The Arab Regional Centre for World Heritage

BAHRAIN AUTHORITY FOR CULTURE AND ANTIQUITIES (UNESCO) | SERVICES: ARCHITECTURE

The Arab Regional Centre for World Heritage is a centre created by UNESCO, which provides training and research programs for the region. It also promotes protection and management plans for World Heritage properties while raising awareness about World Heritage as a whole.

The headquarters for The Arab Regional Centre was formerly a restaurant built in 1988, which imitated the style of traditional architecture using wind tower lookalikes. Our design proposal concluded in shifting the entrance from the cut corner to a central entry. This shift gave rise to a modern architectural facade; a sign of new function and ownership of the building. Although the area of the new facade is small, we saw this as an opportunity to create something unique that would communicate Bahrain’s architectural and pearling heritage; namely its intangible heritage (Bahrain’s pearling songs). The linear fins of the facade (area of interpretation) are inspired by the linear shadows on the face of old heritage buildings created by the protruding timber beams (Denchel).

The spacing of the glass-fibre reinforced concrete fins is based on a pearling song ‘Makhmus’ where the rhythmic structure is accented on the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 9th, 16th and 21st beat. Through a parametric translation, we trans- formed the song’s audio spectrogram into a physical structure. The design and technology of our facade has enabled us to translate intangible art form (pearling songs) into tangible matter.

Scroll for more