Doha's FIFA Architectural Boom

 

(This article first appeared online on 7th April 2023 and then in print in the 9th April 2023 issue of The Hindu newspaper's Sunday Magazine section on page 8 https://www.thehindu.com/society/qatar-doha-architecture-fifa-world-cup-inspired-hotels-stadiums-museums/article66586939.ece)

Armenia via Dhaka

Once home to a bustling population of Armenian traders, Armanitola—the Armenian Quarter of Old Dhaka is a fine repository of history and culture, reinforcing the strong bond between Bengal and Armenia     

By Raul Dias

I’m pretty sure that I must have made quite a spectacle of myself that sweltering summer afternoon in Dhaka, waving a soiled 100 Taka note in front of scores of bewildered noses walking past me. Even my pithy attempt at mouthing a few Bengali words, seemed to fall on deaf ears. But finally—after almost giving up any remaining hope—my phone’s wavering GPS decided to kick into action. And thus, I found myself standing in front of a structure I had been staring at every time I coughed up a 100 Taka note over my previous two days in Bangladesh.
To put it all into context, I had made the trek down the dusty alleyways of Old Dhaka with the sole aim of visiting the rather unusual Tara Masjid. For the iconic and ironically named “Star Mosque” finds a place of glory for itself on the ‘tails’ side of a 100 Taka bank note. All this thanks to its four domes that are decorated in the rare Chini Tikri (Chinese art) porcelain tile mosaic work in star motifs.
But little did I know then that that wonderful thing called serendipity had something entirely different planned out for me… 

The Other Armani!
Unbeknownst to me, I had meandered my way into Old Dhaka’s Armenian quarter. Called Armanitola, the small neighbourhood on the shores of the turgid Buriganga river was once the nerve center of Armenian life in East Bengal. For this was where jute and leather traders from the South Caucasian country in Eurasia decided to set up both shop and home.
And just a mere 300 meters south of Tara Masjid, is what is believed to be the ‘Ground Zero’ of this unique quarter. Simply called the Armenian Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church of the Holy Resurrection was built in 1781 by the traders on a plot of land that they had earlier used as a cemetery.
This edifice, with its hexagonal, crucifix-topped steeple and generous narthex reminded me not just of St. Peter’s Armenian Apostolic Church in my home city of Mumbai, but also of the similarly-structured Armenian Holy Church of Nazareth in nearby Kolkata. But besides Mumbai, Kolkata and other places in West Bengal like Saidabad, even a few other Indian cities like Chennai once had a thriving Armenian population and grand churches to cater to the growing congregation that had been settling in India since the 16th century.

Blast from the past
It is weeks after I return from Bangladesh, as I leaf through a copy of the Anne Basil authored Armenian Settlements in India at Mumbai’s Asiatic Library, do I realise that there was not one, but two separate waves of an Armenian exodus to India (which Bangladesh was a part of then). The first of which was in 1645 with the aforementioned merchants arriving in Bengal, purely for trading purposes. Interestingly, the book even references an agreement of 1688 between the English East India Company and Armenian merchants that reads “whenever forty or more of the Armenian nation shall become inhabitants in any of the garrisons, cities or towns belonging to the Company in the East Indies, the said Armenians shall not only have and enjoy the free use and exercise of their religion, but there shall also be allotted to them a parcel of ground to erect a church thereon…”
It was the second exodus, however, that is the most poignant. As it was in the wake of the 1915 East Anatolia Armenian genocide of more than a million people by Turkish forces. In fact, Basil even speaks of “hundreds of children of uprooted families…found shelter and a roof and received sufficient education…” at the Armenian College and Philanthropic Academy in Kolkata, that is to this day very much functional and a source of pride for the city’s small Armenian diaspora.

