Modern Heritage Research Grants

Registers of the Unseen is a research proposal exploring the fading layers of Abu Dhabi’s urban memory along a single street. Beyond iconic landmarks, the street holds intimate histories — in mid‑rise façades, neighbourhood parks, and storefronts — that have been overwritten by redevelopment. These spaces were once shaped by texture, rhythm, and daily life, now dulled or erased. The project focuses on three typologies: storefronts as cultural façades, residential façades as carriers of collective memory, and parks as shared civic interiors. Using field documentation, oral histories, archival research, and material studies, it aims to recover the sensory and emotional traces of these places. Interviews and historical records will reveal how these spaces were lived, altered, and remembered. The final outcome is a research proposal that reframes heritage not as preservation of form, but as recognition of the fleeting textures, rhythms, and gestures that embody the unseen history of the street and the city.