Abu Dhabi: the city that is looking up with its ever-changing skyline

Whatever your interest, there is really only one place to start from in Abu Dhabi - the 10-lane, 1.5-kilometre-long Sheikh Khalifa Bridge. While the arched Maqta may be the city's oldest point of entry and the sinuous Sheikh Zayed Bridge the most recognisable, neither affords the kind of views - or insights - to motorists that are provided by the bridge that spans the narrow stretch of water between Abu Dhabi Island and Saadiyat.
Once you're inside the city, it's easy to forget where you are, but the view from the Saadiyat crossing opens out before you, like a fan, across Reem and Al Maryah islands, Tourist Club, the Corniche and over Mina Zayed, and thanks to the recent extension of Hamdan Street, motorists can now enjoy the panorama as they drive all the way into Abu Dhabi's downtown.
On view are landmarks from almost every decade of Abu Dhabi's modern history, providing physical evidence of the forces that have helped shape the city over the last half-century - oil revenues and their redistribution, state intervention, town planning, rising land values, private ownership and what one expert has described as the city's "attachment to transience" - writ large in a skyline that also acts as one of the city's most reliable timelines.
Tourist Club's Le Méridien Hotel marks something of a ground zero on this particular skyline, as not only is it the smallest building visible, it is also the oldest. In a month's time, the hotel will celebrate its 35th anniversary, making it something of a national institution by Abu Dhabi standards. Only the second international hotel to open in the capital - the Hilton Abu Dhabi opened in 1973 - Le Méridien was opened by Sheikh Zayed and Queen Elizabeth II during her state visit to Abu Dhabi in February 1979.
Le Méridien and the towers that surround it illustrate the real beauty of Abu Dhabi's skyline, something that stems less from their aesthetic qualities or from feats of engineering, than from the close and consistent correlation that exists between the age of those buildings and their height: only one to two storeys until the late 1950s, two to eight in the 1960s, up to 13 in the 1970s, 20 in the 1980s and so on.
Abu Dhabi may be a city that continually re-writes itself with each generation, but as a 2011 report produced by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (Adach) explained, its old buildings are one of the few points of reference for the "astonishing transformations" that have affected recent generations. "The political, social, demographic and economic changes can be read," the report explains, "both, horizontally in the development of the city plan and vertically, in the physical fabric and design trends of its buildings."
Thanks to Abu Dhabi's most recent spate of development - which includes buildings such as the new, 342-metre Adnoc headquarters, sandwiched between the Emirates Palace hotel and the old Hilton Abu Dhabi, and the new 381-metre residential tower that will soon open at Central Market - the capital now boasts four of the tallest buildings in the Middle East.
According to the Emporis Skyline Ranking, a rating system that scores cities according to the visual impact of their skyline, Abu Dhabi has leapt 47 places up the chart of the world's tallest cities in the last two years and is now ranked in 42nd place with 72 skyscrapers and 165 high-rise buildings.
To put this in perspective, Hong Kong, which tops the list, has 1,308 skyscrapers and 6,600 high-rise buildings. This may not make Abu Dhabi's skyline exceptional in global or in architectural terms, but the forces that have determined it and the history it reveals do make it valuable and in its own way, unique.
Not only does today's skyline speak of Abu Dhabi's modernising visions of the future and the breakneck pace of change that defines the city in the present, but it also provides an important point of continuity with its traditional, but rapidly disappearing, past.
As well as its special relationship with time, Abu Dhabi's skyline has always been intimately connected with the emirate's natural resources, which have helped to define it three times over the centuries, first as the source of fresh water that enabled it to become the tribal capital of the Bani Yas and then as a key player in the Gulf's pearl trade 100 years later. Most recently, the discovery and export of oil have fuelled the profound changes that have taken place since the 1960s.
When Sheikh Dhiyab bin Isa Al Nahyan's men built Abu Dhabi's first burj, or watchtower, to guard the island's fresh water in the 1760s, Abu Dhabi is reported to have consisted of little more than 20 arish, or palm frond dwellings. In 1907, however, when John Gordon Lorimer surveyed the city for his Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, the colonial civil servant recorded a population of 6,000 Arabs, most of whom were Bani Yas, 5,000 Persians and a handful of traders from Sindh in what is now Pakistan.
Early historic photographs show that apart from Qasr Al Hosn, the vast majority of dwellings in early 20th century Abu Dhabi continued to follow a pattern that had been set 150 years earlier, albeit with some interesting modifications. Ronald Hawker describes the situation in Building on Desert Tides, his history of the vernacular architecture of the region.
"Masonry buildings surrounded by palm frond houses asserted the social hierarchy of Abu Dhabi. The masonry houses belonged to the merchants and ruling elite, who controlled the boats. The palm frond houses belonged to the crews on the pearling boats.
"Historic photographs of the market in Abu Dhabi indicate that some arish structures were fitted with additional simple sackcloth wind towers in imitation of the grander masonry and gyspum examples found in Dubai, Umm Al Quwain and Jazirat Al Hamra."
Not only did natural resources help to define the city politically and economically, they also determined the wealth, extent and living conditions of its population and placed very precise physical limitations on what could be built. The size and strength of locally available timber such as mangrove, which rarely grew to a length greater than 3.6 metres, did much to determine the dimensions of the original rooms throughout Qasr Al Hosn.
As somebody who arrived in Abu Dhabi in the late 1960s, the historian Frauke Heard-Bey had personal experience of the very practical limitations imposed by local resources. The introduction of concrete may have had a revolutionary effect on the skyline and on people's lives, freeing both from a pattern that had remained unchanged for centuries, but even with the introduction of western construction techniques and technologies, traditional materials continued to impose their limitations. "Throughout the 1960s, one of the constraints on constructing buildings more than two storeys high was a chronic shortage of wood," Heard-Bey explained in Salma Samar Damluji's architectural history, The Architecture of the United Arab Emirates, "but this was gradually overcome by better organisation of imports and eventually the use of steel-reinforced concrete."
Few of Abu Dhabi's early modern buildings, which were built to cater to the sudden influx of expatriates who were drawn to the emirate by its new-found oil wealth, now survive. As Nezar Othman Ahmad noted in the same book, many suffered from the fact that they had been poorly built with concrete that had been mixed with seawater and highly saline beach sand.
Among those that have been lost is the handsome office development that the engineer David Spearing built for the-then Crown Prince, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, in 1969. At the time it measured a remarkable eight storeys, which briefly made it Abu Dhabi's tallest building. Spearing hadn't been able to make the building any taller because the machinery that would have allowed the construction of the kind of deep pile foundations required for high-rise buildings was unavailable at the time. By a quirk of fate, Abu Dhabi's current tallest building, the 72-storey, 324-metre Landmark Tower, which was also commissioned by Sheikh Khalifa, now stands on almost exactly the same site on the Corniche.
In another irony, Spearing's development was constructed on the site of one of Abu Dhabi's earliest modern buildings, a single-storey school whose long, train-like appearance is unmistakable in early aerial photographs of the city. It had been built in 1958, had survived for less than a decade and had provided one of the earliest examples of the traits and patterns of behaviour that have since come to define Abu Dhabi's developmental DNA. Abu Dhabi displayed its obsession with the new, and its compulsion for repeatedly starting again from scratch, from a very early age.
nleech@thenational.ae
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