Sentinels of Solemnity 
Back at the church at Armanitola, Hafiz, the old watchman who had let me in earlier tells me the story of the last Armenian in Bangladesh. All this in broken English bolstered by his wild gesticulating, of course! Apparently, up until 2014 Mikel Housep Martirossian the Dhaka-born son of an Armenian jute trader was not just the caretaker of the Armenian Church but also its sole congregant who would say his daily prayers sitting quietly in the first pew. After a stroke five years ago, he moved to Canada at the behest of his children who live there and was never heard of again.
But there is some hope for the Church, I am told. The Armenian Embassy in Dhaka that looks after its upkeep has hinted at the possibility of getting down a new warden for the church from Armenia. Till then, it’s up to Hafiz to keep the fires burning. Quite literally, as he lights the altar candles daily at 7pm.       
As I leave the church gates, I make sure to squeeze a small tip into Hafiz’s wrinkled palm. And yes, it was one of those same 100 Taka notes that started it all!

(This article first appeared in the 22nd February 2020 issue of the Mint Lounge newspaper, India on page 17 https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/the-stars-of-dhaka-s-armanitola-11582468772877.html)

From yesterday to tomorrow…

With its impressive cache of brutalist architecture and repurposed USSR-style public spaces, Armenia’s ‘Pink City’ and capital Yerevan artfully melds its Soviet past with a proud, new post-socialist national identity

By Raul Dias

While I had heard a lot about the Armenian nationalistic pride—often with the words “bordering on jingoism” loosely bandied about—I couldn’t have been more ill-prepared for what I was about to witness. And I had not even landed on Armenian soil! All it took was the sight of the double-peaked Mount Ararat in all its snow-capped glory, emerging from a cloudy veil on the port side of the aircraft, for pandemonium to ensue in the narrow cabin around me.
And the row that I was seated in certainly wasn’t immune to this pre-landing frenzy. While the man to my left quickly whipped out his phone for a series of selfies with the mountain in the background, the stylish septuagenarian lady to my right kept muttering something in Armenian, making the sign of the cross every 10 seconds or so. All this, while reverently looking at the mountain where Noah’s Ark is said to have come to a rest after the great flood mentioned in the Book of Genesis.

Celebrating the past
It was only a few hours after landing at my destination, Armenia’s capital city of Yerevan, does the irony of it all strike me. Mount Ararat, one the greatest symbols of Armenia—the similitude of which can be found emblazoned on everything, from bottles of brandy and beer to Toblerone doppelgänger chocolate bars—isn’t even located in Armenian territory anymore. In fact, it can be found just over the border, in present day Turkey.
As I stroll through leafy Yerevan, with its Parisian-style wide boulevards and drinking water fountains called pul pulaks at every corner, I soon realise that for the former USSR country, symbolism is everything. How else can one explain the continued presence of a five-point Soviet star atop the main spire of the city’s Central Railway Station? It is the likeness of Mount Ararat below said star that makes the station one of the few places in Armenia that continue to use this coat of arms, never mind its Soviet underpinning.

Reclaiming glory
Speaking of which, Yerevan’s grand Republic Square was once known as Lenin Square housing a giant, mid-stride statue of Vladimir Lenin that was taken down post Armenia’s independence in the Autumn of 1991. Today, the square is surrounded on all four sides by grand architectural examples of Soviet Modernism, with their brutalist façades clad in the indigenous pink volcanic stone called tuff that gives Yerevan its ‘Pink City’ moniker.
At another popular attraction—the hill-topped Victory Park overlooking Yerevan—another former Soviet leader, General Secretary Joseph Stalin has been dethroned. Quite literally! Replacing his monumental statue and sitting on the same pedestal is the sword-brandishing, 22-meters tall, neo-art deco statue of ‘Mother Armenia’ made from hammered copper. Here too there is ample symbolism on display. The statue is said to not only show peace through strength, but also mirrors the role of prominent female figures in Armenian history who joined the men in fending off Turkish troops during the 1915 Armenian genocide.
Joining a group of the Yerevan Couchsurfing chapter on a post-beer walkabout the city, I learn about how in 2010 a Facebook group called “SAVE Cinema Moscow Open-Air Hall,” successfully petitioned the Armenian Government to stall the demolition of the open-air hall of the Moscow Cinema on the city’s arterial Abovyan Street. Built in 1936 in the constructivist-style—a form of modern Soviet architecture, with a facade adorned with scenes from famous Soviet-Armenian movies—the cinema itself replaced the 5th century St. Peter and Paul Church. Presently, it remains one of the city’s premier recreational spots with its life-size chess board set shadowed by a giant spider sculpture by Armenian artist Ara Alekyan. 

