NYUAD’s Heritage Lab Dhakira got commissioned to build a 18-meter long bronze-age ship on New York University Abu Dhabi’s campus starting Spring 2021. As project partners Prof. Felix Beck and Prof. Robert Parthesius proposed to upscale this project and to use the building site during the two year construction period as a platform to showcase Dhakira’s research excellence. Creating an exhibition around the building site was supposed to give a unique opportunity to feature numerous interdisciplinary research projects from the NYU global network. Simultaneously, the building site would have become a testbed for applied technological developments. As the site was planned to be open to public, it would have created multiple access points to share exciting projects, becoming a living platform for academic research, research based project work, presentations, feedback and community engagement. A hub to create meaningful collaborations and nurture heritage research in the UAE. The Monsoon Winds Research Center, a temporary hub for research and knowledge: A Dynamic Interdisciplinary Research Lab, online and in the real world.

Multiple team members from different labs and research fields under the guidance of Profs Parthesius and Beck have contributed to this proposal. The group teamed up during Summer 2020 to the Dhakira Summer Lab to work together on multiple projects that are all embedded and showcased in this proposal. In more than 20 online meetings the team has shared their ideas and challenged their work with their peers.

Contributors in alphabetic order:

–Diego Arias,
–Emily Grace Broad,
–Adham Chakohi,
–Junior Garcia,
–Aytek Jane,
–Rayna Li,
–Alexis Mountcastle,
–Prof. Goffredo Pucetti,
–Nisala Saheed,
–Jonathan Sharfman,
–Prof. Eric Staples,
–Steven Wyks,
–Mohammad Yasser,
–Alia Yunis,
–Tonia Zhang

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the following lock-down measurements from 2020 until 2022 the Monsoon Culture Research Center sadly could never be realised.  Instead the team worked hard to at least get the absolute minimal version of it out of the ground. In the renderings below, one can see the first visuals, and below the outcome which was used for the actual construction of the Má boat.