Rethinking Rethinking Kuwait | 2023

Commissioner: National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters [NCCAL]

Location: Italy - Magazzino Del Sale N.5, Dorsoduro, 262, 30123, Venezia

Design Team: Mohammad Kassem in collaboration with Rabab Raes Kazem, Naser Ashour

Scope: Exhibition Design, Curation, Installation Supervision

Our role for the Kuwait Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia was to support the finalization of the curatorial direction and to develop the pavilion's design in collaboration with my fellow curatorial team. The Kuwaiti pavilion's design adopts a non-linear, collaborative exhibition approach, exploring the relationships among works to address themes such as identity, heritage, and urban planning. The showcased projects emerged from workshops that fostered diverse creative practices, emphasizing interdisciplinary methods aimed at equity and accessibility. The pavilion serves as a platform for architectural dialogue, incorporating fabric partitions that enhance visitor agency and respect contextual frameworks. This initiative aims to connect Kuwait's historical heritage with contemporary urban challenges, advocating for adaptive reuse and preservation in future design processes. The design of the pavilion was an attempt to design through the method introduced in the curatorial statement:

The fabric of Kuwait City was once a field of organically aggregating structures interlaced with various scales of openness. Courtyard houses were connected by a network of paths with public courts that disrupted their density, creating platforms for cultural, political, and economic exchange. Once the home of numerous aspects of Kuwaiti civil life, the walled city was mostly eradicated to make way for modernization. A new heritage was born, creating a new landscape of modern structures designed by significant international and regional architects of that era dissociated from its indigenous origins.

The Kuwait Pavilion is rethinking urban planning processes through rethinking transportation, walkability, and accessibility. The experiment started as a response to various foreign master planning efforts for Kuwait. The project’s focus is to improve the human scale of the city by enhancing urban transitional and interstitial spaces as well as prioritizing mass transit over individual vehicular modes of travel. The process looks at an approach to urban planning that explores a top-down macroscale simultaneously with a bottom-up microscale keeping the human experience and scale critical for the new plan. The interconnectivity of the city’s historic fabric is revisited through various scales of urban interventions, resulting in a new network of connectivity that forms multiple modes of transportation that culminate on the human scale.

The project’s title reflects the process of rethinking as an effort to decolonize architectural discourse; “rethinking rethinking” emerges as a process for reevaluating existing processes while moving beyond the colonialist principles and values typically driving the development of architectural projects. The approach examines existing conventions and precedents while allowing room for local forces to generate a new process. History is treated as a spiral rather than a linear timeline, looking for moments of precedent that can inform future development that is otherwise disjointed in a conventional linear workflow.

We derived the exhibition layout from a human scale found in the pre-modern city structure of old Kuwait. The old mud walls are replaced by hanging fabric partitions that ebb and flow with the visitors, contrasting the weight of the existing masonry walls in the pavilion. The circulation presents visitors with multiple routes leading to pockets and interiors with different focus areas, ranging from issues of heritage and identity to those of design and infrastructure. The original components of the pavilion were rearranged to fit a site in Kuwait, marking the first-ever re-showcasing of a pavilion locally.