CHRISTIAN KEREZ'S BAHRAIN CAR PARKS ARE COMING DOWN

45,000 square meters of concrete, four buildings, one thousand parking spaces, and zero flat floors. That is the scale of what Swiss architect Christian Kerez built across Muharraq's old city between 2022 and 2023, and it is also the scale of what is currently being torn down. Two of the four structures are already coming down, cleared to widen the entrance to a royal palace. Kerez did not design a stack of floors. He designed a system of sloping concrete slabs that merge into continuous ramps, so the usual distinction between a level and a driving lane quietly disappears. The Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities inaugurated the four buildings in phases through 2022 and 2023 as part of the Pearl Path project, a Ministry of Culture initiative protecting the Unesco listed Pearling Path heritage trail. ## 45,000 Square Meters of Concrete Became a Landscape Each of the four car parks applies the same design logic to a different plot, so no two buildings in the set look identical despite sharing one structural idea. Floors become ramps, ceilings swell overhead in some sections and compress in others, and the concrete itself carries the ambiguity between infrastructure and sculpture. That ambiguity was the point. Kerez conceived the open sided structures as public rooms as much as parking, spaces that could host prayer, markets and gatherings when they were not holding cars. Photographers Maxime Delvaux and Iwan Baan both documented the buildings, and their images read less like a parking garage and more like a poured concrete topography someone happened to drive into. ## Muharraq's Old City Absorbed Four Buildings at Once The four structures sit inside the dense, low rise fabric of Muharraq's historic center, a deliberate contrast to a city where most buildings predate cars entirely. Free parking was set aside for Muharraq residents, with paid parking reserved for visitors to the Pearling Path trail, a UNESCO World Heritage site tracing the region's pearl diving history. Kerez's car parks were never meant to stand alone. They were commissioned alongside Anne Holtrop's pavilion for the World Expo, a visitor center by Valerio Olgiati, and a series of urban squares by OFFICE, all under the same Pearl Path master plan. Together they represented one of the most concentrated runs of contemporary architecture commissioned in the Gulf this decade. [A different concrete house in Milan solves a similar problem of new structure inside an old city](/quick/a-1970s-milan-house-where-two-decades-coexist-in-concrete-mqr8bt3o), letting two eras of construction coexist rather than erasing one for the other. ## Two of Four Structures Are Already Coming Down Demolition on two of the four car parks began without an official announcement or a published alternative design, part of the Muharraq Development Project ordered by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. The stated goal is a more spacious entrance to the Sheikh Isa Bin Ali House, the historic palace the parking structures currently sit in front of. A building completed in 2023 is being cleared in 2026. Three years is not a design lifespan, it is barely long enough for the concrete to finish curing its full strength, and it puts Kerez's Bahrain work in a strange category: acclaimed on completion, published across Divisare and ArchDaily, and then removed before most readers who admired the photographs ever visited in person. ## A Palace Entrance Wins the Argument Heritage access and contemporary architecture are not supposed to be a zero sum contest, but Muharraq's master plan is treating them as one. The palace entrance argument is not unreasonable on its own terms. It is also the same logic that has erased plenty of ambitious public architecture before Kerez's turn, and [a Xalapa house rotated nine degrees purely to keep a volcano in view](/quick/casa-av-rotates-9-degrees-to-catch-pico-de-orizaba-mqzr7l35) shows how much design effort goes into siting decisions that a masterplan can undo just as fast. What survives are the two remaining structures, the 45,000 square meters of documentation already shot by Delvaux and Baan, and a case study in how fast a Gulf capital can reverse a decision that took an internationally recognized architect three years to build. The concrete did its job. The politics did not wait for it. No official demolition notice accompanied the first crews on site, and no replacement design has been published for the cleared plots. For a project inaugurated by the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities as recently as 2023, that silence is its own kind of statement about which authority actually decides what Muharraq keeps.