Dubai Design Week: How coral stones, reefs and mycelium inspired the winning Abwab projects

Winners will be unveiled in November

An Absent Mudhif draws from the architectural heritage of the Ahwaris, who inhabit the marshes in south Iraq as well as the Hawizeh marshlands along the country’s border with Iran. Photo: Dubai DesignShow more

The works created annually for Dubai Design Week's Abwab initiative are a highlight of the creative event. This year, the focus is on regenerative designs that build upon vernacular architecture – everyday structures designed to minimise their environmental impact. The three winners of the initiative have responded to the creative brief in very different ways, using materials that range from reeds and coral stones to mycelium.

The winning installations will be unveiled in full during Dubai Design Week, which will be running at d3 between November 5 and 10. Abwab (which is Arabic for doors) is a key component of the annual programme. Every year, it commissions installations and pavilions, aiming to bolster designers from the South West Asian and North African regions. More than 180 designers have participated in the programme since it was established in 2015.

An Absent Mudhif

Ola Znad is one of the three winners of the initiative this year. Her winning design An Absent Mudhif draws from the architectural heritage of the Ahwaris, who inhabit marshland in the Ahwar of Southern Iraq, as well as the Hawizeh marshlands along the country’s border with Iran. For this reason, the Ahwaris are often referred to as the Marsh Arabs.

“They are a very interesting community because women have a dominant role in society, she is the one who works,” says Znad, an Iraqi architect who lives in Bahrain.

Znad says she has been researching the architecture idiosyncratic to the area for almost four years now, and has long been intent on “capturing the essence of the mudhif in an installation”. The project seems especially important now, she notes, as the draining of Ahwar’s waters is putting this vernacular architecture at risk.

The mudhif is a common sight across the Ahwar of Southern Iraq. The houses, with arching designs, are made using reeds harvested from the area. It often has ceremonial functions, being used for weddings, funerals and other large social gatherings.

The artist plans to construct a mudhif at d3 in a way that pays homage to original forms, materials and intent. “The mudhif is kind of a majlis. It’s a social space,” Znad says. “I want to also host people in Dubai Design Week, and also let people experience the structure and the beauty of the structure. The water, the sand, the reeds, everything is from Ahwar. I want the people to experience the real mudhif.”

Znad says she is in frequent contact with people from Ahwar, regularly consulting them on the design and construction process of the mudhif. “It's very interesting that they are not architects, but they are really accurate with dimensions,” Znad says. “They told me exactly the pieces I needed and helped me with issues that I had.”

The mudhif at Dubai Design Week will be a multi-sensory experience, she says. “I am thinking of playing around with the senses of the person when they experience the space. There will be a sound, potentially also a scent of water. There will also be an exhibition inside of my research and the building process.”

Znad is also planning on constructing a bench from the reeds, to showcase the possibilities of the material. “The reeds have a lot of heat resistance,” she says. “"There are a lot of concrete benches in public, but we can replace them with reeds. Unlike concrete, reeds repel heat, so the benches won't be as hot when you sit on them. If it's successful, maybe we can also use it as furniture and a sustainable material."

ReRoot

ReRoot is a collaborative project that redefines vernacular architecture through an ecological perspective. It also addresses growing refugee crises around the world and the need for humane housing solutions.

At its heart, the project is an emergency housing concept that is delivered in flat-pack kits, which can be easily stored, transported and assembled. However, what makes it particularly interesting is that the concept uses mycelium as its core material, a root-like network of fungal threads.

ReRoot was developed by Dima Al Srouri, a sustainable development specialist who focuses on urban planning and sustainability; Dalia Hamati, an architect and faculty member at the American University of Sharjah; as well as Rosa Hamalainen and Andy Cartier, founders of Studio Cartier, which specialises in mycelium products.

“The concept was inspired by the crises that are happening around the world, and we could see the suffering of so many people, and we wanted to contribute professionally with our work,” Al Srouri says.

The name of the concept project, ReRoot, reflects its use of mycelium and its poetic implications of helping people find stability during turbulent periods.

