Pressure Cooker

The Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates announces its forthcoming exhibition, Pressure Cooker, at the 19th International Venice Architecture Biennale. Curated by Emirati architect and scholar Azza Aboualam, the exhibition investigates the evolving relationship between architecture and food production in the UAE, proposing alternatives for more sustainable approaches at both individual and communal scales. Through a research-based approach, Pressure Cooker looks into themes of sustainability and self-sufficiency, and explores architectural solutions specifically designed for arid environments.

Currently, the world is undergoing a significant agrarian transition that has adverse implications for food security in the immediate and distant future. In parallel, intensifying climate change threatens to disrupt the already fragile supply of food and water, especially in the Gulf region. While prevailing global perspectives on food security lean primarily on centralized technical innovation, Pressure Cooker proposes an alternative: creating a shared responsibility for local communities. 

Revealing intertwined global and local histories, Pressure Cooker investigates the relationship between architecture and the methods of food production. Building on archival research and fieldwork, it examines existing food-growing infrastructures in the UAE, located in resource-rich landscapes that are often obscured, overlooked, or physically separated from urban centers. Local design solutions that were conceived under conditions of food scarcity over the years are delved into, ranging from the vernacular to the technologically sophisticated. By experimenting with a series of new greenhouse assemblies, Pressure Cooker explores how architecture can respond to the UAE’s and the globe’s food security challenges, resulting in a possible future in which these forms can be adapted, refined and integrated throughout our built and lived environments. 

Research findings by Aboualam—to be exhibited in Venice and supplemented with an accompanying publication—will present the different ways in which food, architecture, and the built environment overlap.

The National Pavilion UAE will present its exhibition for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition from May 10 to November 23, 2025 (pre-opening on May 8 and 9). The Biennale Architettura 2025 will be curated by Italian architect, engineer, and educator Carlo Ratti with the title Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.

The National Pavilion UAE is commissioned by the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation and supported by the UAE Ministry of Culture and has a permanent pavilion at the Venice Biennale’s Arsenale—Sale d’Armi. 

Azza Aboualam is an Emirati architect and curator for the National Pavilion UAE at the 19th International Venice Architecture Biennale. She is an Assistant Professor at the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University, Dubai, UAE, and a Co-founder and Director of Research at Holesum Studio, an interdisciplinary architecture and design practice based between New York, USA, and Sharjah, UAE. She co-founded the studio in 2021 a few years after graduating from Yale School of Architecture. 

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