Thrown to Stand

Sixty years ago, in the early months of 1961, the British engineering firm Sir William Halcrow & Partners scrambled to solve a problem that they’d created. At Dubai’s harbor, their miscalculations had been tragically revealed during that year’s seasonal storms. Instead of keeping the waterway navigable, the firm’s design of training walls and dredging lanes left Dubai Creek choking on debris and earth. Flooding on both shores threatened lives and livelihood.[1]

In the aftermath, as workers scraped refuse out of Dubai Creek and families rebuilt the homes that had been washed away, one team of Halcrow engineers redrew plans for the harbor. It’s unclear how much coastal damage there was, but the engineers were quickly back on their feet. Better than just standing, they secured a new contract to draw up the corrections and expand the project’s scope. The new contract was worth nearly double the earlier, blundered one. There was also another Halcrow team at work. Far away from both London and Dubai, they were measuring Mediterranean waves and monitoring giant concrete structures at the port of Benghazi.

Twenty years earlier, in 1941, British forces had bombed Benghazi’s port; now British engineers possessed contracts to rebuild it. Benghazi was the co-capital of the recently independent Kingdom of Libya, which, thanks to fresh petroleum exports, was “on the cusp of a vertiginous path of development.” International banks were very interested. British and US militaries sent troops there. By 1961, Libya was the US government’s largest per capital recipient of development aid, at well over $100 million.[2] Halcrow’s role in these ambitions was small but logical, a strategic response to the West’s whirlpooling focus on the new state’s petroleum reserves. Being in Libya was part of Halcrow’s cast net over a changing global landscape, to search where even small projects could bear long-lasting relations in the future. Consultants “take their profit only once” from any given project, according to a promotional film, but “what endures is the experience.” Experience leads to more and larger projects, at least that’s the hope.

The concrete giant at Benghazi’s port was named a stabit, its physique realized by pouring tons of freshly stewed concrete into a steel mold.[3] The newly patented invention was the latest in a decade of coastal-engineering innovation in “armor units”—a designed replacement for the rock and rubble once piled up to make breakwaters. As a massive geometry of concrete, each stabit reached over three meters in height, no matter how it stood. It could weigh as much as 29 tons.

If a stabit, being hoisted by crane toward a new jetty, were to fall loose, it would crush the attending human below into paper-thin remains. Yet a single stabit is but a granular contribution to a vaster effort. Alone, it can do nothing to “armor” land. It’s a clear example of how design at one scale can transform outcomes at much larger scales. Being patented, however, doesn’t mean that the stabit is ingenious design, just that it is a strategy beyond simply dumping quarried rock into the sea. Instead of the transfer of ground from one place to another, it is the manufacture of ground resources that are fed through a high-speed batcher and poured into steel molds.

Halcrow’s test stabits did not materialize into larger projects in Benghazi, but they did instigate a future lineage of profitable work in Dubai. Three years later, Halcrow issued a study for a deepwater harbor in Dubai; that quickly ballooned into a £24 million project. For Port Rashid, as it came to be known, 28,000 Halcrow-designed stabits were prescribed. The 306,000 tons of necessary concrete required shiploads of cement from Mombasa. The arriving ships overburdened Dubai’s import capacity. Eight years later, another 18,000 stabits were delivered to Gulf waters for creating the neighboring Dubai Dry Docks. And several years after that, Port Jebel Ali was planned; there’s no telling how many were cured and installed at what became the region’s largest seaport.

After Benghazi, Halcrow had to compress the stabit’s four-week curing time in order to meet Port Rashid’s production targets. By the time the first stabits were lifted out of formworks in Dubai, they were coated in “a gleaming temporary aluminium-based curing agent.” Such a coating accelerated curing to a matter of days. (One must wonder where the aluminum went next.) The massive crucibles of concrete were produced on-site at a factory running 22.5 hours a day, attended to by men rushing in sandals and lungis, without helmets. There are photographs of Port Rashid where you see stabits arranged in grids, similar to layouts of workers’ tents, like a graveyard for giants.

Stabit is a conjugation of the Latin verb “to stand.” Stand one’s ground against the sea. There are claims that the name refers to Isle of Man, whose coat of arms is inscribed, “Quocunque Jeceris Stabit”: whichever way it’s thrown, it stands. The coat of arms also includes a version of the triskelion, a symbol of three legs joined at the hip. The triskelion’s meaning and provenance have an unresolved history, although it is fairly conclusive that it celebrates a confident stability through movement, or a surety despite peril.[4] Like the triskelion, the stabit has a three-point profile; also, it is designed to move, roll, and finally find its place.

A gathering of stabits has been described as “a fully inter-locked armour.” But stabits don’t function like the links in knight’s mail. They are not fastened together like a puzzle. There is a certain randomness maintained in their arrangement. The man guiding a dangling stabit above him must “eye” how it should be positioned, directing the crane to nestle it among others, “until it adopts a stable attitude.” The stabit cannot fall, because each of its designed positions is another stance. In whichever way the stabit is thrown, its angular profiles “disrupt and destroy the assaulting waves” by dispersing the energy across its loose connections with other stabits.

Amassed together by a systematic production line, the conversion of a single patent into countless tonnages of concrete was configuring a global narrative, an increasingly indelible one: that land needed “armor” against the sea. Any calculated ingenuity was saturated in an imported concoction of concrete. Once hardened by the mixture, a coastal shore would become a definitive shoreline: a line drawn is a line defended. Of course, it was not so much the land as the engineered forms injected into that land that demanded protection: property and infrastructure. Hardly two decades earlier, British observers claimed Dubai was a “fine natural harbor.” Instead, its low-lying, water-absorbent coast performed as a perfect scenario for testing the new arena of “armoring” land against the seas. Land was framed as an “accident of geography”; in contrast, certainty lay in the realm of calculations. Whichever way it is thrown, engineering will stand.

[1] These events are covered in Showpiece City, Chapter 3.

[2] Vandewalle, Dirk. A History of Modern Libya. Cambridge University Press, 2012, 45.

[3] While real-time studies were done in Benghazi, a hydraulic model was being tested at at the National Hydraulic Research Station in Wallingford, England.

[4] The stabit was used on Isle of Man, in at least one project. And this erstwhile monument included a plaque commemorating the man who designed it for Halcrow as a former Isle of Man resident. Several sources claimed the stabit was patented by Halcrow, but I was not able to find the documentation.