Regional and International Students Engage with the Vision of I.M. Pei

This workshop, led by Pritzker Prize laureate Alejandro Aravena, asked students from VCUarts Qatar to tackle a complex architectural problem. The focus was around the Art Mill Museum (AMM), one of Qatar's most significant cultural buildings in development, and students needed to design a sun screen (a brise-soleil) that answered two very different demands at once.

The technical side was specific: taking into account sun angles across seasons, resistance to sand, ease of cleaning, material durability and constructability. But alongside that, students also had to answer a harder question: How does the shape of a screen say something about the building it belongs to? AMM is a global contemporary museum, and it is being built in Qatar. What it looks like should reflect both of those things without reaching for nostalgia or imitation.

Students visited the existing Flour Mills facilities, received desk reviews from Aravena and three senior ELEMENTAL architects and presented their final proposals in an open session on the final day.

Photo: Adriane de Souza

The brief for this five-day workshop was to design a natural cooling system for the Qatar Preparatory School (QPS), using both traditional and contemporary building methods to reduce dependence on mechanical air conditioning. How you build for heat, the workshop argued, is not only a technical question, but a cultural and spatial one too.

French architect Philippe Starck joined the workshop in person across several days. His work has consistently pushed the boundary between what a designed object must do and what it might also say, and that tension ran through the students’ required sketches, architectural drawings and CGI renders. Physical models and 3D-printed prototypes were optional, left to each student's process.

Not just theoretical, the work the students produced will feed directly into the real QPS campus project.

Photo: Adriane de Souza

The five-day workshop led by Paris-based architects Dominique Jakob and Brendan MacFarlane asked students to design a covered pedestrian connection between Msheireb and Souq Waqif, treating the roof not as a lid but as what the architects call the fifth façade, a surface with its own environmental, social and architectural programme.

As a firm, Jakob+MacFarlane has spent over twenty years looking at roofs as places for energy generation, water management, biodiversity and community use. Students were brought into that thinking and asked to develop proposals for one of Doha's most used pedestrian routes.

Photo: Adriane de Souza

This programme opened with a question about memory. Curator and writer Aric Chen, who co-curated the original iteration of Life Is Architecture at M+ in Hong Kong, led a two-day workshop at Qatar Museums Gallery – Al Riwaq on what architectural archives are and what they can be made to do.

Pei's own archive — the drawings, models, correspondence and photographs at the core of the exhibition — makes its own argument that the decisions taken during the design process matter as much as the buildings they produce. Chen asked participants to stop thinking of archives as storage for holding onto old work, and to start thinking of them as tools for making new work.

Students were asked to consider how architectural knowledge is preserved, who decides what is kept, and what it means to put an archive to use rather than to simply look through it.

Photo: Adriane de Souza

Ibrahim Jaidah's workshop turned attention to a period of Qatari architecture that has not always received the documentation it deserves, the 1960s and '70s, when Qatar's early modern identity was taking shape in built form.

Working from Jaidah's book Discovering Arabian Deco: Early Modern Architecture in Qatar, participants were introduced to the methods behind documenting and interpreting architectural heritage: photography, field observation, spatial description and the construction of a visual record that can be used and built upon. The workshop made clear that documentation is not a passive act. It is a way of deciding what gets remembered.

Students went into the field to photograph and record buildings and neighbourhoods that sit outside the more familiar architectural histories of the period. Each came back with a curated selection of images, sketches or written observations, alongside a short note on why the site they chose matters. The collective output was compiled into a printed workshop booklet, a record, but also a starting point for future research and design work.

Photo: Adriane de Souza

This workshop began two weeks before anyone arrived in Doha. An online session with Aline Asmar d'Amman gave students the theme, the question and the time to sit with both, researching and reflecting before the in-person days began. That gap was part of the method.

When students came together at Fire Station, they each brought a craft of their own choosing, something that connected to regional architecture, local materials, or design traditions they had spent the previous weeks looking into. The workshop asked them to take that starting point and push it somewhere new, using writing, sketching, models, photography, collage, or whatever medium best carried their idea. The only requirement was that the final work told a clear, personal story grounded in real research.

Collaboration ran through the whole process. Students worked in groups, thinking collectively about how elements of the past travel into the future, and what that exchange looks like when it crosses cultures rather than staying within one.

The term at the centre of the workshop was poetic materiality, the idea that a material or a craft carries cultural and architectural memory within it, and that working with it thoughtfully is a way of keeping that memory alive while taking it somewhere it has not been before.

Photo: Adriane de Souza

Dutch architect Anne Holtrop's workshop took the idea of the archive somewhere more physical. Participants made impressions of the desert landscape using gypsum, a direct, immediate material, and then developed those raw forms into architectural models.

The starting point was simple: What is already there before anything is designed? The ground, the material and the climate are not problems to solve but rather where the work begins. Pei understood this, and before he drew a single line for the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA), he spent months travelling across the Islamic world. What he came back with was not a list of references but a way of seeing, which informed the iconic design of the museum.

Photo: Adriane de Souza

South African architect Sumayya Vally's practice centres on how people claim space, and how identity, memory and community leave their mark on a city over time.

Students in this workshop were asked to begin not with a brief but with places to visit, such as Msheireb Museums and other sites across Doha, to record what they found through drawing and research and then to push that documentation into something more abstract.

The students’ plans, detail drawings, printed abstractions and a collective mosaic were presented at Art Basel Qatar. The workshop made a simple point that architectural drawing is not only a technical tool, but it also carries meaning on its own. It can even carry the character of a specific place into a completely different context.

Photo: Adriane de Souza

The five-day workshop led by Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh asked students to design a playscape for the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art campus, a small-scale architectural addition rooted in the principles of the Islamic garden, such as shade, sequence, threshold, water, ground and pause.

Proposals could sit above the ground, come up from it, or do both. They could be pavilions, follies or smaller spaces that invite movement, rest and gathering. Two things had to work together: the practical demands of climate and comfort; and the harder-to-define quality of joy.

The students’ proposals were produced as clay models at 1:200 scale, accompanied by a conceptual narrative and a research and process presentation. They were then gathered into a collective exhibition reviewed by the Mathaf campus team.

Photo: Adriane de Souza

This four-day workshop focused on the route connecting the Doha Metro to the recently opened Dadu Gardens. While the route is a short distance, it has not yet reached its potential in terms of the overall pedestrian experience. Amsterdam-based architects Ben van Berkel and Sara Campagna took students through site analysis, user-mapping and prototyping, with three ideas running through every stage: inclusivity, playfulness and sustainability.

The thinking behind the architects’ approach was consistent throughout, in that public space should be designed with real, specific people in mind and not a version of an "average" user who does not really exist.

At the end of this workshop, the students' boards, models and storyboards were presented as an exhibition-ready pin-up of proposals.

Photo: Adriane de Souza

This workshop placed two texts at its centre: Juhani Pallasmaa's Eyes of the Skin, on the role of the senses in experiencing architecture; and Kenneth Frampton's writing on critical regionalism. Together, they set up the central question: What makes a place distinct, and how does an architect translate that into a building?

Pei's design for MIA was the case study. Before he drew anything, he spent months travelling across the Islamic world. The geometry he arrived at — drawn from an ablutions fountain in Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo — did not come from borrowing a reference. It came from paying close attention to a body of architecture and understanding what it was trying to do.

The workshop asked students to approach their own sites the same way, to stay with them, to use all their senses and to build up an understanding of the place before making any decisions about design.

Photo: Adriane de Souza