The Sharjah Architecture Triennial (SAT) - the first major platform for architecture and urbanism in the Middle East, North and East Africa and Asia - will hold its third edition with the theme "Architecture Otherwise: Building Civic Infrastructure for Collective Futures".
SAT03 will run from November 14, 2026 until April 14, 2027.
Curated by anthropologist-curator Vyjayanthi Rao, with Associate Curator Tau Tavengwa, SAT03 brings together 32 participants whose practices span architecture, anthropology, urbanism, art, design, education and community initiatives. Through new installations, films, archives, workshops, performances and lectures, this multi-disciplinary edition explores how architecture can support collective life in a rapidly urbanising and interconnected world. Activating the city and wider Emirate, the projects will evolve over the duration of Triennial as part of a comprehensive programme that centres conversation and public interactivity.
Expanding architecture beyond questions of buildings and form, Architecture Otherwise foregrounds social, cultural and political infrastructures to examine how communities emerge and grow. Participants will examine migration, displacement, care, food systems, heritage, public space, climate adaptation, mobility, education, spirituality and collective memory, presenting architecture as an evolving practice rooted in people and relationships.
Participants will engage with Sharjah’s layered urban fabric, with some projects developed as part of longer-term residencies, grounding the Triennial in local context.
Several projects investigate what it means to build under conditions of movement, uncertainty and transience. Hiba Bou Akar, Mohamad Hafeda and Nathalie Harb examine how histories of displacement in Lebanon can be carried within mobile, shelter-like installations that incorporate materials from refugee settlements and wartime infrastructures. Aslıhan Demirtaş, Ali Cindoruk, Dilşad Aladağ (Istanbul, Turkey) present a new iteration of Tumblespace, a moveable and adaptable structure informed by traditions of nomadism that creates temporary communities and dialogue. People's Architecture Office (China/US) reconceives everyday flatbed handcarts used for transporting goods as vehicles for both movement and gathering, which can support communal activities such as dining and theatre performances. ABARI presents Weaving Spaces, a monumental bamboo structure that can be dismantled.
Over the course of the Triennial, the structure will move across several locations in Nepal, hosting workshops to celebrate the woven bamboo tradition of Nepal.
Sa'dia Rehman presents There Isn’t a Stone I Don’t Remember (2022), a film about her family’s displacement from Pakistan when the state constructed the Tarbela Dam, and an artist book exploring mobile forms of civic infrastructure that emerged in the region after the dam inundated villages, including her father’s ancestral home.
Other participants examine the impacts of large-scale infrastructural development on people and environments. Kush Badhwar's film project explores the ecological and social consequences of the Navi Mumbai International Airport development, weaving together perspectives and voices of affected communities over time. In a major photographic archive, Rajesh Vora and the National Institute of Design revisit six decades of the Sabarmati River in India – once a valued site of water, seasonal rhythms and economic activity – and how recent urban redevelopment transformed its relationship with the city.
In their focus on human experiences of the city, many projects highlight the importance of placing local communities at the centre of urban development. Megawra Built Environment Collective in collaboration with RIWAQ (Cairo, Egypt) bring together practitioners from Egypt and Palestine to explore how heritage in historic cities is shaped through communities and migrant populations, rather than built form alone. Aga Khan Award-winning POCAA (Dhaka, Bangladesh) champions co-creation as a model for planning and placemaking, while Social Design Collaborative (Delhi, India) will work with migrant communities in Sharjah to imagine alternative urban futures. Tanya Zack, Mark Lewis and Thireshen Govender examine how residents actively shape Johannesburg's urban landscape outside dominant economic frameworks. Cassim Shepard's documentary Housing Agency: Mumbai’s Incremental Neighborhoods revisits collaborative approaches to housing developed in India during the late twentieth century, as a hopeful blueprint for future generations amid today’s housing precarity.
Against this backdrop, other projects focus on the communities that emerge within cities and the social infrastructures that sustain them. Another Empty House (Kerala, India/Dubai, UAE) examines Gulf Malayali gathering cultures through “Koottaymas”, self-organised networks of care and support within migrant communities. Karachi LaJamia creates a nomadic community reading room that shares histories of resistance, ecological knowledge and learning from Pakistan, while Kishwar Rizvi documents the city of Karachi's gymkhana social clubs as sites of memory, conservation and civic repair.
Together, the participants of SAT03 propose new understandings of architecture as a practice grounded in collective life, demonstrating how civic infrastructures are continually produced through acts of care, imagination, movement, learning and solidarity.
Curator Vyjayanthi Rao commented: “Architecture Otherwise focuses on how cities are experienced, co-created, and transformed positioning architecture as the medium through which everyday social and cultural practices shape collective life. Against the exceptionalism, extractive logics, and separations that characterize architecture as usual, the Triennial proposes other ways of imagining, inhabiting, and collectively producing the built environment. Through city-wide activations across the five months of the Triennial, residents, practitioners, and visitors will generate new forms of civic engagement and shared meaning, exploring architecture’s entanglement with sound, food, media, materiality, technology, and ecologies. In contrast to architecture as usual, the Triennial repositions architecture as a lived and collective condition rather than a singular object or event.” - TradeArabia News Service