“Mycelium is the root of fungi that actually exists within the soil,” she says. “It actually holds the land together. The call for this installation is about vernacular, and we thought what could be best to represent vernacular than to link it back to the soil.”

Mycelium is already being used as a replacement to styrofoam, and seen as a more eco-friendly approach to packaging. However, it also has significant potential in the construction sector and can be moulded into bricks or panels, such as with ReRoot.

“The type of fibres, the size of the fibres, the way you grow, it, the species you use, they all bring slightly different final properties,” Cartier says. For ReRoot, the mycelium is grown on palm tree waste. However, it can also absorb nutrients from other organic wastes, making it possible to develop the material from readily-available resources.

“We actually mix mycelium seeds with organic waste,” Cartier says. “Mycelium has this capacity to degrade everything that is wood-like or fibre-like material. This is where the advantage is really interesting, talking about hyper-locality and vernacularity in terms of material available. This capacity to degrade organic waste makes it extremely versatile as a material.”

This is how ReRoot responds to Abwab’s creative call to action, Hamati says. “If vernacular in architecture is about using local materials and construction methods, couldn’t we think of mycelium as a type of eco vernacular? The fact that it's grown in place, that it's using these local substrates, and that as it grows, it's actually registering its environmental conditions,” she says.

Design considerations were also taken for ReRoot to become a housing unit that considers the dignity and safety of its denizens. “We looked into the standard sizes of refugee shelters from the UN and their advice for the design,” Hamalainen says. “We wanted to keep in mind the safety also of the people living there.”

“It's rectangular in shape, and it has a mono-pitch roof,” Hamati adds. “The mono-pitch helps with adverse environmental conditions, which you don’t typically find in shelters. The floor is raised to give a layer of protection from the ground condition. The ramp promotes [movement] for victims of war. The door is recessed to add a layer of protection and security.”

The design is also modular, meaning that the housing units can be assembled based on the environment. Several units can also be clustered to one another. “You can aggregate two or three or multiple units together, where it becomes a village, where people live together within different orientations and different arrangements that can serve the community,” adds Al Srouri.

Material Witnesses and Narrating Lifeforms

Miriam Hillawi Abraham's project for Abwab builds upon a work she was commissioned for at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial. In The Museum of Artifice, she reconstructed the facade of Beite Abba Libanos, an underground rock-carved church in Lalibela, Ethiopia. However, she used Himalayan salt blocks from Khewra, Pakistan – a material commonly used in Sharjah as cattle lick. Since then, she has been “working to continue this exploration of cross-cultural material lineage and reimagining territory”.

For Abwab, Abraham has designed an arcade – or armature – that takes cues from the Ottoman-era structures in the Eritrean port town of Massawa. “Former port cities like Massawa are liminal spaces, suspended between cultures, between land and sea, past and present,” the Ethiopian designer, who has a background in architecture, says. “So their vernacular architecture is a language of elsewheres, rather than something rooted in one locale or identity.”

These arcades were typically built from timber, coral-stone and lime-washed stone. Abraham was particularly interested in their use of coral stones, seeing it as a material connection found across early settlements along the East African coast and in parts of the Gulf. However, while coral stones cannot be harvested without harming reefs, Abraham has taken another approach – constructing the stones from wax. The wax is embedded in mortar and as it melts over time, it will reflect upon the disappearing reefs.

“Having seen coral stone walls in Massawa and it’s nearby islands on a visit to Eritrea with my mother in 2018, I wished to create something relating to these sort of irreparable and ineffable structures and material practices of the distant past and a difficult present. In this work the coral stone wall is recreated using wax replicas of coral – fungible, non-precious and destined for ruin.”

Abraham’s arcade will change throughout the course of Dubai Design Week. In that way, the material is a living and decaying element, drawing parallels between the history of human trade and its environmental implications.

“The wax-coral will, ideally, melt under the heat of the sun leaving behind little cavities and voids in the wall and a trickle of gooey wax, like an architecture haunted by its own materials,” she says.