Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Bahrain’s Pearling Path is not quite like anything I’ve seen before. It is a landmark cultural project in the Gulf that privileges carefulness and thoughtfulness over spectacle. It is a project in which the streetlamps and the benches built for the local community are as beautifully considered as the museums, historic restorations and concert venues. It is, in short, a wonderful surprise. Bahrain, a small kingdom on an island between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, has largely eschewed the excesses of Gulf brashness. Its capital Manama is a busy, functional, late-20th-century but slightly shabby city. Just over a short stretch of water is Muharraq, the nation’s original capital, home to migrant workers and the working classes, and a very different city of tight, shady streets and alleys staggered to encourage breezes and to break up the hot winds. And it is here that the Pearling Path has been established, a winding, 2.2-mile trail through backstreets, alleys and courtyards that ties together some new and some old attractions, designed and restored with care and intelligence, each reflecting on the pearl fishing and trading that was once the city’s main source of wealth. The route begins at the water and meanders through tightly knit neighbourhoods in something that looks very different from the new cultural quarter destinations we’ve become accustomed to. Rather, this route is punctuated by mostly modest, often surprising, occasionally stunning architectural moments. It is a quite brilliant piece of urban acupuncture.At its heart is the Siyadi Complex, a collection of buildings that includes the house of an old pearl-trading family and once the tallest building in Muharraq. It encompasses the beautifully restored interiors of the dwelling, as well as a small mosque, a complex network of courtyards and the newly created Pearl Museum, a cool, raw space with a pearlescent interior designed by Anne Holtrop.Holtrop, an urbane and affable Dutch architect who has made Muharraq his home, is also responsible for the restoration and partial rebuilding of the Suq al-Qaysariya marketplace, which once functioned as the pearling place of exchange but had become rundown from use. Holtrop’s interventions are raw and robust, maintaining the workmanlike character of the neighbourhood, introducing deep, shady eaves and creating a street-level layer of gnarly concrete that evokes the mud and earth of the old city. His own office is here too, in a once burnt-out warehouse amid the restored arcades.A number of other older houses with their distinctive forms, stark exterior walls and tall wind-catching towers are dotted along the path, each restored and made public, each a potential cultural or community venue. One of the first of the Pearling Path’s completed structures was the Dar Al Muharraq, a vertical extension to an existing structure by Belgian architects Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen. This enigmatic building appears draped in a steel mesh veil, a little like chainmail, ruched at its bottom edges like a curtain that is theatrically lifted when an event is taking place inside. Reserved mostly for musical performance (particularly the mesmeric, dirge-like folk music of the pearl fishers), the building’s glass panels also open out to allow the breeze to flow in and the music to trickle out. It is, unusually, a modest and highly dramatic piece of public architecture.Along the route there are other, smaller public buildings, half-hidden and easy to miss while exploring more of the history of pearling and the small city itself. But perhaps the most surprising and inspiring aspect of this intervention is its attitude to public space. A landscape strategy led by Belgian office Bureau Bas Smets (currently working on the designs for the landscaping outside Notre-Dame in Paris) alongside Holtrop is characterised by the creation of a handful of small new public spaces scattered along the path and meant for locals. When I visited, there were lads playing football and older people sitting and chatting on the new curving stone benches. If the institutions might be meant for tourists, these spaces were resolutely designed for the working-class inhabitants of Muharraq itself. It is determinedly not a project about gentrification.This does not feel like an imposition on a neighbourhood but an enhancement of routes to make you look at the cityThe public route is defined by a coherent language of street furniture, something almost always neglected in urban design and relegated to an afterthought or value-engineered out at the last minute. Here streetlamps are designed like lollipops with translucent shades (reminiscent, of course, of pearls) and concrete columns in which sparkle little fragments of mother of pearl in the aggregate. Street trees are placed, like the lights, exactly on the junctions of large pavers that themselves evoke a kind of carpet defining the edges of the space. Even the bins have been beautifully considered in the same cylindrical concrete language as the street lights. The coherence of the street furniture allows you to follow the trail, picking up on the breadcrumbs of bins, benches and lights, without ever making it too explicit or exclusive, so that this does not feel like an imposition on a neighbourhood but an enhancement of routes to make you look at the city.If there is a mis-step, it is perhaps that the exquisite modesty of a meandering walk is contained by four humongous parking garages at its corners. Designed by Swiss architect Christian Kerez, these are remarkable structures in their own right — sculptural forms in which ramps wrap around and create public platforms in the air. But they are also out of place and out of scale, odd in a scheme that is all about the complexities and encounters of walking, such a rarity in the Gulf. The final building on the route (or the first, depending on how you approach it) is another out-of-scale blockbuster — but one that works, I think. Designed by Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati, this gateway/grand finale consists of a vast concrete canopy creating a sort of shaded space beneath it but refusing to define what it might be for. At its heart is an exhibition hall, austere and bunker-like, but mostly this is just covered space. It reminded me of the kind of thing that might have been erected in the 1970s over an archaeological site (and it does, indeed, turn out to be covering some bulky but missable ruins of warehouses) or perhaps an abandoned megastructure in the Iraqi desert. You might criticise the sheer amount of concrete here, the hundreds of tonnes of embodied carbon just to create a canopy, but, with its odd perforated roof (holes in the shape of houses) and chimney-like towers, it is a thing of powerfully enigmatic urban presence.In its entirety and complexity this is a remarkable work of urban intervention and its genesis can be traced to a single remarkable figure, Noura Al Sayeh. An architect-turned-client who now works for Bahrain’s Authority for Culture and Antiquities, she turned the project into something surprising and in many ways exemplary. That she is also now married to Holtrop, who moved to be with her in Bahrain, might be noted — they met and married during the process.It is not often that a group of wildly disparate architects are brought together to create something coherent. This could have been a blockbuster cultural quarter or a ragged collection of discrete monuments, but it has turned into something very different indeed. I struggle to think of a better and more thoughtful example of culture and architecture being used to enhance identity and improve everyday life rather than just create a new, generic attraction. You may not find yourself in Bahrain often, but if you do, it’d be a terrible omission not to take a couple of hours or so to indulge in following this remarkable path.Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
