Architectural Practice
V. Dom Art Projects
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
This project for a cultural space was developed in 2025 for Dom Art Projects in Dubai. It involved the transformation of the façades and interior of a warehouse building in Al Quoz, next to Alserkal Avenue.
The programme includes two exhibition halls for longer and shorter projects, storage, and a double-height foyer with a bookshop on the ground floor. On the first floor there is a learning space for children and adults, as well as three studios for artists in residence.
The language of the space is tied both to the place in which the project is located and to the particular conditions of the design and construction process.
Dubai has a scale that can feel almost detached from ordinary human measure, larger than architectural scale alone can quite describe. Looking at the city from a certain distance, I began to think that this scale could become part of the artistic approach to the project. The city seems to operate in large pieces of territory that do not quite join up with one another. Motorways pass between them like seams, irrespective of whether the fragments they separate are similar or completely different.
I followed the idea that the space should be organised in broader brushstrokes, without excessive detail, and that its parts should be joined together in the simplest and most neutral way possible. The exhibition halls and the artists’ studios are deliberately utilitarian. They relate quite directly to the industrial context of the area, without much embellishment. The foyer, however, works differently.
I thought of the foyer as both an interior courtyard and a garden, two things that seem to be missing from Dubai’s rather hard division between public and private space. It is a threshold: a softened step between the scale of the city, the district, the industrial buildings and warehouses, and the space of artistic thought, which is slower, quieter and less immediately legible.
Inside this courtyard, enclosed by the existing shell of the building, the fourth wall becomes a second façade. It is deliberately flat and punctured with several openings of different sizes and shapes, leading to the exhibition spaces, the learning space and the artists’ residencies.
While working on this façade, I found myself returning to the compositions of Kamāl al-Dīn Behzād, which have interested me for some time. There is something of a minbar here, something of a mashrabiya balcony, and a small window for observing the ‘courtyard’. Under the ceiling hangs a moon-shaped plastic light. Its directness, both as an object and as an image, is essential to the project.
There seems to be a continuity in the use of the 'pivotal' partition (see AP2 Parda Diwar, AP3 Villa Varzob and AP4 Avicenna Suites). Here, however, the partition acquires greater depth, prompted by the scale of the space: the two entrances to the exhibition halls flank what becomes the central part of the wall, marked by the reception desk.
This project was developed in collaboration with Anastasia Belinskaya.
Artworks on figure 3 are by Michiko Tsuda.
Artworks on figure 4 are by Shamin Sharum.
Photos: Dom Art Projects / Nikita Berezhnoy