Brutalism in United Arab Emirates

Before the glass towers, the Emirates built in concrete. The oil boom of the 1970s and 1980s brought modernist architecture to the Gulf, much of it by architects from the Arab world, South Asia, and the socialist bloc, who adapted exposed concrete to the desert climate with deep recesses and shading grids. Dubai's Bus Terminal (1983) by the Bulgarian architect Georgi Kolarov belongs to this layer of the city, a functional public building from the era before the emirate's postmodern and high-tech turn. Such structures are now rare survivors of early Gulf urbanism.