PUBLICATIONS SINCE 2007
Off Centre / On Stage
Dubai Scenes from the 1970s
Khatt Books 2021
Published at the same time as Dubai hosts the World Expo, this book demonstrates that the city has long been a site of exhibition. Dozens of unpublished photographs fill this volume to examine Dubai in the 1970s, when a still small but growing population was working to create a bigger future. A new and illustrated essay by architect and writer Todd Reisz explores how more than just new buildings, ports, and roads were being assembled: Mythologies were also being made.
By first refuting the glib clichés directed at the city, Reisz then places the city into historical, even planetary, context. For the last several years, his work has been focused on documenting Dubai as a site of architecture and as a hub of the expertise that gets architecture built. Photographs by British architects Stephen Finch and Mark Harris have in the past helped Reisz to tell this history. Now with this full-color publication, the photographs take the foreground. For each image provided by Finch and Harris, Reisz reveals that photography is something beyond documentation; it can be a means of reckoning about what we can know and about what we can never recall, even of a city many think of as “young.”
Building Sharjah
Birkhäuser 2021
Building Sharjah reveals how modern architecture unfurled across the United Arab Emirates’ third-largest city. An oil discovery in 1972 positioned Sharjah as one of the world’s final cities shaped by transformative fortune. In the footsteps of Kuwait, Riyadh, and Dubai, Sharjah faced a metamorphosis: either one that repeated the past’s mistakes or one that reimagined how wealth can build a city.
Sharjah’s potential enticed an international cast of experts to create a bold, new city. As their projects begin to vanish, this book preserves them through unseen photographs and recovered documents. New writing chronicles how local and arriving residents arranged the designed, concrete environment into a home. Beyond just a local artifact, this book examines the confident promises made by global practices of urbanization.
Showpiece City
How Architecture Made Dubai
Stanford University Press, 2020
Staggering skylines and boastful architecture make Dubai famous—this book traces them back to a twentieth-century plan for survival.
In 1959, experts agreed that if Dubai was to become something more than an unruly port, a plan was needed. Specifically, a town plan was prescribed to fortify the city from obscurity and disorder. With the proverbial handshake, Dubai's ruler hired British architect John Harris to design Dubai's strategy for capturing the world's attention—and then its investments.
Showpiece City recounts the story of how Harris and other hired professionals planned Dubai's spectacular transformation through the 1970s. Drawing on exclusive interviews, private archives, dog-eared photographs, and previously overlooked government documents, Todd Reisz reveals the braggadocio and persistence that sold Dubai as a profitable business plan. Architecture made that plan something to behold. Reisz highlights initial architectural achievements—including the city's first hospital, national bank, and skyscraper—designed as showpieces to proclaim Dubai's place on the world stage.
Reisz explores the overlooked history of a skyline that did not simply rise from the sands. In the city's earliest modern architecture, he finds the foundations of an urban survival strategy of debt-wielding brinkmanship and constant pitch making. Dubai became a testing ground for the global city—and prefigured how urbanization now happens everywhere.
