A Cathedral for Coventry, A Hospital for Doha
Todd Reisz chronicles how a commission for a state hospital in Doha prepared architect John R. Harris for success in Dubai. While the British architectural establishment was absorbed by Basil Spence’s cathedral at Coventry, Harris established how architects could survive in a post-empire British economy.
John R. Harris, probably on site at Doha State Hospital, mid-1950s. John R. Harris Library.
In my new book Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai, I explore the ways in which architecture orchestrated Dubai’s modernisation. I write ‘orchestrated’, but there was no harmony in the undertaking. There was composition, though, lots of it, resulting in multiple, often conflicting storylines. I focus on the work of one British architect, John R. Harris, whose firm designed some of the city’s essential 20th-century ingredients. Each of them attempted clarity in the midst of uncertainties. The projects – hospitals, banks, a hotel, an office tower, master plans – were described as ‘showpieces’. Like today’s wearied ‘icon’, the term ‘showpiece’ suggests something to behold, but it can also imply something comparable to a floor model, something that bears the evidence that more like this is to come. In Harris’s case, these showpieces both displayed and dispensed expectations of technological advancement and manufactured comfort. A hospital, for example, stands as testament to the very services it offers.
Few realised it at the time, but John Harris is an early example of the global architect. His firm was rarely featured in the British architectural press, but eventually his peers took notice. In the economic standstill of the 1980s, professional associations – even his alma mater, the Architectural Association – reached out to him for counsel. While Harris’s success depended to a significant degree on a bumbling British Foreign Office, it also arose from his own realisation that design contracts in one city result from securing contracts in other cities. Harris’s career was enmeshed in networks that streamed money, machines, people and ideas from one place to another. For those who later probed for the secrets to his success, Harris offered no outright advice but kept to a menu of anecdotes – perhaps not so much to protect what today might be called his ‘USP’ as to avert any portrayal of his clients as golden geese for hungry architects.
Doha State Hospital, mid-1950s. John R. Harris Library.
One story he told was about winning the design competition for a state hospital in Doha. The competition was organised by the International Hospital Federation along RIBA’s established rules. It was also run with support, likely financial, from the government of Qatar, then still under the constraints of treaties with Britain. In 1953, out of an alleged 74 candidates, John and his wife Jill Harris won with ‘the best solution to the problem’, the entry appreciated in particular for its ‘ingenious’ control of natural lighting.[1] For their tiny home office, the commission was a lifeline and their largest to date – a 250-bed campus with housing for 81 residents.
Site plan, Doha State Hospital, including the region’s largest hospital and a campus providing housing to staff. John R. Harris Library.
The moral of Harris’s story lay in a comparison of that win to another, more celebrated design competition held a few years earlier – for a new cathedral in Coventry to replace the one left in ruins by the German Luftwaffe. To make this comparison, Harris rarely stated more than two statistics: Coventry’s budget was £1 million; Doha’s was £3.7 million. He didn’t have to tell much more because his audience knew the story of Coventry Cathedral well enough, and that was his point. His cited budget for Coventry was inaccurate – the initial budget was only £825,000 – but the message was clear. The cathedral was an emblematic project within a city’s emblematic reconstruction. A showpiece but no floor model. Harris didn’t share an additional fact – Basil Spence, the cathedral’s architect, lived several doors down from the Harrises in London’s Marylebone. Harris framed these two competitions as revealing two possible futures for British architecture, and this scenario played out in the West End.
The cathedral project was often in the press. Issues of British design magazines were dedicated to the competition and Spence’s design. The project’s detractors also whipped up press, some criticising its design; others arguing that it took energy, and bricks, away from less symbolic, more essential projects. Spence retorted with a plea published in The Times, arguing that any delays cost work for stonemasons, tapestry weavers, and glass artists.[2]
While Spence’s supporters espoused his project’s ‘civic heraldry’, the hospital’s technical and logistical mandate was its semantics.[3] In contrast to Spence’s advocacy of craftspersons and artists, Harris skirted around finding any meaning for his design, beyond the significant windfall it brought for the British economy. The Qatar hospital was a larger, more technologically demanding program than Spence’s cathedral, and it came with attractive remuneration too. For Harris, the projects’ respective budgets – and the contrasting success of the two teams at sticking to them – were telling. The total cost of the construction of Coventry Cathedral rose to around £1.5 million; the Doha hospital kept within its £3.5 million budget. Not only was the hospital’s larger but, given the foreign client, it provided a major boost to the balance of trade – that budget was nearly all spent on Britain.
