Urban Commissions 2025: The Emirati Courtyard, Rebuilt From Breeze Blocks and Palm Fronds

ART & CULTURE · DUBAI

Reading time: 8 min

Stacked concrete blocks, arish palm fronds and corrugated steel. Everyday materials, chosen deliberately and handled with real care. When Some Kind of Practice won Dubai Design Week’s Urban Commissions competition with When does a threshold become a courtyard?, the studio did it with the cheapest materials on the industrial estate, and made the most quietly convincing argument of the week.

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Every design week produces installations that photograph beautifully, and Dubai Design Week 2025 had plenty of them. It also had a low, open structure sitting in Dubai Design District that did something rarer: it made a serious argument about how people in this region have always built, and then let visitors sit inside that argument for a week.

When does a threshold become a courtyard? was the winner of Urban Commissions 2025, the annual open competition that hands one architect or designer the chance to put a real, built idea into the public realm at d3. The studio behind it, Some Kind of Practice, was founded in 2022 by Emirati architects Omar Darwish and Abdulla Abbas. Their win was announced in September 2025, and the finished piece stood at d3 from 4 to 9 November 2025.

Of everything Urban Commissions has produced across recent editions, this is the entry that has stayed in circulation longest, and the reason is straightforward. It was the one built on genuine research, gathered on the road across the Emirates over several months.

The brief: reimagine the courtyard as public infrastructure

Urban Commissions gives designers a typology and asks them to rethink it for the street. Previous editions have produced everything from public seating to shade structures; the 2023 winner, Ahmad AlKattan’s Designest, is a good example of the format at its best.

For 2025, the theme was the courtyard.

That is a gift of a theme. The courtyard is one of the oldest and most widely shared spatial ideas in architecture, and it carries deep regional roots. It is also a familiar one, and familiarity brings its own expectations. The image most people arrive with is the postcard version: symmetrical, arcaded, a fountain in the middle.

The brief was more demanding than that. It asked entrants to treat the courtyard as communal urban infrastructure: climate-responsive, adaptable, and deliberately blurring the line between architecture and public furniture. Not a picture of a courtyard. A working one.

The jury reflected that seriousness: Ahmad Bukhash of the Dubai Development Authority, Dr Alamira Reem Al Hashimi of M_39 Abu Dhabi, curator and architect Noura Al-Sayeh Holtrop, Ill Sam Park, Robert Shakespeare of Cracknell, and Cyril Zammit, who created Dubai Design Week in the first place. Dubai Design District is the strategic partner, with Dubai Culture as lead supporter.

Some Kind of Practice: design as fieldwork

Some Kind of Practice is not a studio in the conventional commercial sense, and that matters to how this project turned out.

Darwish and Abbas describe their method as collective inquiry, built on field research, archival work and collaboration, moving between built interventions, curatorial projects, exhibitions and teaching. The stated aim is to make visible what usually goes unseen in the Gulf’s built environment.

That sounds abstract until it produces something. In this case it produced a road trip.

The road trip that became a method

Before drawing anything, the studio went looking. They travelled across the Emirates, through coastal settlements, inland towns and remote mountain villages, studying courtyards not as published architecture but as things people actually made.

What they found was not a style. It was a logic.

Local builders assembled with whatever was to hand: stacking stone or concrete blocks, spanning arish palm fronds or corrugated steel across the top, leaving gaps for air to move. Nothing was designed in the drawing-board sense. Everything was resolved on site, by eye, according to what the family needed and what the truck had delivered.

As Abbas puts it, they examined the courtyard “historically, spatially, and materially.” The conclusion was that in the Emirates, the courtyard is rarely the starting point. It is the residue, the space left over once a family has grown and built around itself.

Darwish said it plainly: “The courtyard came as a result with time, depending on the family, how it grows and wraps a space that becomes a courtyard.”

That single observation is what separates this project from every other courtyard proposal.

Why the Emirati housh is not the courtyard you are picturing

The Emirati courtyard has a name, the housh (الحوش), and it behaves differently from its better-documented cousins.

In the historic urban houses of Cairo, Damascus or Jeddah, the courtyard is typically formal and central, a designed void that the house is organised around. The housh is the opposite. It is organic, pragmatic and additive. It emerges from shifting walls, open thresholds, and the liwan (الليوان), the shaded transitional strip that mediates between outside and in, protecting privacy while quietly guiding you inward.

