Why X-Architects is in the Design 100

Ahmed Al-Ali and Farid Esmaeli founded X-Architects in Dubai in 2003, and the practice has spent the two decades since arguing for a specifically Gulf architecture — one that responds to heat, sand and light rather than importing forms built for cooler, wetter places. Their buildings tend to work with orientation, shade and local materials before reaching for mechanical solutions, an approach that reads as much like environmental strategy as design.

That thinking found its clearest expression at the Wasit Wetland Centre in Sharjah, a visitor facility built into a former dumping ground the practice helped turn back into a working marsh and bird sanctuary. The project won a 2019 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, recognition that framed X-Architects not as decorators of the desert but as architects reading it on its own terms — a distinction that has shaped the firm’s civic and cultural commissions across the Gulf since.