A shelter for Gaza and a traditional Ahwari reed house are among the pavilions at this year’s Dubai Design Week, which explored using natural and circular materials to expresses their context.

The festival’s landmark 10th edition featured work by more than a thousand designers from over 50 countries including more or less “every single country in the Arab world”, according to Dubai Design Week director Natasha Carella.

“I think it’s really important for people here to tell their own stories through design, rather than waiting for somebody to tell it for them and to move away from certain stereotypes as well,” she said.

“It was quite common before to import a lot of things, even the manufacturing offering,” she added. “And that has completely changed over the last 10 years very quickly.”

Most notably, architects from across the region including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Palestine, showed experimental pavilions exploring how local design languages and materials could be used to create more sustainable architecture sensitive to its context.

“We’re always looking to the future for new materials that are supposedly sustainable when there’s all these ancient techniques that have been there for thousands of years that people don’t even really know about,” Carella told Dezeen.

The five examples below combine vernacular expressions and regional ingredients like palm fronds and reeds with modern innovations like mycelium and parametric design. Read on for more.

Stoot by Oxara and MULA

Following last year’s Abwab commission, Emirati architect Abdalla Almulla has returned to Dubai Design Week with a pavilion that showcases the possibilities of a novel concrete binder made from construction waste.

Developed by ETH Zurich spinoff Oxara, the low-carbon binder is used as a substitute for cement – concrete’s key ingredient responsible for around eight per cent of global emissions – more than any other material except fossil fuels.

Almulla designed the pavilion, composed of three pairs of columns connected by low benches and a traditional palm-frond roof, to showcase the material’s strength and durability while allowing people to touch and interact with it.

The project presents local architects and developers with a concrete alternative that emits up to 90 per cent less carbon while finding new uses for Dubai’s abundant construction waste.

“Dubai generates a lot of waste and a lot of demolition waste, which nowadays is not reused at all,” said Oxara co-founder Thibault Demoulin. “We believe it’s a very interesting emerging market and I think it’s also understood by the authorities, who want to push it as well.”

A Present/Absent Mudhif by Ola Saad Znad

Architect Ola Saad Znad worked with the Indigenous Ahwari people of Iraq’s southern marshes to reconstruct one of their traditional mudhif houses in the centre of Dubai’s design district.

Casting a striking contrast with the neighbourhood’s towering newbuilds, the pavilion is made almost entirely of reeds – woven into mats to form walls and perforated panels for cross ventilation or turned into rope that is used to bind the stalks together into arches and crossbeams.

As it grows locally in the swampland, the reed is naturally water-resistant and, much like its distant cousin bamboo, balances flexibility and durability so it can be bent into self-supporting structures.

By bringing these millennia-old sustainable building techniques to an international stage, Znad aims to raise awareness of Ahwari craftsmanship and culture as a whole, which is increasingly at risk of extinction as climate change threatens to drain the marshes.

“The woman is a dominant part of their families, which is very interesting in the Arab world – she is the one who builds and she’s the one who works,” said Znad, who was born in Iraq but grew up in Bahrain.

“She’s very much equal to the man, which is something I really honour and I feel like the world needs to know that we have this kind of mentality in the Middle East.”

ReRoot by Dima Al Srouri, MycoSphere and Studio Cartier

Developed in response to the growing displacement crisis in Gaza, ReRoot is a prototype for a temporary shelter made from local palm offcuts and mycelium – the root structure of fungi.

The palm fibres were used both to make the pavilion’s flat-packed oriented strand board frame and also as a substrate to grow the mycelium, which metabolises the plant waste and turns it into solid panels.

These panels were then slid between the structure’s I-beams, like discs in a game of Connect Four, functioning as both cladding and insulation.

The square modules can be spaced apart to create window openings and easily pulled out of the building frame and replaced if they are damaged – or if the temporary shelter is ultimately demounted.

Jordanian-Palestinian architect Dalia Hamati says the panels can be composted and used as fertiliser for a vegetable garden to provide food security for refugees.

“We were working together to figure out how we can bring dignity to the design,” said Hamati, who collaborated with mycelium experts MycoSphere and Studio Cartier to realise the prototype.

“We raised the ground above the soil to give protection against diseases and added ramping to bring accessibility for amputees.”

Iwan by Abdulqader Alsuwaidan, Nawaf Alghamdi, Hayat Almousa and Lama Dardas 

Four Saudi architecture students came together to design this pavilion, which reimagines the vaulted halls or iwans found in Islamic architecture using only folded aluminium sheets.

Stacked on top of each other like Lego blocks, the concave metal modules were designed to resemble muqarnas, traditional decorative elements in which tiers of pointed niches are carved out of the ceiling to create a three-dimensional pattern.

Developed in collaboration with architect Arthur Mamou Mani, the pavilion imagines how a modern material like aluminium – increasingly favoured for its infinite recyclability – can be used to bring Islamic design features into the 21st century.

“Serving as a symbolic gateway, it offers a fresh interpretation of cultural aesthetics, seamlessly blending traditional elements with contemporary design to create a culturally resonant and immersive experience,” the architects said.

The project is the winner of the Tanween Foldable Pavilion Challenge hosted by the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, also known as Ithra.

Photo by Deed

Enfold by Deond

The Enfold pavilion with its recycled cardboard cladding was informed by the spiky exterior of a palm tree trunk but realised using parametric design software.

This allowed design studio Deond to tailor how much of Dubai’s plentiful sun the overlapping modules allow into the interior through their triangular openings, creating a shifting pattern of light and shadow throughout the day.

“It responds to the context,” said co-founder Ross Lovegrove. “You couldn’t put this in the East End of London because there’s no light and it’s going to get wet.”

Although Deond was founded by Lovegrove and creative director Ila Colombo, the studio’s nine-person team is composed mainly of Arab designers.

“We see a lot of design imported to the UAE and I just think it’s not the best approach,” Colombo said. “For us, the importance of the practice is to bring a different perspective and offer something that feels more contextualised and locally truthful to here.”

All photography courtesy of Dubai Design Week unless otherwise stated.

Dezeen is a media partner of Dubai Design Week 2024, which took place from 5 to 10 November. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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