Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History

Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History revisits the founding principles of architectural and landscape discourse in the Arabian Peninsula. The publication explores instances of pre-oil planning, ranging from desert kites to fish traps and water channels, upending the toolset for thinking through architecture’s relationship to its context.

The narrative of the oil economy has overwritten previous traditions of landscape and territory: long spans of highway cut disinterestedly across the desert, vast reclamation works alter the shoreline, and agricultural land is extensively cleared to build new cities. This totalizing mono-myth renders previous spatial narratives as a distant pre-history, more fable than precedent. Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History acts as a primer to the spatial history of the Arabian Peninsula, compiling narratives related to geology, agriculture, mariculture, and seasonality—providing an alternative genealogy and history from which to reimagine the region. This treatise by Civil Architecture also includes an appendix of the practice’s projects, expanding on the themes of the publication with possible trajectories for architectural intervention.

With a foreword by Rania Ghosn and an afterword by Ahmad Makia.

Book published by Kaph books and funded by the BACA, Graham Foundation, and Tamkeen. 

About the authors:

Civil Architecture is a cultural practice based between Bahrain and Kuwait. It was founded by Ali Ismail Karimi and Hamed Bukhamseen, and is preoccupied with the making of buildings and books about them. The work of Civil asks what it means to produce architecture in a decidedly un-civil time, presenting a new civic character for a global condition and offers alternate futures for the Middle East.