The prospects opened up for architectural education by the pioneering initiative of the Um Slaim school in Riyadh.
With vital insights into situated spatial practices across the Arab Gulf and its adjacencies,
Connections as Method: Relational Pedagogies and Participatory Spatial Practice is informed by research, approaches, and perspectives from more than sixty international contributors. The volume draws on the first year of The Um Slaim School—a pioneering initiative that emerges from the work of Riyadh-based Syn Architects and their collaborators, as convened by Beatrice Leanza and Maryam AlNoaimi for the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the Biennale Architettura 2025.
Featuring architects, artists, educators, urbanists, and writers, these interactions pilot methodologies of knowledge exchange to establish south-south networks of coproduction across disciplinary boundaries. Tracing transnational alliances, case studies, and thematics from the school's first year, subjects of inquiry challenge established architectural canons, centering alternative spatial histories and material practices to address urgent ecological and social concerns.
Through conversations, visual and theoretical essays, fieldwork, and tooling curricula, the volume rethinks architectural education as an integrated set of forms and modes of knowledge, nurturing processes of experimentation and research toward social debate, public imagining, and civic enlightenment.
This volume is a complement to
The Um Slaim School: An Architecture of Connection, the inaugural publication documenting Syn Architects' foundational research and proposing a localized spatial discourse relevant to Saudi Arabia and the broader region.
