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Lecture - Making Worlds in Abu Dhabi
Date
Oct 26, 2026
Time
03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Open for Public
Yes
Description
During the final years of the Cold War, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait were crucial nodes of exchanges between architects, planners, and construction companies from across Cold War divides. Building upon my book Architecture in Global Socialism, this talk will foreground the work of design institutes, construction firms, and individual architects from socialist countries that collaborated with local and foreign actors to shape Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, and Kuwait City. Łukasz Stanek will show how Bulgarian and Polish professionals aspired to integrate into the Western-dominated and increasingly globalized market of design and construction services in the Gulf. While Eastern European professionals left aside references to socialism, their integration into this market was based on technological and cultural expertise that they had been acquired during their earlier work in North Africa and the Middle East in the networks of socialist internationalism. This talk will show Gulf cities during the late Cold War as cosmopolitan sites of worldmaking—or reimagining and practicing the world beyond its inherited concepts and visions—with long-term consequences for urbanization in the region and further afield.
Image: Entry to the competition for the Municipality and Town Planning Department, Abu Dhabi, 1979, external view. Shiber Consult (Kuwait), Wojciech Jarząbek, Edward Lach. Private archive of Edward Lach, Wrocław (Poland)
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