensive plan absorbed a professional team of 72 people from 16 different disciplines for over a year. SSH also won the contract for infrastructure and landscaping design at the campus, incorporating everything from roads and walkways to telecommunications and water treatment. In spite of the economic challenges of the Noughties we never stopped innovating to create value for clients. The next project, the last we’ll describe in this book, is just one example of what can happen when you manage to create a culture where great ideas emerge from anywhere in the team.

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The new Public Institution for Social Security (PIFSS) headquarters saw a breakthrough in building services design

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The business has changed from the days when a handshake sufficed to close a deal. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; George Abi-Hanna

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Interior, executive floors, Public Institution for Social Security (PIFSS) new headquarters

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In 2004 SSH, in association with Whitby Bird & Partners, designed the new BMW and Land Rover showroom, bringing an airy, avant-garde touch to the industrial zone of Kuwait

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BMW interior and design rendering

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BMW and Land Rover showroom interior

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KUWAIT’S SMARTEST BUILDING New talent allows SSH to think outside the box

With Ali Daher’s help, SSH could make ICT part of its service offering to clients

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hen Ali Daher joined us in 2007, it was as IT manager. His job was to improve the company’s internal ICT systems. But Ali was not just your basic IT guy. He’d been an ICT infrastructure solutions architect for companies such as IBM, Inchcape and EDS, an entrepreneur, and also founder of an Internet service provision company in Australia. He wanted to do more than just set up and maintain internal systems. “Before I joined, our clients would contract third party ICT consultants for the facilities we designed,” Ali recalls. “I started working on how we could turn ICT into one of the services we offered, into a profit centre of its own.” So Ali rewrote his own job description: he became Chief Information Officer, and started active ICT consultancy. Now imagine a building that lets you turn your air conditioning off as you’re driving to the airport, that recognises you in the evening and adjusts the lights and temperature automatically according to your preferences. Imagine being able to relax while, through one widescreen AV display, you book a holiday, watch the news, write an email, check who’s at the door, answer the telephone, order a curry and turn off the lights in the kids’ bedroom. Imagine also that commercial tenants of this building can choose from an extensive menu of plug-and-play services including security, telephony, high-speed Internet, data storage, video conferencing, enterprise software applications – anything requiring voice, data and video – all without having to call in a singe third-party provider. This is not a scenario of the future, but a description of what life will be like for residents and commercial tenants of the mixed-use, 60-storey United Tower, which we are just finishing as we write this. It is Kuwait’s smartest building. What makes it so smart is that all the data systems that are usually separate in a modern building – telephony, network, security, entertainment, broadband, HVAC, lighting and other building systems – are unified in a fully converged fiber-optic network running over Internet Protocol (IP), the same “highway” the Internet uses. On a practical level it meant for United Tower that seven separate cabling systems could be replaced by one and 17 subsystems could be fully integrated, allowing for efficient and central control of the tower’s operational management. That’s pretty smart, but even smarter is the fact that the client, the United Real Estate Company, while providing tenants with the highest available standard of living and convenience, can also develop revenue streams on top of rents by offering this suite of on-demand services. Residential and commercial tenants specify their own package and URC configures it and collects the fee, not third-party suppliers. As Ali says: “Quite often you have buildings with great technology, but the leap for us was employing the technology so the client can use it as an additional revenue

At United Tower, all data systems – telephony, network, security, entertainment, broadband and more – are unified in a fully converged fibre-optic network

stream. That is something people aren’t generally thinking about yet.” I make it sound easy but of course, as Ali will attest, it wasn’t all plain sailing. The intention to make United Tower “smart” emerged late, after construction had already started in 2006. Says Ali: “Because it was late in the process we had to move quickly, coordinate with other disciplines and revise some designs. We had to talk to the electrical and mechanical contractors, find out what they were doing and negotiate what they would be responsible for. We managed to pull some elements out of the other contracts and formulate a new bid pack specifically for the ICT, security and systems integration.” There was also some resistance among suppliers of the environmental and home automation kit. Ali recalls: “Vendors had to integrate with the building-wide infrastructure already in place, but some had difficulty with that because it meant they’d have to change their systems. We insisted, saying that they needed to make sure that their systems worked with ours or we weren’t interested. The important ones got on board and made the effort. In one instance we worked with a vendor for about a month helping them develop the right protocols. Real innovation requires a fundamental shift in mindset.” United Tower is a significant evolution in what a building can do, which we believe will bring real benefits for its owners and users. It’s also a significant evolution for us, both in the way we think about the service we offer clients and how we deliver it. This sounds grand but as the systems in United Tower were being finished and tested I have to confess to a few collective forehead-smacking moments as we asked ourselves: Why hadn’t we done this before? After all, the technology has been around for some time. Innovation is what we’ve been doing for 50 years in one way or another but, as we enter our sixth decade, the need to do it better and faster will get more acute. 131

