Dubai Design Week 2026: A Journey Through Desert Oases, Kashmiri Craft, and Architectural Innovation

At the heart of Dubai Design District, the installation 'Three Gardens and a Room' stands as a striking, yet accessible, centerpiece. Its curved walls, painted in vibrant hues of pink, ochre, and yellow, enclose serene spaces filled with desert trees, offering a tranquil escape from the surrounding urban landscape of glass and steel. These installations, which won this year's Urban Commissions, an annual initiative of Dubai Design Week, demonstrate how precise architectural elements can redefine a space. Developed by NAO Architects, the project directly addresses the theme of 'Atmospheres,' exploring the impact of spatial design on emotional and physical well-being.

Reem Nassour, founder of NAO Architects, described the open call as highly inspiring and intuitive, prompting architects to consider color, materiality, texture, shade, and temperature. The design of 'Three Gardens and a Room' draws inspiration from Gottfried Semper's 19th-century treatise, 'The Four Elements of Architecture.' Nassour reinterprets Semper's core components—the roof, the hearth, the mound, and the enclosure—through local interpretations. The 'mound' is represented by a grassy hill within a yellow circular structure, featuring desert acacias. The 'hearth,' found in an ochre structure, is a seating area shaded by sidr trees, rather than a traditional fireplace. The 'roof' is realized in a pink structure where samr tree branches create an overhead canopy. The 'enclosure,' a connecting space with seating and gravel, is designed to evoke nostalgia and introduce the subtle sound of footsteps on gravel, reminiscent of UAE's traditional pathways.

The installation's pop colors and circular structures, featuring mashrabiya-like perforations, serve as a nostalgic nod to older houses painted in bright, heat-reflecting colors. Nassour noted that these colors were chosen for their dynamic appearance throughout the day, shifting from white at noon to orange in the afternoon.

Further immersing visitors in diverse cultural narratives, an indoor installation titled 'Herding the Unheard: Traces of an Unwritten Language' transports attendees to North Karnataka, India. This collaboration between Avid Learning ME and Dakhnii Diaries, founded by designer Varsha Rani Solanki, explores the unique communication between Kuruba shepherds and their sheep. The exhibit showcases Solanki's five-year research, featuring felted wool panels, field recordings of shepherd calls, videos, and traditional wool cloaks. Solanki's work highlights the challenges faced by indigenous communities and their traditional livelihoods due to the decline of traditional skills and the threat to Deccani sheep breeds.

Solanki is actively working with a group of women in North Karnataka, teaching them wet felting techniques to help them utilize Deccani sheep wool for commodified goods. The installation emphasizes the distinct texture and color of this wool and features listening stations where visitors can experience the unique communication between shepherds and their flocks. The exhibition underscores the idea of a language that transcends words, a special communication between people, animals, and craft.

These explorations of alternative communication and knowledge transmission are central to the Abwab exhibition, housed in Building Seven. This year's Abwab features five commissioned works from across Asia and Africa, united by the theme 'In Other Words.' Caoimhe CJ Reynolds, curator and head of programme at Dubai Design Week, explained that the theme aims to open the initiative to more voices and explore how language and knowledge are communicated through various mediums, including architecture, typography, and materials.

Among the notable works is 'Taleem,' a large-scale cubic installation by Dubai-based Varussi, founded by Owais Asif Khan and Samreen Junaid Wani. Inspired by Kashmiri weaving traditions, specifically the notation systems used for hand-knotted carpets and Kani shawls, visitors can enter and experience the structure. Another piece, 'Shhhhhhhh' by Dalia Rafeh, uses red neon iterations of the Arabic letter 'sheen' to evoke both silence and the bold aesthetics of city signage, reflecting the idea that sometimes words are insufficient to express complex realities.

Other works in the exhibition include 'Cheent Devanagari' by Kanaka Raghavan, which uses block printing and translucent textiles to explore Devanagari script traditions, and Grace Shieh’s 'A Library of Paper Memories,' which presents handmade paper with fragments of poems, emphasizing the paper's texture and form as a primary mode of communication. Vivek Premachandran's 'Non/Sense' uses fragments of text from Philip K Dick and placeholder text to create a typographic work with a cartographic quality. The event runs at Dubai Design District until November 8.