Interior perspectives, Doha State Hospital. John R. Harris Library.
Harris wasn’t boasting about his project’s budget; rather, he was demonstrating that a firm’s survival was based on defining its benefit to larger stakes and connecting the needs of one place to the needs of another. If the cathedral represented rebirth, the hospital enacted utility and necessity. It orchestrated actual birth. Its successful realisation relied on efficiency fuelled by the export of British expertise: 1,352 drawings were prepared by more than 60 architects, engineers, quantity surveyors and draughtsmen, all based in London.[4] In turn, those drawings resulted in contracts for more than 35 British companies (including purveyors of concrete-roof systems, laundry equipment and flagpoles).
Harris also measured both projects in time. When Elizabeth II laid the cathedral’s first, ceremonial stone in 1956, five years after Spence’s appointment, work was well underway at the hospital. Even with the time required to ship building materials from Britain and Europe, the hospital opened in 1957, on time and five years before the cathedral’s completion. Instead of competing for the more prominent project, Harris had secured the more profitable, both for him and for the British economy. Harris had landed a job the rest of London would have envied, if only they had known about it.
The architect Basil Spence using an architectural model to explain the site of the new Coventry Cathedral to Queen Elizabeth II, 23 March 1956. © Historic England Archive. John Laing Photographic Collection.
The hospital’s 1957 opening attracted regional Arab leaders who assessed the political cachet such infrastructure lent to Qatar’s emir. And, to the benefit of the British economy, the project’s successful completion created a clear association of British expertise with fulfilled promises of healthcare. Such a link was an opportunity for British officials posted in the region to promote the hospital project as a showpiece of British industry. Harris could have been the herald of British-led modernisation campaigns throughout the region. For these late-empire officials, however, supporting modernisation often involved little more than making the first introductions for private consultants and then walking away.
Undeterred by their hands-off approach, Harris sought to convert the Doha experience into a playbook for realising complex medical programs with British industrial technologies. Two years after the Doha opening, Harris accepted two minor, though transformative, commissions in Dubai: a town plan and a new barracks for the city’s ramshackle hospital. The first earned him £1,250; he may not have even been paid for initial work on the second. Eventually, commitment to these projects led to larger projects, including Dubai’s World Trade Centre, the tallest tower in the Middle East on its completion in 1979, 20 years after his first Dubai commission. Harris then introduced Elizabeth II to the imposing new monolith, just as Spence had done at Coventry Cathedral. The monarch’s presence was a peak achievement in Harris’s pursuit of architecture outside Britain, but neither Harris nor any other British architect would achieve another such straightforward link between Dubai and British industry over the next few decades. To the architects and students who sought his advice from the lectern, Harris responded that it was all about timing, and time. He had been there early; they may have already been too late.
Notes:
The State Hospital, Doha, Government of Qatar (Kingston-Upon-Thames: Knapp, Drewett & Sons Limited, 1956), 8.
Basil Spence, letter to the editor, The Times, 25 February 1954.
Louise Campbell, ‘Paper Dream City/Modern Monument: Donald Gibson and Coventry’, in Man-Made Future: Planning, Education and Design in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. Iain Boyd Whyte (London: Routledge, 2007), 133.
The State Hospital, Doha, 28.
Todd Reisz lives in Amsterdam and is an architect and writer. His work has been featured in The Guardian, Architectural Design, and Artforum. He has taught architectural and urban design at Yale University and Harvard University. Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai has just been published by Stanford University Press, and academic purchases in the UK can be made here.
