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"Regional Exchange and Knowledge Transfer through Building Practices: The Work of PACE in Yemen, 1968-2016"
Pan-Arab Modernism 1968-2018, eds. Dalal Al Sayer and Ricardo Camacho, Actar Publishers, London, UK, 2021
Kuwait-based Pan Arab Consulting Engineers (PACE) arrived in war-scarred Yemen in 1968, carrying the Gulf’s oil-funded modernist know-how into clinics, universities, and mass housing that stretched from Hodeida to Sana’a. The essay shows how regional aid transformed architecture into soft power: concrete frames and recessed arches broadcast Arab solidarity yet often clashed with Yemen’s stone vernacular and climatic logics. By following five decades of PACE’s work, it unpacks a two-way exchange in which Kuwaiti geopolitics, Iraqi design ideas, and Yemeni landscapes forged a hybrid “Arab modernity” whose tensions still echo across the Red Sea and Gulf today.
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Criticism & Academic Writing