Eric Kuhne & Associates is designing and building projects around the world. Lucy Taylor sits down with the practice's principal and namesake to talk about Silk, sway and storytelling.
What can you tell me about Kuwait's City of Silk?
The original concept for City of Silk was that it would be one of seven city sites to accommodate the explosion of the expat population living in Kuwait, as well as a larger number of Kuwaitis returning after the invasion [by Iraq in 1991].
So they have an enviable need there, which is to provide major new communities on a scale which is pretty much unprecedented. I think Dubai gets a lot of the attention these days, but before the invasion, Kuwait was 20 years ahead of any other city in the Middle East.
The great news is that last November [2007], the parliament unanimously endorsed it and gave it planning approval, which allowed the executive branch of the Kuwaiti government to mobilize resources to start doing all the infrastructure planning as soon as possible.
We worked with a group called Tamdeen Corporation and we said we'd like to work on a gateway city. Tamdeen's chairman-Mohammed Al Marzouk-and our guys worked together to basically incubate this city.
I started drawing diagrams on a map, showing all these connections that Kuwait was going to be able to do, and you very quickly realise that Kuwait sits right in the middle of 30 Middle Eastern countries.
[Its connections] extend from Kazakhstan in the north to really the middle of Africa in the south, Morocco in the west and all the way over to China in the east. So the idea of recreating the silk routes for the twenty-first century is where the name of the city came from.
Can you give me an idea of the scale of the City of Silk?
There are four city centres in the City of Silk. The first one is called the City of Commerce, and it's basically creating the equivalent of London's Canary Wharf for Kuwait.
The second one is called the City of Leisure. It sits on the banks of the River Delta, 16 miles from Iraq, and it uses the river water to develop a whole load of resorts and sandy beaches on the river.
It also includes an athletics and entertainment centre, and connects to a separate district which is a media city centre. Kuwait produces most of the Arabic soap operas, so it builds on that industry.
The third is called Ecology City, and it is an amazing place because we took 60km² out of the centre of the City of Silk and turned it into a wildlife refuge.
Ecology City also includes a desert reclamation centre, a wetlands ecology centre, and a fantastic collection of research universities that deal with botanical and zoological sciences.
Then the fourth centre is the Diplomatic Cultural Centre, and what it deals with is the higher education, there will be graduate education located there and there will also be a centre for archaeology.
There will be diplomatic missions, cultural centres, the major opera house and the performing arts centre.
Tell me about the centrepiece of the City of Silk, the Burj Mubarak al-Kabir.
The prime minister and the chairman of Tamdeen Corporation came to me and said ‘we want the tallest building in the world', and I said, 'No you don't. What you want is a building that will be among the tallest'.
It's going to be 1001m for the 1001 Arabian Nights. So again the architecture ties itself in to the folk literature of the entire civilization. I told them, 'we don't have to be the tallest, but we have to be one of the best'.
The towers are actually seven villages stacked on top of one another. Seven 30-storey buildings on top of each other and between each of these 30-storey buildings are four levels of gardens, recreation facilities, shops, healthcare facilities, education facilities, police, fire and maintenance facilities.
So they become the town squares and the high streets-they're just vertically stacked as opposed to being horizontal.
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