We had to move quickly, coordinate with other disciplines and revise some designs. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ali Daher

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SSH-designed United Tower allows the owner to tap into new, data-driven revenue streams

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United Tower

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The SSH-designed Universal Printing Press was shortlisted for the World Architecture Festival awards in 2011

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TAKING STOCK It has been an incredible journey, but there is no room for complacency

o here we are. We started with Sabah stepping off the plane on that summer night back in 1958. It has been an incredible journey. The cast of characters has grown from one to hundreds. The transformation of the country is so complete that in the Central Business District, hardly a trace of Old Kuwait remains amid the gleaming towers of glass and steel. We’ve come a long way together, the country and the firm, and while we can be proud many challenges remain. In February 2010 the government announced an astonishing KD35-billion (US$104-billion), four-year development plan designed to boost investment in health, education, and infrastructure and kickstart the sluggish private sector. The first year of the plan alone envisaged up to 900 projects worth around KD5 billion. The overall plan even includes a railway. It also envisages significant participation of the private sector through new public shareholding companies. The underlying aims of the “DP” are sound. Oil is a finite resource and to safeguard future generations Kuwait needs to shift from the classic petrowelfare-state model, with the vast majority of working Kuwaitis on an everexpanding state payroll, to a diverse, growing and sustainable economy. It is a hugely ambitious plan but, as we write, two years after it was announced, red tape and political gridlock have meant that only a small percentage of the projects have begun. Having a plan and the money to pay for it is, for Kuwait, the easy part. What it needs now is the political will to see it through, followed quickly by a robust and transparent regulatory framework and streamlined procurement procedures. And what about us? As we enter our next 50 years, we are big enough to handle any sort of project but not so big that management doesn’t know what’s going on in the trenches. This means we can make decisions fast and change things that aren’t working. We have added “International” to our name, reflecting our expanding regional presence with offices in Oman and the UAE. We’ve got a diverse top tier of leadership, Kuwaiti, Asian, Western, Arab, young and not so young, which means we can relate comfortably with clients from around the world. We’ve gone through the tricky transition to second-generation ownership and management with our credibility and brand as intact and fresh as ever. But in this business there is nothing guaranteed about your place in the league table. You’re only as good as the talent you retain, for instance, and while we’ve been blessed with great people catching the SSH vision and making long-term, even lifetime, commitments to us, professionals targeting the Gulf region are usually in the market for short-term, high-return contracts. So, to grow and safeguard our unique culture we are setting up an employee ownership model whereby committed staff can look forward to a greater personal stake in the 138

Royal Opera House Cultural Souk, Muscat, Oman

company. There are technical challenges as well. The way of the future is BIM (building information modelling). BIM stands to revolutionise the way buildings are designed and put together, but it’s more than just whizzy new software. On top of three- and four-dimensional design tools it incorporates new protocols for sharing project information that challenge the traditional business model of the construction supply chain. Its adoption will be a learning process across the board. Finally, putting development on a sustainable path will be critical. We need to help clients understand that energy and water are our two most precious natural resources, and we need to get better at designing a new built environment that recognises this. Still, we can be proud. There is, however, a certain sense of dissatisfaction at not having been able fully to capture it in these pages. I discussed this with Sabah and, for once, he let me off the hook: “Memories,” he says, “are not really about dates, or the buildings and highways built in this or that year, or the money earned, or the dramatic events or the staff numbers at particular times. You can focus on these data but what you are searching for slips through your fingers. The hardest thing to recapture when you look back on a life is intangible. It’s the energies and influences, the sparks of understanding and inspiration between people. It’s not so much the things you’ve done as what preceded them: the ideas, the excitement, the shared sense of what is possible.”

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The next

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New opportunities, new challenges By Sadoon al-Essa

