Time Frame: A city’s historic heart

One of the highlights of this year’s Qasr Al Hosn Festival was the restoration, if temporary, of the Cultural Foundation as a living and working building.

Hidden behind temporary hoardings, the Cultural Foundation forms part of a much bigger renovation plan for the block that includes Qasr Al Hosn, the historic heart of Abu Dhabi.

This photograph, from the archives of Al Ittihad newspaper, our older brother here at Abu Dhabi Media, shows the Foundation and the connected Public Library, in the later stages of construction.

The building is on the right side of the image, with one of the minarets of the Sheikh Zayed Mosque - the older one in the city centre - just visible on the centre right.

The photographer is looking down Airport Road before an underpass replaced the roundabout at the junction with Zayed the First Street and is most likely standing on a building where the HSBC main branch in Abu Dhabi now stands.

It is also worth recalling the architect behind the Cultural Centre. Hisham Ashkouri is one of the most distinguished architects in the world and the Cultural Centre one of his masterpieces.

Ashkouri was born in Baghdad in 1948 where he initially trained, first under Louis Kahn, at the time American’s leading architect, at the University of Pennsylvania, and later at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When this photograph was taken, in May 1979, Ashkouri was just 30 and working for The Architects’ Collaborative, the firm created in 1945 by Walter Gropius, a contemporary of some of the titans of 20th century modernist architecture, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.

A more fitting pedigree it would be harder to imagine for a building at the centre of the country’s history.

* James Langton