An architectural cookbook in six booklets featuring recipes that range from the technical to the fictional to the historic (official catalog of the National Pavilion of United Arab Emirates at La Biennale di Venezia).
Cooking and architecture have a lot in common. Both start with a set of ingredients that are combined to create a whole; one that is often greater than the sum of its parts. Conceived as a publication for the National Pavilion UAE's pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2025, this architectural cookbook features recipes that range from the technical to the fictional to the historic. It showcases a multitude of responses to a curated selection of key ingredients, providing creative, flavorful, and accessible ways to reflect on food production in a harsh desert climate such as the UAE's.
Azza Aboualam is an Emirati architect and curator of the National Pavilion United Arab Emirates (UAE) for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2025. She is an Assistant Professor at the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University, Dubai, UAE, and a Co-founder and Director of Research at Holesum Studio, an interdisciplinary architecture and design practice based between New York, US, and Sharjah, UAE. In 2021, she co-founded the studio a few years after graduating from the Yale School of Architecture. Her scholarly interests include the intersection of memory, architecture, and society in the Middle East and North Africa.
Edited by Azza Aboualam.
Contributions by Azza Aboualam, Dimitri Brand & Kit Elsworth, Brittany Utting & Daniel Jacobs, Elisa Iturbe, Rashed Almulla, Kevin Mitchell, Faysal Tabbarah, Sarah Alajmi, Huma Gupta.