he team effort of capturing the milestones of the last five decades has kindled a profound sense of excitement among us. We salute Sabah, Salem and Charles for the strong foundations they laid, and the role they played in the development of architecture, engineering and planning in Kuwait makes us grateful and proud. SSH was not so much bought as a design practice as inherited, as was evident during the transition phase which saw the founder-partners extend their professional support and mentoring, which still continues today. This transition phase saw SSH reflect on its past and gear up to compete in a new globalised environment. During the last eight years SSH has transformed itself from a studio culture to a corporation able to support the creativity and expertise of its people with underlying organisational systems based on professional best practice. We have broadened our focus from a local to a regional perspective. We have embraced technological advances in design and process re-engineering, and have adopted best practices in corporate governance, empowering staff participation through our partnership programme and progressively aiming to develop a unique firm culture. But life is about evolution and change, so what about the next fifty years? What will be the shape, the challenges, the opportunities of life in 2061? And how will SSH contribute and lead in meeting this challenge? Telling the future is risky, but it’s equally true that our thoughts create tomorrow and that we won’t know what direction we should take unless we create a desirable vision to aim for. The idea of the future has always tickled people to dream. Dreams transform themselves into vision, which triggers the formulation of strategies, long-term objectives and sustainable goals. If George Bernard Shaw were around, he would have tweeted: ‘We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future’. As designers, engineers and planners we believe the best way to envision the future is to review past and current trends, engage in research and to think logically (even, sometimes, ‘out-of-the-box’), make calculative assumptions and ask the right questions. In doing so we allow our inquisitiveness to lead us into exploring what the future may hold. The purpose of this exercise is not to attempt predictions for the future, but to highlight the key factors that have the potential to shape the design and architecture of tomorrow, and with it the future of SSH. So let’s embark on a journey. The challenges facing us in the Gulf region and indeed the world, we believe, are serious and converging. We foresee that 2011, a year of widespread popular unrest, will be identified as the year that necessitated a social shift between 142

governments and their peoples. The enduring societies of the next five decades will be the ones who succeed in providing the foundations for full-spectrum wellbeing, which includes housing, education, healthcare, water, energy, transport and communications. At the same time, societies will have to make their limited resources stretch further. For all countries the deepening reality will be the rising prices of the traditional forms of energy, and of essential commodities, metals and minerals, as demand for these finite resources continues to be driven up by the rapidly developing countries, whose growth, according to forecasters, will dramatically outpace growth in the developed, wealthy nations of yesterday. Demographically speaking, over the next 50 years the world will be a far more crowded place. The UN estimates that by 2025 more than eight billion people will inhabit our frail planet, up from roughly 6.9 billion today, and rising to 9.3 billion in 2050. The population growth will trigger development of newer towns and 143

cities and the expansion of existing residential and commercial and social spaces, which will generate demand and new business opportunities. The result will also be even higher demand for the scarce, precious things that sustain us: water, food and energy. It will also put extra pressure on cities because populations around the world are shifting from rural to urban areas. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs predict that 69 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, up from around 50 per cent in 2009. (See World Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision.) Until 1975 there were just three megacities in the world: New York, Tokyo and Mexico City. By 2025, the UN predicts, there will be 29, with most new ones sprouting in Asia and Latin America. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) a billion people now live in urban slums, which are typically overcrowded, polluted and dangerous, and lack basic services such as clean water and sanitation. To fulfil their side of the social contract governments will have to meet this challenge head on by organising the fast and efficient provision of affordable homes, utilities and infrastructure. Politically, instability in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world may force firms to focus on other emerging markets, although the Middle East, with its immense natural resources and potential to become a global logistics hub, will continue to provide opportunities. Overall, countries and boundaries will diminish as barriers to trade in a flourishing, free-world economy. In its Global Environment Outlook of 2007 the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that by 2025, about 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and that two-thirds of the world population could be under conditions of water stress – the threshold for meeting the water requirements for agriculture, industry, domestic purposes, energy and the environment. Complicating the picture even further are the effects of climate change. That global warming is real and is caused by humans is no longer seriously contested within the international scientific community. The results may be droughts, heatwaves, floods, extreme weather events and rising sea levels, causing damage to infrastructure, displaced populations and the need to adapt existing structures to cope with rising or falling temperatures. All this will place extra, severe and unforeseen strains on the financial and political resources of countries both rich and poor. Perhaps I have painted a rather apocalyptic picture. That’s what happens when you focus on challenges. But we are optimistic. Naturally the responses to these challenges might be seen on a political level, as societies decide to prioritise appropriate measures, cooperate with each other, improve their effectiveness and commit to action. But I believe that real sustainable change begins less at the political level than through social change led by businesses. Pure and applied science will play a major role in the development of new and sustainable sources of energy, for instance. But so too will the disciplines of design, engineering and planning, because a great part of the response to the challenges of the next 50 years lies in the creation of a human space, of a built environment, that is genuinely fit for purpose. Considering all these factors, sticking to the basics and keeping things simple could be the mantra that guides us to success in the future. Historically, the design function was limited to a few talented people who enjoyed close proximity to powerful rulers. We think of Leonardo da Vinci, Senan and Michelangelo during the Renaissance era. But centuries before and after the Renaissance saw engineering marvels which exist now as monuments to great civilizations and dynasties, whether it’s the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall

