01/10/2026
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01/10/2026
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We look at old photographs of Kuwait City with a certain sense of loss. The old wall, neighbourhoods, markets and courtyard houses survive vividly in photographs, but very little remains on the ground. More than half a century later, our instinct has not changed as much as we might like to think. Demolition is still often easier than adaptation.
The value of land is readily calculated; the value of memory is not. Kuwait’s old Palace of Justice deserves to be considered in that context. It was designed by Sir Basil Spence, one of Scotland’s most distinguished twentieth-century architects and the architect of the new Coventry Cathedral. The Palace was designed in 1976, the final year of Spence’s life, and belongs to an extraordinary period when Kuwait became a laboratory for modern architecture, commissioning figures including Jørn Utzon, Kenzo Tange, Reima and Raili Pietilä, and Spence himself. Preservation, therefore, is not simply an exercise in nostalgia. Scotland has more than 46,500 listed building records.
Owning a listed building does not give even the wealthiest owner an unrestricted right to demolish it or alter its character. Significant changes require consent. Heritage value, in other words, is translated into an institutional and legal constraint. The story of Kuwait’s Palace of Justice illustrates the difference. In 2022, a committee of Kuwait’s Municipal Council recommended preserving the building and exploring its integration into the new development. That same year, Kuwait’s National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters recognised the Palace as being of significant value to the country’s modern architectural heritage.
Four years later, the government announced that technical studies had concluded that the existing foundations could not bear the required loads, and that a decision had been taken to demolish and rebuild the structure. I am not qualified to challenge that structural assessment, nor is this an argument against development. It does, however, raise a larger question: what is the difference between recognising heritage and actually protecting it? Other cities demonstrate that development and preservation need not be opposing choices.
In Melbourne, Australia the nineteenth-century Coop’s Shot Tower was retained and Melbourne Central was built around it, placing an industrial relic beneath a spectacular glass cone. In London, the Grade II*-listed Battersea Power Station has been transformed from a redundant industrial building into the centrepiece of a major mixed-use neighbourhood. This is the principle behind adaptive reuse: rather than asking only what should replace an old building, planners ask what new life an existing building might accommodate.
A city’s capacity to modernise should not be measured by how much of its past it can demolish, but by how intelligently it can incorporate that past into its future. No one wants Kuwait City frozen as a museum. Cities must grow. Buildings must sometimes make way. But between preserving everything and demolishing everything lies an entire discipline of architecture, engineering and urban planning. Perhaps our problem is not that we fail to appreciate history. It is that we so often appreciate it too late. We demolish. Decades pass. An old photograph resurfaces, and we look at it with that particularly Kuwaiti expression of regret: “Hasafa” — what a shame.
By Abdulaziz Al-Anjeri
