“Sumaya Dabbagh founded her Dubai practice on a straightforward premise: that Gulf architecture should answer to its own climate and craft traditions rather than import someone else’s, and Dabbagh Architects has spent its history proving the point.”
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Sumaya Dabbagh founded her Dubai practice in 2008 after training at Bath University under Peter Smithson and Ted Happold and working in London and Paris. She returned to the Gulf in the early 1990s, one of the first women architects in the UAE to open her own studio, and that grounding shows in how the practice works: for climate and material culture first, rather than importing a template built for a different set of conditions.
The Mleiha Archaeological Centre in Sharjah, its concentric sandstone walls arranged around a 4,000 year old tomb, is the clearest statement of that approach, and it earned a nomination for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. In 2021 Dabbagh became one of the first women architects to design a mosque in the UAE, the Gargash Mosque, extending the same logic to a building type rarely opened up to reinterpretation.
This profile carries Martyn White’s Design 100 seal — one of 100 names selected for the 2026 index of the people and studios shaping our coverage of architecture, interiors, art and design. Honourees are welcome to display the seal on their own site; get in touch for the embed code.
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