The Aga Khan Program Fall 2026: An Evening With Lecture Series presents Ali Karimi, hosted jointly with the Urbanism Group

“Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History”

Ali Karimi

Bio

Civil Architecture is a cultural practice preoccupied with the making of buildings and books about them. The work of Civil asks what it means to produce architecture in a decidedly un-civil time, presenting a new civic character for a global condition. Since its founding by Ali Ismail Karimi and Hamed Bukhamseen in 2017, the practice has attracted a strong following for its provocative works and its vision of an alternate future for a nascent Middle East.

Abstract

Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban Historyrevisits the founding principles of architectural and landscape discourse in the Arabian Peninsula. The publication explores instances of pre-oil planning, ranging from desert kites to fish traps and water channels, upending the toolset for thinking through architecture’s relationship to its context.

The narrative of the oil economy has overwritten previous traditions of landscape and territory: long spans of highway cut disinterestedly across the desert, vast reclamation works alter the shoreline, and agricultural land is extensively cleared to build new cities. This totalizing mono-myth renders previous spatial narratives as a distant pre-history, more fable than precedent. Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History acts as a primer to the spatial history of the Arabian Peninsula, compiling narratives related to geology, agriculture, mariculture, and seasonality—providing an alternative genealogy and history from which to reimagine the region. This treatise by Civil Architecture also includes an appendix of the practice’s projects, expanding on the themes of the publication with possible trajectories for architectural intervention.