Gulf pavilions provide cultural clout

News that Qatar is to become a rare addition to the group of permanent national pavilions at the Venice Biennale’s historic Giardini venue is indicative of the increased involvement of Gulf countries at major global cultural and commercial events. While Qatar’s planned new pavilion, designed by Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh, is still at the concept stage, this summer’s 19th International Architecture Exhibition features six Gulf countries among the national pavilions that take up temporary residence: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE and exhibition newcomer Oman.

Meanwhile, those same six countries have also built temporary national pavilions at Expo 2025 Osaka in Japan, which opened in April, the latest in the five-yearly series of world expos. Again, the growing role of Gulf countries in the expos is clear. Dubai hosted the 2020 event, while Riyadh will host in 2030.

Such events provide a high-profile platform for engaging with an international audience. The Venice Biennale, the leading event for architectural discourse, is curated this year by Italian architect Carlo Ratti with the theme ‘Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective’. Osaka, meanwhile, hopes to attract up to 28 million visitors over its six-month duration.

At Venice, Gulf participants have taken diverse approaches, some focusing on national concerns, others highlighting wider regional themes. Saudi Arabia’s presentation may be a surprise to anyone expecting a focus on the gigaprojects currently underway in the kingdom. Instead, Riyadh-based Syn Architects is presenting The Um Slaim School: An Architecture of Connection. This builds on the practice’s five-year archival and research work studying the displacement of traditional Najdi architecture in the centre of the city. As well as examining vernacular techniques, the ongoing collaborative project – the Um Slaim Collective – explores the values this architecture embodies, and how these can inform teaching, restoration and contemporary development.

Syn was co-founded by Nojoud Alsudairi and Sara Alissa, who studied together in London at the Bartlett. According to Alsudairi, while a lot of architectural knowledge is imported, their research through the collective is a way to focus on local knowledge and production, and bring this discourse into the city ‘to come up with context-driven solutions, which has not been the case in the past years’. ‘If we really plant the seed, this conversation can be more inclusive and collective,’ she says.

The exhibition includes installations from collaborators Maha Malluh, an artist focused on material culture, photographer Laurian Ghinițoiu and sound artist Mohammed Alhamdan, and is accompanied by a programme of laboratorial and public sessions.

Syn is clear that it doesn’t necessarily have the answers. Instead, says Alissa, ‘we’re raising questions as to how we can proceed in Riyadh and the region as a whole’. She adds: ‘Everyone associates Saudi with these mega projects, but we really wanted to convey that there are these collectives that are trying to start these conversations about how and why we build the way we do.’

Learning from the traditional is also one aspect of Qatar’s presentation in Venice, which this year takes two forms: Community Centre, designed by Pakistani humanitarian architect Yasmeen Lari, has been re-erected in the Giardini on the site of Qatar’s future permanent pavilion; and, off-site, the Beyti Beytak exhibition goes beyond national boundaries to explore the theme of hospitality across the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa and South Asia) world.

Community Centre, a bamboo structure with a palm frond roof, showcases Lari’s approach to using local, vernacular materials to provide shelter in the aftermath of flooding and earthquakes. Appropriately for the emphasis on locality, bamboo from an Italian factory was used to replace some of the pavilion structure, which had previously been erected at the National Museum of Qatar.

‘It’s good to make a statement that it’s okay to build in such materials,’ says Lari, who advocates innovation using traditional techniques and local materials to deliver low-carbon, zero-waste results. The concrete approach of the global north is, she says, ‘no longer relevant’.

She adds: ‘I feel that in many countries, as a profession we might become redundant if we don’t embrace the vernacular and try to find the ways we can deal with this whole energy crisis.’

Qatar’s Beyti Beytak exhibition considers the idea of hospitality in the broadest sense of ‘the act of welcoming the other’, according to curator Aurelien Lemonier of Qatar Museums. The exhibition features around 30 contemporary and 20th-century architects, with the work of Hassan Fathy, the Egyptian architect acclaimed for his embrace of the vernacular, a ‘red thread’ running through the show, according to Lemonier.

Ranging across multiple typologies, sections include the oasis, gardens, museums, housing and mosque. The latter features three mosques designed by women architects: Marina Tabassum, Sumaya Dabbagh, and Elizabeth Diller. The architectural heritage of Qatar’s capital Doha is also explored with exhibits including restored historic doors, which traditionally are reinstalled when houses are rebuilt.

Lari also features in this exhibition. ‘The quality of hospitality starts with Yasmeen and her practice, which is both community-based and welcoming,’ said Lemonier.

