Page 120 - Post Summit_2019_AV

Indexing Architecture HE Sheikh Salem Al Qassimi, Assistant Undersecretary, Ministry of Culture and Knowledge Development, UAE Kate Goodwin, Head of Architecture, Royal Academy of Arts Introducing a federal initiative to record and protect the UAE’s modern architectural heritage, His Excellency Sheikh Salem Al Qassimi said that while the importance of the nation’s ancient heritage has long been recognised, a recent wave of what he described as “nostalgia” had helped to draw attention to sites and buildings from the more recent past. A sometimes maligned and misunderstood phase of the UAE’s built heritage, the architecture associated with the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is just as important, he said, and in order to understand which examples from the period merited protection and conservation, new research, documentation and policy-making was required. This task, which was historically the responsibility of local municipalities, was now being taken up at a federal level, HE Al Qassimi said, because the UAE had decided to approach architecture and built heritage in the same way that it had approached archaeology - from the perspective of culture. The new project, the UAE Architecture Initiative, will carry this out, focusing on a programme of education, research and documentation - a process 116