Parting shots
We walk towards the Republic Square Metro Station, where I notice how well the Soviet style of almost harsh, geometric ornamentation is merged with the more oriental features of the station. The entrance houses a decorative fountain of an eight-petal concrete flower in bloom, with a huge vaulted ceiling held up by plain columns featuring sculpted eaves in the shape of bird heads.
From Republic Square we take a dirt-cheap metro train ride (100 dram or Rs 15) to Charbak a few kilometers away to get the real feel of Soviet suburban Yerevan with its many ‘Khrushchyovkas’. Developed all over the Soviet Union during the early 1960s, these concrete-panelled apartment buildings were named after Soviet statesman Nikita Khrushchev to provide low-cost housing in a gargantuan communal setting.
It is from the terrace of one of these 15-storied (and yes, elevator-bereft!) grim-looking buildings do I spy the ultimate remnant of the Soviet past a few yards away, eerily backlit by the setting sun. Constructed in such a way that they spell out the alphabets CCCP (which is ‘USSR’ in the Cyrillic script) when seen from above, I’m told that they were built so that the Soviets could feel patriotic as they flew in from Moscow.
Truly, one man’s Mount Ararat is another’s alphabetised Khrushchyovka!


Travel log
Getting There 
As there are no direct flights from India to Armenia, one can reach Yerevan by connecting flights from Dubai on airlines such as Emirates and the low-cost carrier FlyDubai. Given its compact size, most of Yerevan can easily be accessed on foot or by its super cheap metro train system which comprises of 10 stations. Costing a very affordable US$ 6 for a 21-day or less stay, the easy-to-procure Armenian visa can be availed of either online (evisa.mfa.am) or on arrival at Yerevan’s Zvartnots International Airport by most nationalities, including Indians.

Stay
Offering a range of hotels to choose from, Yerevan has accommodation options to suit all budgets. One such recommended accommodation option is the conveniently located, city-centered Double Tree by Hilton (Rs 6,600 for two with breakfast, doubletree3.hilton.com). The Ibis Yerevan Center Hotel (Rs 3,200 for two with breakfast, accorhotels.com) along the city’s pedestrian-only Northern Avenue is another good, value-for-money accommodation option.

Tip
* Every night from 9pm to 11pm, Tuesday to Sunday, the grand fountains outside the History Museum and the National Gallery in Yerevan’s Republic Square put on a very informative free sound and light show with plenty of local folk music and snippets of Armenian history narrated in both Armenian and English.

(An edited version of this article first appeared in the 19th October 2019 issue of The Hindu Business Line newspaper's BLink section on page 20 https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/takeaway/yerevan-armenias-pink-city/article29732640.ece)

Notes from Tashkent

By Raul Dias

I’m technically still on Indian soil, sitting ensconced in a giant metal tube that’s taking the form of an Uzbekistan Airways’ airplane, en route from Mumbai to Tashkent. But I’m also instantaneously being made aware of the fact that remnants of the former USSR are very much alive and kicking in the country I’m to be deposited in, four hours later. The cabin crew greet me with a hearty “dobro pozhalovot!” in Russian. The safety briefing is a trilingual English-Uzbek-Russian one, the rather robust wordage and flat intonations of the last language not lost on me. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial ‘Soviet-influence iceberg’, constant montages of which reveal themselves to me at almost every turn I take over my next two days in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent.