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of China, the Taj Mahal, the aqueducts and infrastructure of the Aztecs or the Byzantines, the boulevards, covered bridges, palaces and mosques of the Persians, the sewerage of the British or the trans-Siberian railroads of the Russians. What unifies most of these architectural and engineering marvels was the existence of a strong visionary leadership supported by highly-skilled architects, engineers and planners who shaped projects that were beyond their times. Most reflect the prosperity and greatness achieved by the rulers. Some epitomise the ruthless drive to conquer and subdue, while others display the noble intent to improve conditions for the masses. It raises an interesting question: in the next 50 years, if societies become more democratic and decision-making more participatory, will we see such awe-inspiring monuments? You never know. We believe successful societies of 2061 will have learned to do more with less. “More” means more of what is really necessary and good for the greatest number and “less” means with less impact on the environment, less energy consumption, less carbon output, less risk and less cash. The built environment business has only scratched the surface in responding to these challenges, and that includes everyone from the inventors of new building materials and systems, to designers, builders and planners of towns and cities. In thinking about the next 50 years we’ve found it helpful to channel our focus onto five areas: new materials and systems; new procurement models; better buildings; new delivery techniques; and better urban spaces. New materials and systems Traditionally, the design and construction industry has not changed at the same pace compared to wider technological developments. But it’s possible now to see exciting developments and to project infinite possibilities into the not-sodistant future. For instance, NASA started working with Phase Change Materials (PCMs) in the 1980s in its search for space suits that kept astronauts comfortable more effectively. PCMs change “phase” – i.e., turn from being a liquid to a solid and back again – within specified temperatures, naturally absorbing and then giving off energy as they change state. Now PCMs are being tested in a range of ceiling tiles and the results are encouraging. PCMs are a key part of the astounding cooling system used in Qatar’s prototype of a carbon-neutral stadium the country is developing for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which they say will keep players and spectators cool in the scorching summer desert heat. Glass is another locus of interest. For years now researchers have been looking at foamed glass as an alternative to concrete because it is strong, adaptable, highly insulative and completely recyclable, which could utterly reconfigure a building’s whole-life cost model. The potential for glass panels to capture or deflect the sun’s energy is only beginning to be explored. In 2002 researchers at Sharp’s Japanese laboratory printed a transparent computer processor onto a flat plate of glass showing that, in the future, ultra-thin computers and even displays could be incorporated into glass surfaces. It may be a bit ‘blue sky’ but it’s not unreasonable to hope for a new structural glass that acts as an external façade for the building while also generating electricity from the sun. It could regulate temperatures inside and adjust its level of transparency to suit the mood of the building user. It could also serve as a multi-purpose computer and display unit and the control monitor for all building management functions. Apart from the above mentioned materials, I believe our generation will surely witness other new materials that could revolutionise the design and construction industry, or find new uses for existing materials based on technological advances.

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New procurement models In most of the developed world the traditional mode of procurement is certainly a source of concern and bewilderment for anyone who has stood back to consider it. It is characterised by highly fragmented supply chains in which separate companies perform the various crucial aspects of design and construction, but, in a competitive bidding environment where risk is shifted down to the weakest links in the chain, the atmosphere on many projects is like unrestrained economic warfare as all these entities compete with each other in order to protect their meagre profit margins. Instead of collaborating, sharing information and learning from mistakes, they duplicate work and functions just to protect themselves from legal claims. The amount of waste, cost, delay and defects this inherited system generates is phenomenal. Until now, most procuring bodies in the developed world – governments in particular – have felt they could afford to muddle through with this wasteful and conflict-ridden delivery model, but in the midst of a deepening global resource pinch, change is in the air. New forms of procurement are being pioneered in the US and the UK to try and undo the splintering of the construction process that occurred in the early- to mid-20th century. Called variously “Integrated Project Delivery” or “Integrated Design and Construction”, these models try to recapture 147

Telling the future is risky, but it’s equally true that our thoughts create tomorrow. – Sadoon al-Essa

