Brownbook Magazine: Contemporary Arab Culture

One of my favorite things I saw at Miami Basel was Brownbook, an urban lifestyle magazine that covers contemporary design, politics and creative culture coming out of the Middle East and North Africa. Based in Dubai, the beautifully printed and bound publication feels a little bit like Monocle with its layout but the coverage is more diverse ranging from Istanbul Design Week to Afghani indie rock. The current issue, Urban 50, is their annual survey of fifty unique people and ideas that are transforming the Middle East.

For our annual roundup issue, we’ve scoured the region for the people, ideas, places, businesses and buildings that we think are making the Middle East better today. In Brownbook 24, Our search has taken us to a Cairene radio station, to a college on the banks of the Red Sea, to a rundown area in Casablanca that’s had an injection of community spirit from a converted abattoir.

The coverage in Brownbook along with the NYTimes' recent feature on the many ambitious architectural projects in the Middle East gets me excited about visiting in the upcoming years. Check out the full NYTimes article here and Nicolai Ouroussoff's the accompanying video piece featuring IM Pei, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel speaking about their individual museum projects in Abu Dhabi and Qatar.