Manama: a gate that once faced the sea, a house of the Qur’an and towers built around three turbines

The Bab Al Bahrain gate marks a historic entrance to Manama Suq in the city centre. Bahrain’s cultural-heritage authority says government offices once occupied the building and that it overlooked the sea. The authority’s visitor page says the building houses tourism offices and a visitor centre. Its project page describes a permanent ground-floor gallery and the restoration effort to revive Manama’s old centre. Fuad Al Ansari’s 2009 Newcastle thesis describes the open land north of Prior Road (now Al Khalifa Road) as a working waterfront. People built boats, anchored vessels there, and stored coral stone taken from nearby shallows. Al Ansari writes that Prior Road once lay under water, and that by the late 1920s Sea Road (now Government Road), built over reclaimed land, had become a public area along the shore. Al Ansari notes that the new Sea Road seawall made boatbuilding and coral-stone storage impossible at that spot.[2][3][1]

Beit Al Qur’an is in Manama’s Diplomatic Area, off Exhibition Avenue. Bahrain’s cultural-heritage authority lists a mosque, auditorium, madrasa, museum and art exhibitions at the complex. In her May/June 2000 feature, Ni’Mah Isma’il Nawwab describes the Qur’anic frieze on the exterior and the daylight that small stained-glass domes bring into the inner courtyard. Dr Abdul Latif Jassim Kanoo founded the museum. Nawwab says Kanoo entrusted the collection to the 1990 foundation he created to operate the institute and preserve historic manuscripts. Nawwab singles out a manuscript made for Safavid Shah Husayn I on sandalwood, and an octagonal, 43 mm Qur’an written in ghubari script. The mosque’s commissioned glass dome is 16 m wide and bears Verse 18 of Surat al-Tawbah in Egyptian artist Ahmad Mustafa’s hand. The mihrab (prayer niche) is faced with blue ceramic tiles by Turkish craftsmen, and the Throne Verse runs around its perimeter. Nawwab reported in 2000 that the collection included more than 5,000 Qur’anic manuscripts, some complete and some partial.[4][5]

The Bahrain World Trade Center stands on King Faisal Highway. Three turbines are mounted on bridges between its twin towers. Building magazine’s 2008 report describes the towers’ aerofoil-shaped wings as a channel for the wind: the gap between them is 120 m at the front and 30 m at the rear. The report says the 70-tonne turbine bridges were lifted into place as units with strand jacks because a crane could not raise them. A 2015 computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study by Chaudhry, Calautit and Hughes and the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat entry list each turbine at 225 kW with a 29 m rotor; Consulting-Specifying Engineer reported that all three first turned together on 8 April 2008. Building estimated 1,300 MWh of annual output and reported a forecast share of 10–15% of the building’s energy demand. The 2015 paper cites an estimate of 11–15%, or 1,100–1,300 MWh per year. These are projected figures; the sources read for this page do not give a measured annual total. In its CFD model, the 2015 study reports air speed rising from a 6 m/s reference to 7.1 m/s, with approach speed at the top turbine 17% higher than at the lowest one.[6][7][8][9]