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the modes of bygone eras, where the powerful architect worked in a spirit of trust and collaboration with the multidisciplinary master builder. Today we have already started seeing buildings being assembled, not built, and over the next fifty years we expect it will be a matter of course that designers will collaborate closely with other members of the delivery team and weave buildability, material selection, phasing, procurement, logistics, scheduling, time and cost accounting into the primary design process. Information technology has a big role to play. Fifty years ago architects drew using pen and paper. Then came computer aided design, CAD, first in two dimensions (2D) then in three. The big thing now is BIM (building information modelling). Using object-oriented modelling, BIM creates a virtual building complete with everything, from the superstructure and cladding down to the last screw on the last light switch. You can slice the model any which way to examine how each discreet system – steelwork, mechanical and electrical, ventilation, interior finishes, for example – works within the whole. BIM promises amazing things. It provides accurate instructions to the various component suppliers. It can detect clashes, as one system interfaces with another, and flag up departures from standards and building codes. It can accurately phase assembly to within minutes. If you change one aspect of the design, the whole model automatically adjusts to the change, showing the ramifications in an instant. For good reason, it seems, some European governments are considering making the use of BIM compulsory on government projects. However the challenges to widespread and effective BIM use are serious. That’s because the BIM approach assumes that all participants in the design and delivery process will have open access to the virtual model and can contribute freely, which runs contrary to the currently fragmented set-up of the industry, in which various parties’ design input is guarded because of commercial sensitivity. It will most likely take a groundswell of heavyweight clients to see the advantage of BIM before the construction supply chain swings into line, and we become witness to the wide range of BIM benefits in the operability, maintenance and facilities management of the project once it is complete. Better buildings While the appetite is still strong for tall, iconic towers of glass, concrete and steel, public attitudes have hardened noticeably against them as resource-wasting monuments to hubris. It may be that rising costs of materials and energy force a shift away from skyscrapers toward more human-scale developments, especially as the business model for the skyscraper has displayed its weakness in many GCC states, where, thanks to the global financial crisis, office tower rents have plummeted and many towers stand empty. As designers and planners, however, we reserve judgement. For one thing, if required, human ingenuity will find a way to build, operate and recycle tall structures sustainably. For another, tall structures offer a tested way of increasing the density of human settlements, an important consideration in the prevention of unsustainable and dispiriting urban sprawl. Perhaps we’re not thinking tall enough: what is to prevent pleasant, integrated and open-air spatial organisations in which everything – food production, manufacturing, work, leisure and play – takes place in vertically oriented, three-dimensionally matrixed communities? As space comes at an ever higher premium we could see the widespread adoption of avant garde sensibilities such as the “Raumplan” of early 20th century Czech architect Adolf Loos, who thought of space in terms of cubes, not floor-

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plans. A locality’s response will of course depend on its unique conditions and needs. In very hot places we may see a retreat from the skies and a return to ancient forms that use shade, natural airflow and structural mass to provide sustainable and comfortable interior spaces. Such an approach was used by SSH and Cal-Earth in the design for United Real Estate Company’s Junoot Ecoresort in Oman. URC’s commitment to a new development approach and design application inspired by the Tri-vault and Eco-dome structures won the Future Projects category in the World Architecture Festival of 2012. Whatever specific response is called for by usage and locality, we believe that holistic simplicity is a timeless design value. Sustainability is becoming a mainstream concern. Much work is being done to guide design through various standards around the world, from Germany’s “Passivhaus” to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification arising out of the US, which we are actively engaging with. At the moment, being green is largely voluntary and associated with ethics and social responsibility – nice-to-haves, in other words. But as demand for energy and raw materials rise, causing prices to rise too, we predict it will have a much more aggressive driver: cold, hard cash. Investment in smart materials and systems, low-energy buildings, one hundred per cent recyclable structures, and renewable energy production could come to determine the basic viability of a development. As a progressive sustainable concept, we may also see ‘earth design’ drawing much interest in the coming years. In fact, our vision here may be too timid. The American economist and writer Jeremy Rifkin has put forward the idea of a “Third Industrial Revolution”, in which centralised, fossil-fuel-based power generation gives way to distributed, renewable power generation systems that are linked and managed by Internetstyle smart grids, and enabled by emerging energy storage technology. This convergence of new communications technology and energy systems could set the world on a path of global green growth, Rifkin believes. Whether it happens or not remains to be seen, but if it does, it would have a dramatic effect on what we do. Not only would buildings, in his vision, become power plants, but the spatial configuration of towns, cities and regions would need to adapt as well. New delivery techniques The physical delivery of structures around the world has simply not kept pace with advances in technology nor with practices now common in arguably comparable industries such as the manufacture of cruise ships or commercial aircraft. Construction is still a dirty, dangerous, wasteful, expensive and haphazard process. There is no particularly good reason why it should remain so, but it has, due to the inertia of a large and inward-looking sector and also to the fact that most individual clients of construction shop for a new building or structure only once in their careers. It will most likely take a radically new and disruptive mix of technique and technology, sponsored by a committed nucleus of full-time and experienced clients, for the rules of the game to change. That said, a growing number of visionaries are submitting their blueprints for the future of construction technique. Some of these feel like pure science fiction. Renowned American architect John M. Johansen proposed the theoretical possibility of buildings that grow by themselves. The process he explored involves self-replicating nano-scale assembler robots, programmed by designers the way living cells are programmed by DNA, building infinitely complex, durable and strong structures. Such buildings would “grow” out of vats of liquid compounds

