Qatar Beyond Doha

In the book “The Heritage of Qatar”, authors Peter Vine and Casey Paula provide an insight into Qatar’s history through its natural history and culture. The artificiality of landscape in Doha has replaced the once bare desert land of Qatar. In Doha, development and building technology focuses on integrated and master-planned communities, a generic building type that shifts from Qatar’s local tradition. In the area outside Doha, technology is seen through its historical and ecological context. The desert of Qatar, with its vast open landscape, is structured by a series of land depressions, sinkholes or caves, sand dunes, mangroves, and salt flats known as “sabkhas”. Aside from Qatar’s desert ecological context its historical context is expansive. Bedouins, abandoned fishing villages, coastal mosques and ruins of ancient forts makeup its heritage. Modernization has brought much change to the Bedouins who occupied the desert. This thesis critiques the mechanistic manipulation of the inhospitable landscape and proposes live and learn space in conjunction with the ecology of the desert land.