So the Emirati courtyard is less a matter of geometry and more a matter of behaviour. It is climate, materials and family life negotiating with each other over years.

Some Kind of Practice took that to its logical end, abandoning the courtyard as a typology to be reproduced and treating it instead as a condition that occurs, something that happens when walls, roofs, airflow and human movement intersect. Hence the question in the title. A threshold becomes a courtyard at the moment those things line up. Not before.

It is a genuinely good idea, and it is the kind of idea that only comes from looking at real buildings rather than reading about them.

What it actually looked like at d3

The built piece was direct to the point of bluntness, and far better for it.

Breeze blocks, stacked vertically, formed the mass, a deliberate nod to the dry-stacked stone walls of the mountain settlements. Arish palm fronds, the material of the coastal courtyards, enclosed the space. Overhead, the roof did something clever: it merged arish with corrugated steel, holding two eras in one plane. That is not a stylistic collage. It is an accurate record of what happened across the UAE as household resources improved and builders substituted new materials into old systems without changing the logic underneath.

Inside, modular plywood elements could be reconfigured, and the whole structure was designed to be dismantled and relocated. There was no literal liwan, only an implied one, the threshold suggested rather than walled.

Then the important part: the studio programmed it. Across the week, the void hosted talks, screenings and dinners. Visitors sat in it, ate in it, sheltered in it. The installation was not asking to be photographed. It was asking to be occupied, and it earned its argument by being used.

Abbas described the intent as recreating “the regionally important courtyard space using off-the-shelf and natural materials, combined with traditional techniques such as the stacking systems we observed in the desert.” Darwish framed the philosophy more sharply: “design doesn’t always need perfection, it can come from what’s at hand.”

The quiet radicalism of using cheap materials

This is the part that deserves dwelling on, and it is where the project is at its most interesting.

Dubai has a well-earned reputation for material ambition. Heritage-referencing projects here often arrive clad in fine stone and finished to an exceptional standard, a polished translation of vernacular building that shows just how much craft the city can command.

Some Kind of Practice went the other way. Concrete blocks from an industrial zone. Corrugated sheet. Palm fronds. Plywood. Materials with no aura whatsoever, deployed with precision.

That choice does two things. It is honest. These are the materials the original builders used, precisely because they were the materials available. And it is transferable. A courtyard made of breeze blocks and shade can be built again, cheaply, in a car park, on a rooftop, between two towers. A courtyard made of hand-carved stone cannot.

For a competition explicitly about public infrastructure, that is the whole game.

Why courtyards are a serious answer to a hot city

There is a practical argument sitting underneath all of this, and it is only becoming more urgent.

Gulf cities are hot, and getting hotter. Much of their recent growth has been made possible by air conditioning and the car. The courtyard is one of the few inherited spatial tools that addresses heat without a compressor: shade, stack ventilation, thermal mass, a protected microclimate that stays usable when the open street does not.

It is also a social instrument. Darwish and Abbas point to the courtyard as the mechanism that lets neighbours live densely while keeping privacy intact, which is precisely the problem every fast-growing city in the region is trying to solve.

Dubai Design Week 2025 landed in the UAE’s Year of Community, and the programme reflected it. Installations across d3 kept returning to shared space, from Japanese teahouses to majlis structures. Among all of them, the courtyard was the one that arrived with the most evidence behind it.

What happens next

Urban Commissions returns for the twelfth edition of Dubai Design Week, running 3 to 8 November 2026 at d3. The 2026 brief looks at how spatial design shapes collective life in the public realm through movement, connection and shared experience, a natural extension of the courtyard question rather than a departure from it. Open calls across the programme, including Abwab’s In Other Words theme, are live now.

For designers in the region weighing up an entry, the 2025 result is instructive. The winning proposal succeeded on the strength of its research, months of fieldwork across the Emirates, closely observed and carefully applied. That is a reproducible advantage.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The best thing about When does a threshold become a courtyard? is that it does not ask to be admired.

It asks a question, answers it with breeze blocks, and then hands the space over to whoever walks in. There is no monument here, no signature gesture, nothing requiring a plaque to explain it. Just walls, a roof, moving air and people, which, as the studio spent months across the Emirates establishing, is all a courtyard has ever needed.

In a city with a real appetite for the extraordinary, that restraint reads as confidence. Some Kind of Practice went out and looked at how this place actually builds, came back, and built it. Dubai Design Week rewarded them for it.