The 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia opened on 10 May 2025 and continues through to 23 November. Titled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. and curated by Carlo Ratti, this year’s edition invites a broader constellation of voices into the architectural conversation—engineers, artists, scientists, chefs, and philosophers among them. Architecture, here, becomes a space of convergence.
Within this expanded field, several Arab countries return to Venice with new questions and renewed perspectives. For the first time, Qatar and Oman join the Biennale’s national participants, marking a shift in regional presence and ambition. Alongside them, Lebanon, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Bahrain present responses rooted in local context while engaging with the exhibition’s wider call for collective thinking in an era of environmental and cultural adaptation. Among the many global voices shaping this edition, Arab countries present a range of approaches to adaptation and design. Here’s a closer look at their participation.
QATAR – Beyti Beytak. My Home is Your Home. La mia casa è la tua casa
Marking its first official participation at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Qatar presents Beyti Beytak. My Home is Your Home. La mia casa è la tua casa, a two-part exhibition exploring hospitality across the built environments of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Organised by the future Art Mill Museum and produced by Qatar Museums, the exhibition is presented at the Giardini della Biennale and ACP–Palazzo Franchetti.
At the Giardini, a temporary installation titled Community Centre, designed by renowned Pakistani architect and humanitarian Yasmeen Lari, reflects sustainable design principles developed for humanitarian response in Pakistan. Built using bamboo and other low-impact materials, the structure embodies community-focused, environmentally conscious architecture. Throughout the Biennale, the installation will host weekend gatherings inspired by Qatari traditions of welcome. The exhibition is installed in the future permanent Qatar pavilion at the heart of Giardini.
At ACP–Palazzo Franchetti, Beyti Beytak presents work by over 30 architects from across three generations in the MENASA region, including several exhibiting in Venice for the first time. Featuring drawings, models, photographs, and archival materials, the exhibition explores themes of community and belonging through sections on the oasis, city housing, community centres, mosques, museums, gardens, and the architecture of Doha. Notable figures include Raj Rewal, Nayyar Ali Dada, Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil, and Minnette de Silva, alongside contemporary practices such as Marina Tabassum, Sameep Padora, DAAZ Studio, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. A section also honours the legacy of Hassan Fathy, whose work championed socially rooted and vernacular architecture.
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – Pressure Cooker
The National Pavilion UAE participated in the Biennale with Pressure Cooker, curated by Emirati architect Azza Aboualam and presented at the Arsenale. The exhibition explores how architecture can support food security in the face of climate change, using the UAE as a case study. Drawing on archival research, fieldwork, and design-build experimentation, the project proposes modular greenhouse assemblies designed for arid environments.
Each structure rethinks the greenhouse as a kit-of-parts—roof, wall, floor, tools, and materials—recombined to respond to environmental conditions and crop needs. Inside, visitors encounter crops with regional ties and unexpected species like blueberries, grown in climate-adaptive settings.
While rooted in the UAE’s landscape, the installation also reflects on its temporary home in Venice, engaging with both contexts. Pressure Cooker becomes a living experiment, measuring how architecture might shape food systems across shifting geographies—inviting visitors to consider where cultivation and construction might meaningfully converge.
SAUDI ARABIA – The Um Slaim School: An Architecture of Connection
Saudi Arabia’s pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale presents The Um Slaim School: An Architecture of Connection at the Arsenale, curated by Beatrice Leanza and featuring the work of Syn Architects (Sara Alissa and Nojoud Alsudairi). The exhibition explores the Um Slaim Collective’s research into Najdi architecture in Riyadh, using it as a springboard to rethink collective learning and spatial practice. The pavilion aims to examine architecture as a medium for collective learning, proposing new spatial practices to address contemporary social and environmental challenges.
Housed within a textile-sheltered scaffold structure, the pavilion itself acts as a living archive, gathering photographs, models, sound, and film. A central sculptural table, which functions as both a map and a gathering place, is a key feature of the pavilion, symbolising the intersection of architecture and community.
The exhibition also includes contributions from collaborators of Um Slaim Collective: a sound scape by composer Mohammed Alhamdan, an installation by artist Maha Malluh, and a photo series by architecture photographer Laurian Ghinițoiu. Alongside the exhibition, the public programme, BUILT/UNBUILT, explores participatory practices and the role of architecture in shaping education and community.
LEBANON – The Land Remembers
Lebanon is also marking its presence at the Biennale with its exhibition The Land Remembers, a fictional ministry — the Ministry of Land Intelligens — committed to confronting ecocide and reimagining architecture as a tool for environmental healing. Located in the Arsenale, the pavilion unfolds as an activist space rather than a traditional exhibition. Through soil bricks embedded with wheat seeds, it materialises its mission: that land precedes architecture, and that architects must take active responsibility in times of destruction.
