qatar charts architecture of belonging and care across MENASA region at venice biennale

from the works of hassan fathy to balkrishna doshi, the exhibition maps an architectural history of traditions of welcome, gathering, and collective care in the region.

ravail khan May 29, 2025 7 min

Beyti Beytak. My Home is Your Home. La mia casa è la tua casa

Qatar’s national participation at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale maps a cultural and architectural history of traditions of welcome, gathering, and collective care across the MENASA region, split across two sites across the city. Titled Beyti Beytak. My Home is Your Home. La mia casa è la tua casa, its first expression is a temporary pavilion in the Giardini by Yasmeen Lari (read our interview with the Pakistani architect here), while the other is a major archival exhibition inside the Palazzo Franchetti. In the latter, curators Aurélien Lemonier and Sean Anderson treat the metaphor of hospitality as a design principle that has shaped the built environment across geographies and generations — from homes, mosques, and schools to museums, gardens, and even entire cities. Doing so, they delve into some of the greatest, and emerging, profiles that have illustrated this across countries such as Palestine, Pakistan, India, Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Qatar, and beyond. The show presents drawings, models, photos, and more from more than 30 architects and collectives, spanning from Hassan Fathy and Balkrishna Doshi to younger voices like Sumaya Dabbagh, Abeer Seikaly, and Rizvi Hassan.

Throughout the rooms of the historic Palazzo, the show is loosely organized into seven sections — each one pointing to a different typology of collective life, sketching a constellation of projects shaped by climate, community, and care. Here, the oasis is imagined as a generative metaphor for exchange and encounter, while social housing projects from Lahore, Mumbai, and New Gourna offer intimate insights into how the home can be shared, extended, and adapted in various socio-political climates. Mosques and museums, too, are included as civic anchors that embed public life with rituals of togetherness and reflection. The exhibition is produced by Qatar Museums and organized by the forthcoming Art Mill Museum.

qatar’s venice biennale exhibition charts architecture of belonging across MENASA region — on view at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale | image by by Giuseppe Miotto — Marco Cappelletti Studio

qatar museums at venice architecture biennale

The exhibition opens with Reimagining the Oasis, illustrating it as a simple water source in a landscape, a large farm, or even a city, and looking at projects from Iran, Iraq, and North Africa, and more. The space explores the role of the oasis in transmitting cultures over time, examining how water and vegetation have historically generated life, and as an extension, public space.

Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, for instance, in the 1900s continued to examine rural typologies along the waters, and how they could be alleviated for sustainable, collective living. More recently, Jordanian architect Abeer Sekaily has taken inspiration from the craftsmanship behind the tents of nomadic Bedouin communities to create her domed Weaving a Home tent which further questions the social implications of creating shelters for displaced communities.

CIVIC LIFE AS A CONTINUUM across community centers and mosques

Community centers are positioned in the exhibition as sites where architecture directly responds to the needs and practices of the people who use it. Whether improvised on woven mats or embedded in the civic fabric of informal settlements, these projects position design as an extension of shared life rather than a formal imposition. In Iran, DAAZ Office’s Jadgal Elementary School was developed through participatory processes to reflect indigenous spatial customs while supporting education as a tool for economic and cultural resilience. In Cairo, Ahmed Hossam Saafan’s Dawar El Ezba Cultural Center provides a kitchen, workshop, and gathering space within one of the city’s largest informal neighborhoods, designed with and for a marginalized community.

Ahead, the exhibition looks closer into the role of the mosque in particular as both a sacred space and an architectural form crucial to welcoming a wide spectrum of human activity. From Marina Tabassum’s contemporary Bait ur Rouf Mosque in Bangladesh to Sumaya Dabbagh’s Mosque of Mohamed Abdulkhaliq Gargash in the UAE, this part of Beyti Beytak looks at the work of three leading women architects and explores how mosques often act as cooling centres, learning hubs, and places of shelter. Their openness, in plan and in social role, is central to the exhibition’s reading of architecture as hospitable infrastructure.

the making of domestic architecture

In City Houses and Social Housing, we encounter a shifting idea of domestic space, turning toward a more porous environment shaped by rituals and collective gathering. For communities in the MENASA region, the architecture of the home has been organized around cultural and spatial features such as courtyards and terraces that have allowed a degree of both connectivity and privacy. Works on view also consider how domestic spaces might have seeped into the street in the context of the bustling contemporary metropolis, becoming a part of the fabric of the city itself. In this section, drawings of plans outline Hassan Fathy’s New Gourna Village in Egypt, while contemporary examples from Iraq and India show how homes are often co-produced and adapted over time.

the art of gardens in islamic and secular traditions

Building on this, the Art of Gardens section moves inward to explore verdant landscapes as crucial sites of memory and care in today’s cultural spaces, while celebrating their role in visual practices. Projects from India to Qatar trace how gardens operate as sensory and spatial interfaces between built form and natural systems, in both religious and secular contexts. In Islamic traditions, the garden is a metaphor for paradise, symbolically tied to the water resources they hold. But they also work as a cooling device, a place of retreat, and a tool for ecological thinking.

Through carefully selected drawings and fieldwork, the section shows how landscape design carries emotional, spiritual, and architectural weight across institutions in public spaces across the world. One such example is the Chihilsitoon Garden, Kabul’s largest historic public garden which was revitalized after destruction in the war of 1979-80, becoming a crucial shared space for the public and a sustainer of life and livelihoods.