Bahrain’s Siyadi Pearl Museum is a treasure at the heart of an urban regeneration

Muharraq lies across the water from Manama, the modern capital of Bahrain. If we think of a typical Gulf city, with its riotous towers, malls, cornices and freeways through the centre, this is not really it. Instead it is an old place, a little down at heel, but still busy and crowded with immigrant workers and some of the less affluent Bahrainis. It is also the site of by far the finest piece of urban regeneration through culture in the whole of the Gulf. And very possibly beyond. 

The Pearling Path is the result of a more-than-a-decade-long process of restoration, intervention, urban acupuncture and stonking great architect commissions which manage to astonish, delight and occasionally dumbfound. It is framed by four huge multi-storey parking garages by Swiss architect Christian Kerez, swirling, wafer-thin concrete spirals which seem to flutter and unravel. Not, perhaps, the greatest ad for a scheme which aims to make the city centre walkable. There is a massive, strange structure which seems to provide mostly shade and not too much accommodation by another Swiss, Valerio Olgiati. And there is a traditional music venue, a house sheathed in what looks like chain-mail curtains by Dutch architect Office Kersten Geers David van Severen. 

The path itself winds slowly and a little haphazardly through a series of working class neighbourhoods and, rather than creating a shortcut, it makes the visitor meander, to take a little longer over the route. The whole project is then tied together by a sophisticated and frankly superb series of small public spaces with street furniture designed by landscape designer Bas Smets and architect Anne Holtrop. The main motif here is a chain of deceptively simple lamp-posts with concrete bases (mother of pearl occasionally sparkling in the aggregate) and pearl-shaped globes. These act as breadcrumbs along the trail, a subtle, noticeable feature which allows the wanderer to stay on the path, despite its winding route. The spaces have already been adopted by local football-playing kids and tired-looking old men resting on the S-shaped benches. 

Holtrop is a Dutch transplant to Bahrain. He met his wife Noura Al Sayeh as she was planning and commissioning works and together they have been the architectural force behind the Pearling Path, with Holtrop designing many of the landmarks along it as well as the civic spaces. He is also responsible for the new Siyadi Pearl Museum which constitutes the culmination of the Path, where it loops around and takes the visitor back again. 

Part adaptive reuse, part conservation (and major restoration), part interpretation and part striking intervention, this is a scheme which knits together the elements of a domestic complex in an intricate weaving of space and fabric and creates a memorable series of interiors from frankly unpromising beginnings. 

The Siyadis were a wealthy Muharraq family from the era when this was the capital of Bahrain. Their money came from the island’s major industry at the time, pearl fishing. So this small museum, devoted to the history of pearl fishing in the islands, has become the centrepiece of this remarkable piece of regeneration and it perfectly illustrates the principal intent and fundamental intelligence behind the project. 

Anne Holtrop has based himself in Muharraq and has built a legacy of projects (not only in and around the Pearling Path but beyond in Manama too) which have made him almost the de facto city architect. His own office is in the once-burnt shell of a warehouse in the still-lively souk just off the path, and he has transformed the old colonial-era Manama customs house into an impressive, though rather empty-looking, modern post office. 

The pearl in which the path culminates is the Siyadi Majlis and Pearl Museum. This is a complex of domestic, semi-public, formal, commercial and informal spaces carefully restored and added to. The Siyadi Majlis (the gathering place within the domestic compound) was once a place of business as well as conversation, as traders bought and sold the pearls found around the islands. Its history runs from the mid-19th to the 20th century as the house grew to meet the needs of the family and its business.

One room, with a painted, coffered ceiling and gem-like coloured glass in the windows and fanlights, appears as a kind of jewel-box with pierced screens filtering the brilliant glare and throwing coloured light onto the surfaces. The Pearl Museum is here too – a series of surprisingly austere rooms also made precious through surface, in this case via the application of silver to raw plaster walls. It’s a curious, seductive finish, recalling OMA’s gold-leaf wrapping of the industrial surfaces of the Fondazione Prada in Milan. It makes the walls shimmer and, as it patinates, the shades of silver turning to rust and lead are captivating – a literal foil for the surprisingly sparse vitrines. Pearls, of course, are tiny and even in piles or displayed in exotic pieces of jewellery, they occupy only a small sliver of the space, so it is the architecture itself which is left to make an impression here. And it does. The silvering creates a pearlescence echoing the sheen of the items on display. 

The openings in the monolithic walls are few and placed high up. The glazing meanwhile is rough cast, almost appearing filmy and translucent rather than transparent, adding to a sense of seclusion and interiority. In one area (rather tongue in cheek, this, the bathrooms) a kind of James Turrell-style skylight – unframed and surprising – captures an irregular sliver of bright blue stratosphere. 

The new spaces are solid and weighty, their rough concrete walls a response to the older earthen architecture of the island but also an anchor to contain the frothier, kitschier spaces of the Majlis with its self-consciously ostentatious decoration.

This is a complex and deeply intelligent scheme which succeeds in reconciling the heavily-restored historical spaces, the traditional vernacular, the now-public nature of the compound and the external streetscape – a place of ongoing working class life – in a richly-layered and enticing manner. Neither excessively respectful towards history or seduced by the usual demands for perfection of the white cube in the contemporary museum space, it has insinuated itself into the city and become a real and pivotal part of its everyday life. 

Edwin Heathcote is a writer, architect  and architecture critic of the Financial Times

In numbers

GIA 1320m²
Construction cost $1.8m