Dubai Design Week 2025: How two UAE architects are rethinking courtyards as living community spaces

Dubai: Have you ever thought about the courtyard in your home? This simple question became more profound at this year's Dubai Design Week’s Urban Commissions.

From Cairo to Cordoba, courtyards have always been about balanced openness, privacy and a quiet calm. Yet, at the Urban Commissions 2025, designers were invited to ponder on what this shared space could entail. The idea: It goes beyond just an architectural feature. It's a living, breathing piece of community life. Moreover, in the UAE, courtyards have a different story. They are shaped less by formal design, and more by molding to sense of needs and everyday craft.

This idea lies at the heart of the winning proposal, When Does a Threshold Become a Courtyard? by UAE-based studio Some Kind of Practice, founded by architects Omar Darwish and Abdulla Abbas. Known for their deep research and curiosity about local architecture, the duo decided to go beyond what we normally see, and approached the brief as a design exercise.

From fieldwork to form

Their concept draws on extensive field research across the Emirates, from coastal settlements to mountain villages, tracing how the housh, the Emirati courtyard emerged organically within homes. Unlike its counterparts in Egypt or Syria, the housh was not premeditated as the spatial centrepiece of a house; rather, it appeared as a byproduct of need, a void that formed as walls shifted, rooms grew, and families expanded.

“We wanted to understand what actually makes a courtyard a courtyard,” explains Abdulla Abbas. “So we looked at it historically, spatially, and materially. In the UAE, courtyards were never just four walls enclosing a box. They were always approached through a transition, the liwan, which protects privacy while guiding you inward. You enter through this threshold, the liwan, and only then do you experience the courtyard as a place of calm and openness.”

This transitional choreography became the project’s guiding principle. The installation unfolds as a series of thresholds, from compression to release, encouraging visitors to move, pause, and reorient as they traverse the space.

A material logic of the everyday

Rather than idealising the courtyard, Darwish and Abbas chose to express its everyday pragmatism. The installation’s palette included concrete blocks, Arish panels, and corrugated metal sheets that mirrors the materials found in the UAE’s industrial zones, where local builders have long assembled what was available.

“Even though our research dealt with historic practices, we never recreate the past,” says Omar Darwish. “Instead, we reinterpret it through what’s accessible today. Every material in the pavilion can be bought off the shelf. It’s about showing that design doesn’t always need perfection, it can come from what’s at hand.”

Each material references a regional context: concrete for the mountains, Arish for the coast, and corrugated steel for the desert. The forms are stacked, inverted and layered to evoke both continuity and change and a dialogue between climate, craft, and community.

A space that adapts

Functionally, the courtyard was designed as an empty, flexible void, one that shifts with public programming throughout Design Week. It hosted lectures, screenings, and dining experiences, each transforming the layout and inviting new ways of inhabiting the space.

“The courtyard has always been a space that adapts,” says Abbas. “It grows with its users, for family, for community, for reflection. It’s a protected space, yet open to the sky; private, yet deeply social.”

For Darwish, the courtyard symbolises a broader ethos of Gulf urbanism: “It’s about living close to your neighbour, acknowledging them while maintaining privacy. The courtyard allowed people to coexist densely without separation, creating a sense of community born from necessity, not planning.”

Redefining regional practice

Selected by a jury of regional experts including Dr Alamira Reem Al Hashimi, Noura Al-Sayeh Holtrop, Ahmad Bukhash, Cyril Zammit, and Robert Shakespeare, When Does a Threshold Become a Courtyard? stood out for its depth of research and its ability to bridge the vernacular and the contemporary.

Some Kind of Practice’s approach is rooted in observation, documentation, and reinterpretation, drawing from archives, site visits, and lived experience. Their work situates architecture as a cultural dialogue, one that asks how buildings can speak of place, memory, and identity without nostalgia.

As Darwish reflects, “For us, architecture isn’t only construction, it’s a way to connect people, culture and place. The courtyard, in that sense, isn’t just a form. It’s a story — of how we’ve always lived together.”

In the calm enclosure of When Does a Threshold Become a Courtyard?, the everyday becomes extraordinary, a reminder that the future of Gulf architecture may lie not in reinvention, but in rediscovery.