Past Perfect
An hour after I land, I find myself on the brink of a mini meltdown as I try to navigate my way through block after block of bleak, Khrushchyovka-style residential buildings in the Tashkent suburb of Chilanzar. Bereft of a charged cell phone, I’m trying desperately to locate the elusive building number 26 where Yura Vedenin, my friend of Russian descent has promised to let me spend the night in his tiny, two-room apartment. Named after Soviet statesman Nikita Khrushchev—in whose era these low-cost, concrete-panelled apartment buildings were developed all over the former Soviet Union during the early 1960s—the ‘Khrushchyovka’ is a suburban Tashkent mainstay.
The next day, at the city’s glitzy Tashkent Janubiy Vokzal southern train station, I try to make sense of the indecipherable Cyrillic alphabets that form alien words printed onto my bullet train ticket to my next destination, the ‘Silk Road’ city of Bukhara. God bless the kind-hearted ticket counter lady who takes the effort to pen down all the vital details on the back of my ticket in Roman numerals and alphabets. Without her intervention, I’d surely be in Cyrillic blunderland!
On my way back to Chilanzar from the train station, I burrow my way underground to experience for myself the brilliance of the Tashkent Metro I had heard a lot about. Opened in 1977, the metro today has 29 stations, each a shining (pun intended!) beacon of the former USSR’s legendary hubris. ‘Opulent’ as an adjective doesn’t really do justice to the grandeur and scale with which each of them has been built and decorated, with everything from pink marbled walls to be-chandeliered ceilings. One of the most beautiful of these is the Kosmonavtlar station where Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova—and the first woman in space—is immortalised with a mural, wherein the ceramic wall panels surrounding her portrait fade from blue to black in imitation of Earth’s atmosphere.

Spaces like no other
And speaking of space, just like this station that was influenced by the ambitious USSR space program, Soviet architecture in Tashkent too greatly references the cosmos and science fiction. One such building in Tashkent is the turquoise-domed Tashkent Circus built in 1976, that pays homage to Yuri Gagarin’s epic journey into outer space with its flying saucer like appearance and alien limb-like pillars.
But it is the typical soviet, brutalist style of architecture that augments the USSR’s overarching influence over Tashkent, 27 years after Uzbekistan declared its independence as a brand-new nation in 1991 post the historic breakup of the Soviet Union. It was the devastating Tashkent earthquake of 1966, that gave rise to this style of utilitarian architecture where form and function trump ostentation and ornamentation of any kind.
Seemingly caught up in a time warp when bell bottoms and acid rock ruled, the gargantuan Hotel Uzbekistan, centrally located at Tashkent’s Ground Zero—Amir Timur square—is the perfect specimen of 70s Soviet modernist architectural style that’s associated with social, utopian ideology and influenced by the works of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Though a tad tired and scruffy looking today, this icon of Tashkent’s Soviet past draws in nostalgists by the busloads eager for a morsel of melancholy…however brutal. 

(An edited version of this article first appeared in the 20th January 2019 issue of The Hindu newspaper's Sunday Magazine section on page 7  https://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/travel/notes-from-tashkent/article26035588.ece)

The White City

Housing the world’s single largest cache of Bauhaus style buildings, Tel Aviv puts on a spectacular show for the architectural philistines amongst us!