Divided into four departments — Ecocide Reports, Counter-Mapping, Endemic Species, and Strategic Healing — the installation maps the erasure of Lebanon’s landscapes through war, toxic contamination, and deliberate devastation. Visitors are invited to engage, to sign, to act.
What grows from the pavilion may be symbolic, but its call is rooted in reality: the need to heal, protect, and rethink our relationship with land. Lebanon’s ecological crisis becomes a broader reflection on the stakes of rebuilding in an age of environmental collapse.
SULTANATE OF OMAN – Traces
Marking its first participation at the Biennale, Oman’s pavilion at the Arsenal reimagines the Sablah – a traditional communal space – offering a pathway to resilience and connection. Rooted in cultural memory, Traces reframes this architectural form as a space that bridges the past and the present, shaping future connections. The Sablah is more than just a space; it’s a living, evolving environment where stories are shared, decisions are made, and communities come together.
The pavilion reinvents the Sablah as a vibrant symbol of Omani identity, where tradition and contemporary needs coexist. Every corner of this space reflects authenticity, renewal, and the seamless integration of cultural history with modernity. Traces highlights how the Sablah not only embodies Oman’s rich cultural legacy but also serves as a living link, connecting generations and guiding future architectural practices grounded in sustainability and community.
KINGDOM OF BAHRAIN – Heatwave
Heatwave, Bahrain’s contribution at the Arsenale, turns its attention to this reality, asking what architecture can offer when heat becomes constant. The exhibition focuses on construction sites — spaces of labour and exposure — using them as a lens to re-examine passive cooling methods. Wind towers, shading devices, and other vernacular strategies are revisited and re-engineered, bridging inherited knowledge with contemporary needs.
Rather than nostalgic preservation, Heatwave imagines how such techniques might evolve—scaled, adapted, and made communal. The pavilion sketches out possibilities for public space that ease thermal stress while remaining rooted in local identity. Architecture here is not only a form of shelter, but a means of adaptation and continuity in a warming world.
EGYPT – Let’s Grasp the Mirage
At the Giardini, Egypt’s pavilion – Let’s Grasp the Mirage – invites visitors into a reflective space where an imagined oasis becomes both setting and metaphor. The installation unfolds as an interactive “game”, offering a series of choices that mirror the real-world tensions between preservation and development. The oasis — a fragile system of life within the desert — serves as a symbol for ecological precarity and cultural continuity.
The mirage is to suggest that harmony between progress and sustainability may be as elusive as it is necessary. Inspired by Karl Popper’s words, “The future is open… we all contribute to determining it”, the pavilion places agency in the hands of the visitor. In doing so, it reframes the oasis not as an isolated anomaly, but as a lens through which to consider global environmental fragility, and our collective responsibility in shaping what comes next.
KINGDOM OF MOROCCO – Materiae Palimpseste
Morocco’s pavilion at the Arsenale, Materiae Palimpseste, serves as a manifesto that prompts reflection on the future of traditional Moroccan craftsmanship. Acting as both a glossary and an archive, the exhibition presents an inventory of past construction techniques and local materials. Through a multi-scalar approach, it invites visitors to reconsider and reimagine these methods for contemporary use.
The installation offers an immersive experience, guiding visitors on a sensory journey through Morocco’s diverse landscapes. Organised into 72 vertical columns, each made from distinct materials, the space evokes the varied altitudes and topographies of the country. These tactile, visual, and sonic elements form a unique architectural landscape that celebrates Morocco’s rich construction culture. By fragmenting traditional processes, Materiae Palimpseste encourages deeper understanding and the potential for reinvention, inspiring future generations to rethink and adapt these techniques in a sustainable way.
KUWAIT – Kaynuna
Kuwait’s pavilion, also located in the Arsenale, presents Kaynuna, an exhibition that examines the dissonance between space, time, and matter in shaping the built environment. It reflects on the social, political, and economic forces that have influenced Kuwait’s architectural landscape, critiquing the nation’s modernisation path, where demolition often replaces adaptation, and vernacular heritage is steadily erased.
Kaynuna proposes an alternative framework—one that reclaims cultural values while integrating sustainable methodologies. It bridges theory and practice, offering a model for development that is both resilient and locally grounded. Moving beyond surface aesthetics, the exhibition envisions identity as an evolving construct, rooted in context and continuity. In doing so, it calls for a hybrid approach to architecture—intentional, adaptive, and responsive to the conditions of the present while mindful of the past.