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Principles of earth architecture used in an SSH-designed eco-resort in Oman

containing ordinary minerals or elements that are the basic building blocks of our physical world, but which can be molecularly engineered into outstanding new materials. A dream-like vision indeed but, to give Johansen his due, the year he set for his theoretical, nano-engineered house was 2200. Other proposed blueprints are in the messy prototype stage. We are aware of at least two universities, the University of Southern California and Loughborough University in the UK, who are working on 3D printing systems that use a mechanical print-head to deposit layers of sand mixed with a patented binding agent so that a structure builds up according to whatever design is fed into the system. The idea is that, with a big enough gantry supporting the print-head, whole buildings could be printed this way, incorporating stairs, partition walls, concave and convex surfaces, plus cabling and piping cavities. In another example of bold visions of future delivery, technology company Living PlanIT is assembling a swarm of hi-tech companies like Microsoft and Cisco to collaborate in making buildings that are embedded with sensors and computing power such that they intelligently optimise and recycle the flow of water, energy, waste and data. Living PlanIT founder Steve Lewis, named by the World Economic Forum as one of 25 Technology Pioneers of 2012, says they will build buildings the way aircraft, or even cars, are manufactured: by developing a complete digital model first and opening it up to a global supply chain of 151

Oman eco-resort

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manufacturers of prefabricated components who bid for supply contracts and ship for just-in-time assembly on site. Meanwhile we would like to submit our own vision. Sit back and imagine yourself a fly on the wall in an SSH office somewhere on the globe in 2045. A designer is sitting in front of a new type of potter’s wheel: a satellite image of her construction site on another continent is projected holographically onto a 1-sq-m project board that rotates in any direction. The soil survey and topography analysis is produced with live satellite data. As the system recognises voice and gestures she begins literally to mould the structure in front of her. She experiments with the shape of the building by squeezing, pressing or pulling. She excavates the site with her fingers on the project board to match the scale of the project, followed by the structural design applications: grids, column and beams. Floors are added and the dimensional parameters are adjusted on the fly. Cladding, interior finishes, fittings, even furniture can be chosen by dragging and dropping from a vast online library onto the project board. Local building codes, the client’s specifications and budget are all in the system library, which also tracks, in real time, commodity, material and labour costs. Warnings flash when she moves out of regulatory tolerance or bursts the project’s budget. Having selected a particular component, the system sends automatic requests for information (RFIs) to vendors, generating multiple quotes and fulfilment scenarios. New design iterations are presented by a mobile holographic device to the client in real time, allowing instant multiple views and walk-throughs. Client changes are incorporated instantaneously and results displayed. Once the basement and the ground floor design are finished the project is ready to commence construction. Onsite, a holographic projection displays guides for constructors. Site excavation simply follows the lines and sensors monitor compliance. When that’s done a new holographic overlay shows volumetric guides for concrete or steel frame. Back at the potter’s wheel completed portions are highlighted in red and are locked to further modifications. Any lines out of true glow amber onsite to warn the supervisor. Fixing of doors and windows are kept within the permissible deviation margin. Project cost is monitored in real time. The client can change the design where the project has not been locked. Floor and height extensions and expansion on the sides may be done based on the permissibility of codes and the structure’s load bearing capacity, which is tested and reported by the system. Cost and time implications are calculated instantly, taking into account procurement, transport, storage, plant, labour and anything else required for the adjustment. Supervisors are there to inspect work, but in such an amalgamated approach many traditional roles such as the client representative and quantity surveyors become obsolete. Continuing our imaginary journey, we see a client walking into an SSH International office to discuss their requirements for a building or structure. With vast amounts of data in the system including material, labour and equipment availability and costs, standards and building regulations and structural behaviour simulations, it will be possible to provide detailed holographic mock-ups with budget estimates and completion dates within minutes. But the client wants to shop around. He visits other design houses plugged into the same enabling technology to see how they interpret his brief. By lunchtime he has his board’s approval for the design he liked best, the contract is signed, and the designers are at the potter’s wheel analysing ground conditions and working on the virtual site excavations.

