Three Years of Shade
Christian Kerez built four sculptural car parks along Bahrain's UNESCO pearl-diving trail, designed to double as prayer halls and market squares. Two are already gone — to improve access to the heritage they were built to serve.
From the street in Muharraq they don't read as parking structures at all. Swiss architect Christian Kerez poured four of them along the Pearling Path between 2019 and 2023 — concrete slabs bent into continuous sloping ramps, cantilevering out over sidewalks, spiraling up around bare stair columns like something a wave left behind. No ramps in the conventional sense; the floor plates themselves tilt and merge, level bleeding into level. The Architectural Review called them “Temples to the Automobile,” and meant it structurally as much as sarcastically — 45,000 square meters across the four buildings, engineered like something built to be worshipped in, not just parked under.
That wasn't incidental. The Pearling Path is a UNESCO World Heritage site, inscribed in 2012 — a strand of oyster beds, seafronts, and merchant houses commemorating the centuries Bahrain ran on pearl diving before oil made the whole industry obsolete overnight. Kerez's brief wasn't just to store cars for the tourists the trail was meant to attract; he's said outright that the buildings hosted markets, music festivals, skate sessions, children's playgrounds — civic space stacked on top of a parking function, built for a heritage route that draws pilgrims as much as visitors.
In March 2026, per Domus, two of the four — Parking A and Parking C, the one that sat directly across from the historic Sheikh Isa bin Ali House — were already coming down, with no public explanation offered at first. Muharraq's municipal council later tied it to what it called a comprehensive development vision for the historic city, aimed at improving pedestrian access to the very heritage sites the Pearling Path exists to connect. 2026 is also Bahrain's official “Year of Isa Al Kabeer,” commemorating the country's 18th-century founder — the timing isn't coincidental so much as it's the whole point.
Kerez didn't fight it in public. Asked about it, his answer was flat: “It's the king's decision, I don't want to criticize it: if you agree to work in a monarchy you accept its power.”
As of this writing, that's still the most recent confirmed account — Parking A and C down or coming down, B and D standing, nobody saying yet whether they're next. The pearl beds the whole path is named for took the Gulf a few hundred years to build a culture and an economy around. The building put up to honor that lasted about three.