By Raul Dias

If looks could kill, then Itamar Gavriel seems to be doing his darned best to slay the gum-chewing, fanny pack-toting American tourist with his icy, steel grey stare. “Looks just like Art Deco!” says aforementioned tourist for the nth time that morning, the drawing out of vowels doing very little to obfuscate traces of a New Jersey accent. Ignoring the susurrations of protest escaping her husband’s mouth, she continues making her own — highly inaccurate, as we’d soon learn —analogies.
But Itamar is used to such violent acts of desecration. As someone who has dedicated the better part of his life as a tour guide, taking architectural philistines like our motely group of 10 out-of-towners on a walkabout around Tel Aviv’s treasure trove of Bauhaus style buildings, he’s reassuringly immunized.
“To the contrary, there couldn’t be two more distinct architectural styles,” he says calmly. “While Art Deco places a hefty premium on ostentatious embellishments and chunky geometric shapes, the Bauhaus style — with its predilection for all things white — is all about primary forms and volumes that are characterised by asymmetry, which you can see in the rounded, ribbon-like balconies and thermometer windows of the building in front of you.”
He is, of course, referring to a shining white beacon of Tel Aviv’s cache of over 4,000 Bauhaus style buildings, the 1930-built Hotel Cinema. Overlooking the once-decaying, now-gleaming Dizengoff Circle and its frisky water fountains, the newly-restored building that was once the Esther Cinema, designed by architect Yehuda Magidowitz revels in all its Bauhausian minimalism from the outside. The mish-mash of styles that forms its chic interior is a sore point Itamar resolutely refuses to touch upon!
But creating something chic was probably the last thing on the minds of the early proponents of the Germanic Bauhaus school in Israel. Architects like Arieh Sharon, Shmuel Mestechkin, Munio Gitai-Weinraub and Shlomo Bernstein, who were ardent devotees of the ahead-of-its-time kind of art, design and architecture style that embraced utilitarianism and rationality, while vehemently condemning ornamentation of any kind. Thus, perfectly melding the post WWI need for austerity and the slowly growing socialist-Zionist movement in Israel after WWII. One that strove to create a new world for displaced Jews returning home to the Motherland, so to speak. In the process, making Tel Aviv Ground Zero to the largest collection of buildings built in the Bauhaus style, anywhere in the world.
Our continuing tour de Tel Aviv à pied takes us on a saunter along the arterial Rothschild Boulevard where same sex couples walk their poodles as freely as young hipsters-in-training wearing socks on their head attempt to smash Evel Knievel-esque records, riding their battered skate boards along the ridges of the undulating concrete platforms and benches at breakneck (God forbid!) speeds. It was here in the Ahuzat Bayit district, we are told, that Tel Aviv adopted its racially-benign moniker ‘The White City’. This, it borrowed from a housing estate in Stuttgart, Germany called Weissenhofsiedlung built in 1927 for a Bauhaus style exhibition. And one that was literally considered a blueprint for Utopia of sorts, thanks to its generosity of space and lightness of spirit that the early Bauhaus architects saw reflected here in this arboreal nabe of Tel Aviv.  
In a surprising departure from the almost antiseptic Bauhausian obsession with monotones, the ombre effect created by the hues of the plaster that vary at each of its stories, oxymoronically emphasises the  characteristic Bauhuasian horizontal lines of  the Rubinsky House that flow toward the window of the perpendicular stairwell. Sitting stoic on a lane off the main boulevard, this 1935-built modernist structure, designed by architects L. Kranowski and E. Marcusfeld for Eliezer Rubinsky, is also unique for its dual façades that are dotted with an array of ribbon balconies and windows.
“Due to the climatic variations between Germany and a warm Mediterranean city like Tel Aviv, many Bauhuasian architects significantly enlarged windows and placed wide awnings above them, at the same time using the wind directions to plan naturally aired buildings,” says Itamar. The great emphasis on the socio-communal underpinnings of the minimalist style is also the reason why many of Tel Aviv’s Bauhuas style cooperative workers’ apartment buildings sport erected pergolas on top of their roofs to create places for people to commune with each other and even to sleep under during the hot summer nights. Thus, making voluminous balconies a sort of de facto social statement symbol, signaling the openness of the community and the symbiosis between its members.
Seeming to hug the corner of Rothschild Boulevard and Bar-Ilan Street with all its might, the once decrepit Aharonovitch House is a shining example of what a little hope and a few licks of paint can do. It’s hard to believe that it’s the same miserable, forlorn looking building staring up at us from the dog-eared photo album that Itamar thrusts in front our eager noses. Designed in 1933 by Yizhak Rapoport, it typifies the Bauhaus-style with its glass windows, staircase and balconies that front its cubical block apartments. Built on a hill that once housed horse stables, snagging an apartment here today can earn the punter some serious bragging rights, we’re told!
Often regarded as a contemporary and dare-I-say ersatz take on the traditional Bauhaus style, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s Herta and Paul Amir Building was our last stop on the tour. Basking in all its Bauhaus renewal glory, this wing of the museum sits at the top end of the Sha’ul HaMelech Boulevard that lays slap bang in the center of the city’s cultural complex. Designed by American Modernist architect Preston Scott Cohen in 2011 who paid obeisance to his Bauhausian predecessors by letting ‘form follow function’, the building’s bright white countenance, small square windows and flat roof are nouvelle iterations of what we’ve been seeing all day.
But then, that exactly what the hyper-modern Bauhaus school has always stood for: buildings that grow from the sands without a past, towards a future…

(A shorter, edited version of this article appeared in the 6th August 2016 issue of the Mint Lounge newspaper, India http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/DQaUOlB7AeixJ82L4ybCYK/White-City-of-Tel-Aviv.html)