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Successful societies will shape urban spaces that work better, rather than accept a rudderless drift. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Sadoon al-Essa

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We note with a certain amount of amusement that such projections about the techniques of the future tend to suit the deep desires of whoever makes them. Constructors envisage total standardisation of design, designers envisage the total automation of construction, and developers and clients envisage the total amalgamation of an awkward and fragmented supply chain. The future reality is likely to be rather different from what any particular vested interest hopes for now and the imperative to adapt will be the order of the day for all. What’s interesting, however, is that in most of the scenarios above, save the nanotechnology one, perhaps, the underlying technology is close or already to hand. The real barriers are more human and mundane, to do with business models and risk, the acquisition and ownership of data, and supply chain organisation. Better urban spaces Finally, how will the more-with-less ethos transform the planning of towns, cities, and regional conurbations? In the next fifty years successful societies will be the ones who started deliberately shaping urban spaces that work better, rather than accepting a rudderless drift into unsustainable modes. Good design in this context means acknowledging the scarcity of material and financial resources. It could mean a return to human-scale spatial organisations, predicated no longer on the unlimited growth of individual car ownership, where a family’s livelihood, social network and leisure opportunities are each separated by road journeys that sap precious time and energy. Such a return to the human scale could release the sources of real wealth of the future: innovation, social cohesion, self-sufficiency. We envision urban spaces that effectively manage their use and recycling of energy and water, and the efficient flow of people, information, services and goods. We foresee a return to design values that create sensitive and inspiring public spaces, and a cooling off of the quest for the ‘iconic’, which often produces alienating novelty, shock and bombast. “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” said Winston Churchill. Kuwait, like many other rich, developing countries, has a history of eradicating itself as it rushes to the future. The obsession with the new causes a ruthless deletion of the past, making it a city with little physical memory. There is a yearning for identity everywhere, and an architecture that goes beyond the cosmetic and unthinking application of ‘styles’ will help Kuwait and the Gulf region, and any locality, find and nurture its soul. There will be different solutions according to the cultures and priorities of communities around the world. ‘Less is more’, ‘complex yet not complicated’, ‘firm yet flexible’ are puzzling metaphors that designers will seek to interpret and explore anew. We all know that the shape of things in 2061 is impossible to predict with certainty. On the surface, any design firm practicing the same way we do today will look as out of place in fifty years as a 360-kilobyte floppy disk. However, as we’ve tried to argue, the future is not all about whizzy new high-tech stuff. Technology will change and will usher in new modes of operation and business. We want clients, designers, project managers, constructors, manufacturers and stakeholders of all varieties to join forces and exploit new technology to create a better built environment for all. In the end, the serious challenges we face will be met only with the timeless values that SSH’s founding partners committed this practice to fifty years ago: responsibility, accountability, faith in people, innovation, passion and the tireless quest for excellence.

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SSH and the future We turn our attention now to SSH as a firm and the space in which we will be operating in the next fifty years. The key question that confronts us is this: how will SSH address the future, sustain and grow, prosper and continue to be recognised as a firm that makes a difference? Investing in people, technology and processes is our priority and with our collective expertise and commitment we will propel SSH forward as one of the most successful architecture and engineering consultancies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Vision statements do have limitations, so we need to make them effective by reviewing and re-validating them from time to time. The following are most significant in SSH’s endeavour for the next fifty years. Adapt and synergise: We have always enjoyed the challenges. Through them we scale new heights. To continue making a difference we aim to be smarter and faster, efficient yet flexible, feasible and value-driven, compliant and effective. SSH needs to be in the forefront when it comes to adopting technological advances, but we must ensure their smooth and timely implementation in our operations. We strive for continuous improvement in everything we do. Trust and open communication catalyses our creative instincts and synergises the firm’s efforts. Envision and strategise: There is an opportunity for SSH now to establish itself as a global professional entity. We will focus on emerging markets and be ready to respond quickly to opportunities. Being flexible in our approach and willing to take bold decisions will strengthen our capacity to adapt and manage change. We will look ahead, above the day-to-day business, at changing trends on the global scene. People and passion: Usually when we talk about the future, technology comes to mind first. But actually the future belongs to people and their passion. I envisage SSH as a pulsating place for its people, a place where creativity thrives and keen minds collaborate to arrive at exciting solutions. By attracting young talent and developing their skills, SSH will be recognised as a hub for the brightest and best, for people who can take up special assignments anywhere. Our staff have always comprised a thrilling diversity of backgrounds, languages and cultures. As we grow this diversity will increase, while at the same time providing a strong and unique identity for our people and services world-wide. We also foster the concept of ‘SSH Corporate Citizenship’, which defines and reinforces our social and cultural responsibility. Higher purpose: Fifty years is a long journey and a firm that reaches this milestone naturally feels a desire to give something back. Firms work best when their people are able to express their highest values through their work. For SSH, real success does not stop at our business goals. We aim to be an active participant in society-building. We will collaborate with NGOs and civic society organisations, municipalities, government agencies and educational institutions, contributing our design services and creative energy to help realise projects that enrich society. The future will by no means necessarily belong to the firms now making the highest revenues or employing the most staff, but to the ones who adopt a sustainable approach that will help them keep afloat in the turbulent times ahead. To sum up our vision for the next fifty years, we borrow from Martin Luther King, Jr., who said: “But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.”

