Valerio Olghati:
“The site includes ruins that form part of the UNESCO monument - the Pearl Route. The entire building serves as an entrance area for cultural heritage and a lobby for the medina [old city]. This is an urban room for the residents of Muharrak with the scale of a public park. Concrete components are placed along the border of the site to form a new locus in the densely built city. A large space has been created where a forest of columns and "wind towers" [scoops] support a horizontal plane 10 meters above the ground. The roof, interpreted as an archaic gesture, gives vital shade to the townspeople in this very hot climate and creates a new and unique situation due to its different scale. The mysterious house, where the museum of the UNESCO World Heritage Site is located, is slightly shaded. In its entirety, the building itself creates the universe - the gateway to the Pearl Way and the city beyond."
Pearling Site - a museum and entrance area of the Pearl Route - was built in Muharraq on the territory of the old city - medina. Beneath it are the ruins of old trading buildings: the new building is raised above them on stilts. The closed volume of the museum with an exhibition area, a small auditorium and a cafe is located under a roof with openings of different sizes. The main material is monolithic concrete of a reddish hue.
Pearl way
The UNESCO World Heritage Site is almost 20 buildings in Muharraq (including houses of wealthy merchants, shops, warehouses and a mosque), three oyster plantations on the high seas, part of the coast and the Kalat Bou Mahir fortress. All of these monuments are the legacy of a centuries-old history of pearl fishing and trade, which brought prosperity to Bahrain. This fishery came to naught in the 1930s, when the industrial production of pearls began in Japan on special farms.
