At the site of one of Kuwait’s last remaining traditional mosques, an all-male construction crew is busy stripping a wall of the peeling plaster that covers the original building blocks. Supervising the reconstruction and issuing orders in a mismatch of Arabic and Farsi is the lone woman in sight, architect Evangelia Simos Ali. It is the twentieth such mosque that she has helped save since the late 1980s.

“Evy,” as she is known to friends and colleagues alike, is an Australian-born Greek married to a Kuwaiti. A quiet woman with a twinkle in her hazel eyes, Evy began what would become a lifetime of advocacy work to save... Kuwait’s heritage buildings when she moved to the country soon after her marriage.

“I first came to Kuwait in 1977 for my wedding party,” she says. “Being both a foreigner and an architect, I was instantly fascinated with its old buildings – they seemed to convey a sense of living history.”
 
“Buildings can tell you so much about a particular time and place,” she says, smiling. “For example, if you look at the walls of the old nurses’ hostel in Kuwait City, you will see that there are jagged bits of glass from soda bottles embedded into the cement to keep intruders from climbing the walls and fraternizing with the young nurses. Those little colorful spikes in the wall give you real insight into the people that lived within them.”  

When Evy returned to Kuwait some years later, she knew that traditional buildings were her passion. “I wasn’t really interested in working on anything else. Beautiful old buildings were being knocked down like crazy and Kuwait was emerging as a totally modern town, losing something of its essence in the process. The few buildings that remained were neglected – no one knew what they were, who they belonged to, or any of the stories behind them.”
She  decided to  make it her personal  mission  to  find  out.

Evy began working at the Kuwait Municipality, creating a heritage building register to “list” traditional structures left standing and grade them in terms of historical importance. She also began photographing buildings and analyzing them to see how they had evolved over time, using aerial photographs from the 1950s as her reference point. Evy then mobilized a campaign to save the most important old buildings and restore them to their original form. There were many challenges along the way. “Especially in the beginning, doing this sort of work was really about changing people’s attitudes – encouraging them to embrace their culture and heritage rather than destroying it in favor of the new and shiny,” she points out. 

Working with both the National Council for Arts and Letters as well as the Awqaf Ministry and Foundation, Evy has since taken the lead on every single mosque restored in Kuwait since 1998. She has also worked as a consultant on a number of other renovation projects for historic buildings.

Her work has not stopped there, however. Evy continues to try to influence the attitude of the next generation by lecturing to young architecture students at Kuwait University on heritage buildings, and also conducts a “heritage walk” several times a year for the public through the Dar Al-Athar Al-Islamiya.
Her latest project is to try to convince governmental authorities to rebuild the old town-wall that protected Kuwait against foreign invaders in the 1920s. Her vision is to construct one segment of the wall per year, using a design chosen from an annual competition open to university students.

“It will become a permanent national art instillation in the heart of the City, marked along its length by heritage markers that tell the story of old Kuwait,” she says enthusiastically. “Imagine it: maybe one segment of the wall will be made of a sheet of running water and the next will be an illusory light projection, and the third segment will be formed of clay and sea stone with colorful mosaic images on its surface.” “Together though, it will form a seamless bridge that brings Kuwait’s past into its future.” It is a bridge that Evy has been building in her work every day for over twenty years. “It will become a permanent national art instillation in the heart of the City, marked along its length by heritage markers that tell the story of old Kuwait,” she says enthusiastically. “Imagine it: maybe one segment of the wall will be made of a sheet of running water and the next will be an illusory light projection, and the third segment will be formed of clay and sea stone with colorful mosaic images on its surface.”
“Together though, it will form a seamless bridge that brings Kuwait’s past into its future.” It is a bridge that Evy has been building in her work every day for over twenty years.