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Our people 159

It’s not so much the things you’ve done as what preceded them: the ideas, the excitement, the shared sense of what is possible. – Sabah Abi-Hanna 160

Sabah Abi-Hanna, Partner 1961-2003

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I was an engineer. When I see problems I want to fix them, and politics is a very blunt tool for that. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Salem al-Marzouk

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Salem al-Marzouk, Partner 1972-2003

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1975 was a turning point for Kuwait. That was the attraction. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Charles Bosel

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Charles Bosel, Partner 1980-2003

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I had dealt with SSH as their client, and I knew exactly who they were and what kind of work they produced. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ali al-Abdullah

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Ali al-Abdullah, Partner 1993-2003

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It taught me some lessons, not least how valuable a good reputation is. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; George Abi-Hanna

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George Abi-Hanna, Director 1984-Present

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Life is about evolution and change. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Sadoon al-Essa

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Sadoon al-Essa, Executive Partner 2003-Present

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I came in and spoke my mind. It was no problem being a new guy. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Omran Hayat

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Omran Hayat, Managing Partner 2003-Present

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Testing and trying new ideas. 175

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Sharing information, knowledge and experience. 177

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Inclusive teams working towards shared goals. 179

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Promoting a strong training culture. 181

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Everybody contributes to the success of the company. 183

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Engagement with industry experts. 185

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Synergy through partnership. 187

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Collaboration is vital to our success. 189

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A glance back 191

60s

In 1958 the young Sabah Abi-Hanna completes a summer internship with the public works department in Kuwait, while studying architecture at the American University of Beirut. He returns after graduation when a job is offered, but leaves to set up his own practice in 1961, the same year Kuwait gains its independence. Amid Kuwait’s rapid urbanisation, his practice and reputation flourish and he receives a wide range of commissions. With technical and aesthetic innovations he makes an early mark on the burgeoning cityscape of Kuwait and the nucleus of a broad and influential client base emerges.

Clockwise from top left:

Firms work best when people are able to express their highest values through their work

The National Bank of Kuwait Sheikha Badriya Mosque, Salmiya Al-Marzouk Pearl Sabah Abi-Hanna’s first logo

70s

Clockwise from top left: Al-Messilah District master plan Al-Rihab Complex Sabah Abi-Hanna and Salem al-Marzouk in the early years Al-Fahaheel Buildings Sabah Abi-Hanna and Salem al-Marzouk partnership logo

Sabah meets the civil engineer and reforming politician, Salem al-Marzouk. They form a powerful new partnership based on a shared commitment to quality and ethics. As the explosion of Kuwait’s population and built environment continues, the firm begins to bid for, and win, major government projects. Renowned urban planner Charles Bosel joins in 1977, helping to establish the partnership as a key player in Kuwait’s master-planning.

80s

Despite security concerns and the financial crisis sparked by the Souk al-Manakh crash, Kuwait presses ahead with ambitious infrastructure development, and the “Triumvirate”of Sabah, Salem and Charles assists at every step of the way. The Kuwait Master Plan Review, the Outer By-pass motorway, Bayan Palace Conference Centre and other major projects mark the “Golden Decade” for SSH. Four Beaches Hotel, Lebanon

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First Ring Road

90s

Hopes are shattered at the beginning of the fourth decade by the Iraqi invasion of August 1990. SSH offices are ransacked, projects are halted, and staff are scattered all around the globe. But the SSH spirit prevails. Right after liberation, even as the burning oil wells blacken the sky, the partners and a core team of staff regroup and re-mobilise. Contracts for major projects are renegotiated. Staff are located and most return. Ali al-Abdullah joins with his broad public sector and management expertise and a powerful quartet guides SSH toward the Millennium.

Clockwise from top left: The National Bank of Kuwait Kuwait Petroleum Corporation Headquarters Sabah Abi-Hanna and Salem al-Marzouk partnership logo, updated Al-Fanar Complex

2000s

The founding partners prepare to retire, and SSH becomes the first major Kuwaiti consultancy to navigate safely to second-generation ownership â&#x20AC;&#x201C; just in time to weather the financial crisis. A more robust corporate structure is implemented and new talent helps the company stay on the leading edge of technology and design. With overseas offices now in Oman and UAE, the future is as bright as ever.

We allow our inquisitiveness to lead us into exploring what the future may hold Left, the Marina Waterfront Development. Right, the new logo for SSH International

Clockwise from top left: PIFSS Complex Electricity & Water Training Institute BMW Showroom interior & exterior VIP terminal at Kuwait International Airport Printing Press Building United Tower

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