'We're teaching how to view life'

Dr Taha al Douri says his role running the interior design programme at the New York Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and Design in Abu Dhabi goes well beyond acquiring the diverse skills of the profession.

When Dr Taha al Douri received a call from the dean of the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in early 2007 asking him if he'd be interested in running an interior design course that the university was going to set up in Abu Dhabi, he jumped at the chance.

Dr al Douri had spent five years teaching at the institute in New York in and around his private architectural practice. And where else in the world could he see the principles he taught in the classroom spring to life? Dubai was in the middle of an ambitious city-building programme, perhaps the largest in the world. And Abu Dhabi, keen to be home to icons of its own, was coming up with its own projects.

"I found great interest in the timing at which I was approached to lead the programme in Abu Dhabi as it was a time when there was, and still is, so much ground work to be done," he says. "NYIT offers career-orientated education that, I find, is much needed at this time in the UAE where ideas are considerably nearer to materialisation than they would be almost anywhere else." Now, as the assistant dean of the School of Architecture and Design, Interior Design at NYIT's Abu Dhabi campus, Dr al Douri runs a four-year programme that covers everything from the philosophy of design and the history of architecture to interior design and how to produce contract documents.

The programme, which was the first US-based programme to be accredited by the Ministry of Higher Education, has 13 students and a further 10 have just been admitted to the next session. Dr al Douri's goals are to not only prepare students to design projects and learn how to deal with developers and contractors, but also to teach them to maintain a sense of their surroundings and the public. "Really, we're teaching them how to view life, perception, their understanding of themselves and others, so that they get accepted and tolerated, because what they do is something that will need to be accepted and tolerated by the public," he says. "So much is rooted in philosophy and sociology that you wonder where the calculation of quantity and contracts come into play."

It was during his formative years in Iraq that Dr al Douri discovered his passion for the arts and how design can transform a physical building into a place to belong. His first most abiding early memory of design was the family home in Baghdad. Hamad Nakir, one of Iraq's most prominent architects and close friend of his father, designed it. "The most important element of my years in Iraq was the house in which I grew up," he says. "I've never lived in a place like it. There was an inner courtyard, which had a very Mediterranean look. The garden was also very internal with grass in the middle and surrounded by date, pear, apple and peach trees."

Creativity was nurtured in the al Douri family, he says. Born in Baghdad in 1969, he is the youngest in a family of four children. His father, a historian, was the dean of arts and sciences at the University of Baghdad and later became the third president of Baghdad University. His mother taught Arabic literature for 26 years in Iraq. "There is a very strong vein of artistic tendency that runs in the family and we're not really sure where that comes from, but it's very much there," he says.

"My brother plays the guitar and my two sisters draw and paint ? for as long as I can remember, I've been painting and drawing and I guess the family gave me the perfect encouragement by giving me the supplies I needed as a child to do that." Political upheaval made the family leave their home in 1975, when al Douri was just six years old. They moved to Amman. In order to hone his professional skills, Dr al Douri realised he would have to leave home once again. So, in his early 20s, he left for Philadelphia to begin a Masters of Science in Architecture at Pennsylvania State University, the first of his family members to go to the US.

While working on his PhD in architecture, he moved to New York at the age of 27, despite having no job or place to live. He had only a few contacts to help him get on. But he was not the only aspiring young architect drawn to New York and the competition for paying jobs was tough. He had to work for free. His break came when he responded to a newspaper advertisement by the renowned architect Beverly Willis, who was looking for a research volunteer to help with an urban development project in Manhattan.

Dr al Douri worked at her Architecture Research Institute for six months, making the 90-minute trip from Philadelphia. "New York is full of everybody and there's always somebody who's better," Dr al Douri says. "The way to do it for me was to volunteer for a while, at least to get known in certain circles and be recommended. "A lot of things in New York work that way. It seems like a very open place and it sure is, but there are certain professional circles and one needs to establish a reputation in order to move around those circles. It was a very interesting project and working with Beverly was quite an eye-opener for me."

The volunteering and commute paid off: through the institute, Dr al Douri landed his first real job in architecture with Goshow Associates. He made the move to New York and stayed with the firm just under a year. From there, he moved on to Perkins Eastman Architects, which specialised in the design and construction of health care facilities, and later managed projects such as the development of an emergency unit in Long Island for NJCL Architects.

Healthcare design was not where he had intended to practise, but he says he still found it rewarding. The US industry grew at a rapid rate in the past decade with many new hospitals and clinics coming online. "Health care is a very specialist field of architecture, it has a reputation of being really technical and mundane but it is not, it's rapidly evolving." After getting his PhD in 2000, he joined the NYIT in an adjunct teaching capacity. He continued to practise design in the healthcare field.

He stayed in the US for 13 years. During that time he never once returned home because he feared, as an Iraqi citizen, not being able to return to the US. Although he says he sorely missed his family, travelling to see them could risk jeopardising his studies. "I'm very close to my family, so you can imagine how high the phone bills were," he says. Eventually, the distance was too great. He began searching for work closer to Jordan and a former colleague told him about a position at the University of Sharjah.

In 2005, he joined the faculty to help set up its architectural engineering programme. But after his time in New York, Dr al Douri found Sharjah life a little too quiet. "That was a shock and I never really adapted," he recalls. "I buried myself in the university context and busied myself with the course. The upside of the appointment was that I helped to shape the programme and really enjoyed it."

Dr al Douri left Sharjah after one academic year, taking some time figuring out his next career move. He taught for one term at the American University in Dubai when he received a call from the dean of the NYIT. Neither the economic downturn nor the slowing of construction in the UAE has diminished interest in the course. "There's a very interesting relationship between money and education: generally, when there is less money, more people tend to go into school," he says.

And while some students might be pursuing their studies simply as a prerequisite to employment, others are motivated by a need to nurture a creative impulse that would exist no matter the state of economic cycle. "A lot of people go into design to legitimise a natural tendency they have." [e-mail]