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Kuwait cultural Program | Kuwait culture and Tradition | Kuwait culture
Since their inception in the mid-19th century, World Expos have provided countries of all sizes and degrees of wealth with a rare opportunity to curate their own national narrative, and tailor their preferred image - past, present and future - before a global audience.
Specific elements of a nation’s heritage, culture and economy are distilled, refined and placed on display in often exquisite and sprawling pavilions designed to reflect the country’s distinct national character and qualities. It is by communicating in this way, through their pavilions, that participating nations define themselves on the world stage.
Taken as a whole, a World Expo can therefore perhaps best be described as a rose-tinted mirror of civilization at a specific point in time. This “greatest show” is an amalgamation of nations in their idealized state; the world depicted as it would like to be seen, and everyone is invited.
Kuwait has risen, with flair and ambition, to the occasion of the first World Expo to be held in the Arab world. It is clear from the grand scale of the small Gulf kingdom’s presence at Expo 2020 Dubai that a great deal of thought and attention went into its pavilion design, content and messaging.
Kuwait City has a history of telling its preferred story through its architecture. It has undergone a number of significant transformations since the advent of oil urbanization, often through ambitious, state-led development initiatives that have consistently sought to replace the old with the new.
After 1950, almost all pre-oil structures in Kuwait City’s historic urban center were transformed to make way for a new, modern metropolis. And since 2003, a renewed cycle of development has replaced that modernist landscape with something newer still. Kuwait’s ambition at Expo 2020 is in keeping with its past, present and future.
Designed by Italian architect Marco Pestalozza, the 5,600-square-meter Kuwaiti pavilion sits gracefully on a large central plot near Al-Wasl in the Sustainability District, distinguished by its irregular, roughly circular shape and gold exterior panels featuring geometric designs.
The architecture of the pavilion is a nod to Kuwait’s history of urban development. A funnel, modeled after the iconic towers built soon after Kuwait gained independence in 1961 to store desalinated water, occupies the center of the pavilion, extending from the roof to ground level.
During the day, the pavilion resembles a nugget of unprocessed gold, textured so as to echo Kuwait’s undulating desert terrain, complete with screens displaying the familiar image of camels loping across sand dunes.
At night, the pavilion is transformed. Gold no longer dominates; instead, a blue spotlight illuminates “the envelope” - the name for the wide, sloping funnel at the top of the pavilion.
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