He saw himself as a master craftsman planner rather than an artist or technician because to him people

He saw himself as a master craftsman planner rather than an artist or technician because to him people were always more important than things.His professional life began in 1955 when he joined a private practice employed in the design of various projects for the Glasgow Corporation. Duncan remembered with pride his spartan childhood and the craftsmanship of his father. At great sacrifice his parents had sent him to the Ayr Academy and then to the Glasgow School of Art and Strathclyde University. Calculations were made in his head.Duncan was the son of a journeyman. Everything was committed to paper in long hand supported by three-dimensional sketches.

Similarly, he never found time to learn to type or become computer literate. Whenever he was stuck for words he would take a pencil out of his pocket and draw. It was very much the meeting of these two minds that established Jeddah as what Farsi described as "the bride of the Red Sea".By his own admission Duncan never achieved more than "some Arabic". Together with Duncan he developed other bold and imaginative schemes including the recreational corniche forming the Red Sea frontage of the linear city that Duncan and his team had designed. In spite of criticism he introduced sculpture and monuments on to the city streets and promoted the development of a magnificent open air museum of modern art. Without Farsi's intervention the remaining magnificent old buildings within the historic core would have been lost to developers. Both were aesthetes and respected the best of the past as a pointer to the future.

One of the new graduate appointees was Mohamed Said Farsi, a born leader who later became Mayor of Jeddah and was able to provide the drive and initiative without which the master plan could not have been accomplished.At Jeddah, Duncan and Farsi were as brothers. To begin to address at least some of these problems it was decided to establish at Jeddah an inter-disciplinary team of architects, engineers, geographers, statisticians and so on.It was important that the team should include Muslims and that every opportunity be taken to recruit locally-qualified Saudi engineers to work side by side with the expatriates. Above all it was important to understand and respect Islam and the cultural environment it expressed. There was also the language problem and the need to secure the confidence and co-operation of people on the ground. There were no maps or reliable information on which to base a plan. George Duncan was appointed to co- ordinate the project. It was a formidable task.