Pressure cooker
Azza Aboualam explores how architecture can respond to the food security challenge.
By Charles Shafaieh
The UAE has grappled with aridity for its entire existence. Its strategies for dealing with it, however, are rarely celebrated globally and often undocumented locally. Sharjah-born Azza Aboualam, an architect and assistant professor at Zayed University in Dubai, hopes to change this as the curator of the nation’s pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia, which opens on May 10.
Her exhibition, Pressure Cooker, directly responds to Biennale curator Carlo Ratti’s prompt, One place, one solution. “If every country brings one success to the table, together we can assemble a global kit for adapting to the future,” he states in a clarion call to participants about tackling what he deems “a burning world.” Examining the overlap between architecture and food production, Aboualam will showcase ways in which Emiratis have invented and adapted agricultural methods to suit their environment.
She focuses on greenhouses, which originated 2,000 years ago in Rome. While in Rome plants had to be kept warm, the UAE faces the opposite. On field trips throughout the country, Aboualam documented practices for cooling that have been successful over generations. A farmer in Fujairah, for example, altered a greenhouse that was failing to dry his dates appropriately. Another farmer, near Dubai, helps ensure his banana trees thrive by employing misters inside a green-shade net.
Aboualam will also introduce a greenhouse kit, similar to IKEA furniture, that, she says, “would be sent out, bought, or subsidised for families and that could be built in their backyards.” By mitigating fears about cost, she hopes even lay farmers will consider this architectural technology easy and approachable.
“Techniques of resilience need to be highlighted and promoted to the rest of the world, starting with the Gulf region and then other arid environments,” Aboualam says.
Photograph by Nino Consorte/Seeing Things. Courtesy of National Pavilion UAE–La Biennale di Venezia.
