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Lina Ghotmeh announces design for Bahrain's National Pavilion at Expo Osaka 2025

2024-06-17T12:01:00-04:00

Lina Ghotmeh’s design for the official National Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain for Expo 2025 Osaka has been revealed along with details of what she calls a “celebration of the bilateral relations” between the Gulf state and Expo’s host nation.

The Lebanese-born French architect’s follow-up to the 2023 Serpentine Pavilion in London offers a highlight of the Kingdom’s distinct maritime heritage and history as a major regional port of trade.

Image: © Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture

What hails as an artful reinterpretation of ancient Bahraini boat-building methods will take shape as a timber structure whose outermost shell is made out of aluminum. Open and porous, the design incorporates natural ventilation methods Its interiors are set to be provided by the award-winning Bahrain-based Shepherd Studio and center around a space dedicated to commerce and promoting the country’s “forward-looking” economy.

Image: © Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture

The pavilion will be realized within the “Empower...

With the Middle East in diplomatic crisis, what will happen to Qatar's building projects?

2017-06-06T12:53:00-04:00

In a stunning move, seven Muslim countries—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Libya, Yemen, and the Maldives—have severed ties to Qatar, a small nation of about 2.7 million people on the north-east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. The crisis underscores the deep divisions running even within Sunni Islam that are often overlooked by the West, which tends to view the Muslim world through the dichotomous prism of Sunni and Shia.

These countries accuse Qatar of sponsoring terrorism, which is to say, primarily, Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood held power briefly in Egypt following the 2011 Revolution before being overthrown in a coup led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. They are active in many of the seven aforementioned countries.

Qatar also funds Al Jazeera, the widely-watched news channel known for supporting political Islamism and for critiquing the regimes controlling Saudi Arabia and other countries. And Qatar has been criticized for m...

Unchecked climate change will make the Gulf uninhabitable, claims new study

2015-10-26T21:03:00-04:00

The Gulf in the Middle East, the heartland of the global oil industry, will suffer heatwaves beyond the limit of human survival if climate change is unchecked, according to a new scientific study. The extreme heatwaves will affect Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha and coastal cities in Iran as well as posing a deadly threat to millions of Hajj pilgrims in Saudi Arabia, when the religious festival falls in the summer.

"The study shows the extreme heatwaves, more intense than anything ever experienced on Earth, would kick in after 2070 and that the hottest days of today would by then be a near-daily occurrence."

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Swiss Architect Takes First Prize at Bab Al Bahrain Competition

2012-02-20T16:13:00-05:00

Winners have been announced at the Bab Al Bahrain Open Ideas Competition with the proposal "Pearl Dive" by Swiss architect Lukas Lenherr taking home the $15,000 First Prize. [...] Significance was added to this competition by the recent political events that have taken place across the region, encouraging questions about social representation, public identity, urban integration, sense of place, and historic importance.