Heat

Heat: Post-Oil Modernism Vernacular in the Arab Gulf looks at the five materials that built the modern Gulf: concrete, steel, asphalt, aluminum, and glass. For most of architectural history, vernacular meant building with what was locally available, shaped by climate and inherited knowledge. In just a few decades, the Arab Gulf built a modernity out of industrial materials instead. None is local: all are produced in kilns, furnaces, refineries, and smelters, then shipped in, and all require continuous cooling to make the spaces they enclose habitable. This creates the double energy dependency at the heart of Gulf architectural modernity: energy to make, energy to manage.

The book proposes a sixth material, arguably the only local one: heat. It is the single element that was never imported, ordered or even chosen. It is what all five materials are made in, what they then fail against, and what every building in the region is organized around. Heat reads it as Gulf modernism's real vernacular material, present in every surface.

What made building this way possible was cheap and abundant energy, and that abundance is no longer a given. Gulf economies are actively planning beyond oil, while the climate these materials helped intensify is making these cities harder to inhabit. The book asks: what happens to a vernacular condition when the energy regime that produced it begins to change?

This volume reads each material as a carrier of politics, labor and climate. Its contributors ask where the vernacular now sits: in where a material comes from or in what it is made to do, and what becomes of a way of building when the conditions that produced it begin to change. Together, they refuse to treat the Gulf's pre-oil traditions as a lost paradise, or their recovery as the answer. They are concerned with what comes next. The five materials are not going anywhere, and neither is the heat. What is no longer assured is the heat that paid the difference.

Heat is published to expand Bricklab's Post-Oil exhibition at the 2026 Doha Design Biennale.