The Bahrain and UAE exhibitions both consider issues relating to the impact of climate change. While the former, curated by Andrea Faraguna, considers this in relation to liveability and health, the UAE’s Pressure Cooker exhibition, curated by Emirati architect Azza Aboualam, focuses on the intersection between architecture and food security. Her interest in the topic was prompted by the post-Covid rise in the amount of locally grown food in the UAE, a response to national targets to increase this from 10 per cent to 50 per cent by 2051.

‘We’re looking at how architecture and food production overlap,’ she says, ‘because how else would you grow blueberries in a desert without a shield – a shade that would help them grow?’

While traditionally the design of such structures is driven by agricultural experts, her research seeks to ‘flip the script’ by bringing in architectural expertise. After extensive fieldwork with the agricultural community, documenting structures for different kinds, scales and contexts of cultivation, the findings formed the basis for architectural research into a modular kit-of-parts. This can be tailored to suit crops and locations, from domestic to neighbourhood and new community scales. These include consideration of various floor options and wall angles to suit different and changing needs. Experimental structures from this research are on show in the exhibition at Venice’s Arsenale.

Aboualam plans to continue the research, and sees the potential to develop a guide to greenhouse construction and trouble-shooting. She hopes visitors will reflect on the relationship between architecture and food production at a time of increasingly arid conditions.

‘I’d really hope that they’d think of where their food comes from,’ she says, ‘and how that could be potentially integrated within their cities and also their backyards and balconies.’

At Expo 2025 Osaka, the form of the pavilion itself, as well as the content, is a key way to communicate the host’s national identity, and also, in some cases, to find resonances in Japanese culture. Architects faced the additional challenge of designing for demountability and reassembly.

Foster + Partners’ pavilion for Saudi Arabia eschews a ‘black box’ exhibition experience, instead comprising an assemblage of stone-clad volumes rising up to 17m. A labyrinthine visitor route through naturally ventilated and shaded paths and courtyards is designed to evoke traditional village architecture. In ground-floor studios, visitors can interact with a rotation of resident Saudi artists and musicians, with hospitality areas located above and events held in the grand central courtyard.

‘We wanted to create a concept where the visitors can actually feel the warmth and kindness of the people of Saudi Arabia, to break any barriers that they might have about the nation,’ says partner Tony Miki.

The design showcases Saudi stone – an important natural resource – as part of a demountable lightweight system. The stone is used in 8mm-thick tiles adhered to a low-carbon, aluminium honeycomb panel and configured in 16 modular types. After the Expo, the plan is to reassemble the steel-framed building in either Japan or Saudi Arabia.

References to traditional Arab sailing dhows can be found in both Kengo Kuma’s Qatar pavilion and Ghotmeh’s spectacular design for Bahrain. In the latter, this motif is also conceived as an intersection point with the tradition of craftsmanship in Japan, according to Ghotmeh, ‘evoking the figure of the dhow as an open boat that’s not finished, that’s under construction, that talks about this meeting point between the two cultures … For me it was important to find ways to build in a way that talks to traditions of building in Japan.’

Jutting timber fins suggest oars. Visitors enter the 14m-high structure as if walking through sails before embarking on a ‘sensorial tour’ of Bahrain. In addition, says Ghotmeh, Bahrain’s relationship with the sea also resonates with that of Osaka, and the waterside location of the pavilion. Like the Saudi pavilion, another key strand to the design was demountability, using engineered timber in 3m and 4m lengths as supplied, to maximise possibilities for reuse after dismantling.

Ghotmeh hopes visitors will understand Bahrain as a progressive country that values craft, and find commonalities with it, as well as appreciating the capacity of humans, when empowered, ‘to generate beautiful structures’.

With its butterfly-like tensile wings, Kuwait’s pavilion, designed by the Australian practice Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA), is also highly expressive. Partner Tobias Wallisser described the concept as a ‘visionary lighthouse’ that conveys Kuwait’s ‘very inviting and very hospitable’ nature. Inside, the design incorporates traditional elements such as a courtyard, a dune landscape and a dome with projections of stars. Exhibits convey both the country’s past and its ‘Vision 2035’ future as a financial and trading hub.

At just 3,500m2, it does not seek to fill its entire plot. ‘It’s not the biggest, not the largest. It doesn’t try to be the most triumphant. But it is very refined and elegant,’ says Wallisser.

His vision for the pavilion’s afterlife reflects a key aspect of major events such as Venice and world expos, whether it be physical artefact or idea: ‘Part of the brief was that it could be taken down and brought back to Kuwait,’ he says. ‘Kuwait brings its vision to the expo, and then brings a souvenir of the expo back to Kuwait. Because it’s all about exchange.’

The Venice Biennale runs till 23 November and Expo 2025 Osaka runs till 13 October