UAE pavilion rethinks greenhouses for a hotter and hungrier world at Venice Biennale

Pressure Cooker exhibition presents a controlled-environment agricultural site

It all began with a modest box of blueberries.

One day, Emirati architect Azza Aboualam brought home groceries and her mother, tasting the blueberries, asked where they were from. To her surprise, they had been grown in the UAE. Blueberries thrive in cool and temperate weather, making their presence in the UAE’s arid desert intriguing.

“Where do the desert blueberries come from?” says Aboualam, curator of this year’s National Pavilion UAE. “The question instigated the entire project.”

Greenhouses were, of course, the answer – but the discovery prompted Aboualam to rethink how they are built in the UAE and explore the deeper “back-and-forth relationship between architecture and plants".

This research underpins the National Pavilion UAE exhibition at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, revealing how greenhouse design can strengthen food security in a changing climate.

Pressure Cooker presents several greenhouse assemblies within the exhibition space. Photo: National Pavilion UAE

Greenhouses date back to ancient Rome, where Emperor Tiberius used simple structures to grow cucumbers all year round. Modern variations emerged in the 17th century, gradually evolving through advances in glassmaking and heating.

Today, greenhouses are a central component of agriculture around the world. However, they are still very much a European design, and even the greenhouses found in the UAE have been retrofitted and modified for the local context. In short, the technology was never considered from the ground up for arid environments.

Aboualam sought to revamp the greenhouse specifically for the UAE climate.

Working with her team at Holesum Studio – a practice based between Sharjah and New York that she cofounded – she developed a series of modular greenhouse assemblies or “kits-of-parts”.

Each kit contains the essential components to create a greenhouse – roof, wall, floor, tools and materials – designed to adapt to different crops, climates and site conditions.

The exhibition, Pressure Cooker, presents several assemblies as examples. It transforms the National Pavilion UAE venue into a controlled-environment agricultural site. The first of the greenhouses has a broken arched roof that facilitates airflow.

Basil grows in pots set on rammed-earth platforms, raised slightly above ankle height to shield them from the ground’s heat. Tomato shrubs hang from steel pipes, closer to the arched roof.

“The vertical arch and the way it’s broken, it can be fitted with panels that open and close when the seasons shift from extremes,” Aboualam says. “You can open it up let out heat and hot air, and then in the spring it would do the opposite.”

Pavilion architect Azza Aboualam is an assistant professor at the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University. Photo: National Pavilion UAE

This kind of assembly, Aboualam adds, works best in urban areas closer to the coast, such as Dubai or Sharjah. “There's a lot of humidity, and this essentially mitigates that by having a lot more air flow,” she says. “Another aspect of this kit of parts is a fan that is positioned across from an evaporative cooling pad and so this cools the space down without the use of air conditioning.”

Blueberry plants are displayed on a rammed-earth platform that, this time, is at knee height. The display is as much a homage to the fruit that inspired the research for the project as it is an example of how platforms can be used to mitigate the heat of the ground.

“Essentially, it shows how [the platform] could be used as geothermal cooling for the greenhouse itself,” Aboualam says. “With that assembly, you could essentially combine geothermal cooling and a green shade net which cools down the space significantly.”

Then comes an assembly that incorporates a recognisable architectural element from the Gulf, and which has long been used to naturally cool spaces: the barjeel, or wind tower.

Basil growing in pots set on rammed-earth platforms. Photo: National Pavilion UAE

In the context of the greenhouse, the barjeel is much simpler, featuring angled panels that promote airflow. The structure feeds air towards the tomatoes growing in between corrugated glass fibre panels, which also help keep things cool. The fact they are green is also not a mere aesthetic choice. “The green shade net and the green fibreglass helps reflect a lot of the harmful rays of the sun that can affect the crops,” Aboualam says.

The centre of the exhibition is a gathering space that offers insight into the research behind the project. Maps, illustrations and video elements display the field work and build experimentations that informed the work.

“The gathering table mimics the way the research team always gathered around a table to not just eat, but also work,” Aboualam says. “This invites visitors to come with us on the journey.”

One video highlights the archival research that Aboualam and her team carried out in order to understand the overlap between architecture and food production in UAE history. It shows maps dating back to the turn of the 20th century of palm trees growing along the coast of the Trucial States.

An illustration of Dibba Fort shows how its watchtowers were built to protect orange groves in Fujairah. There are blueprints from the UAE National Library and Archives that show the inflated greenhouses in Saadiyat, as well as how evaporative cooling techniques were used to lower their temperatures.

A map of the UAE shows the 155 sites that Aboualam and her team visited to document agricultural techniques.

A gathering space at the centre of the exhibition offers insights into the research behind the project. Photo: National Pavilion UAE

A second video shows how the “kits-of-parts” can be arranged in a programme that tests their efficacy in various assemblies and contexts. Walls, floors, shades, roofs and material can be organised in different permutations and shapes, ranging from rectangles and squares to arches, each with a unique set of advantages.

“We took all of the knowledge and all of the kits and then fed them in the digital tool, which was developed by Holesum Studio,” Aboualam says. “It's a digital tool that uses thermal modelling programmes, but also architectural programmes.

“You put the kits together in different combinations and then assign a location in the UAE. It draws from airport data to tell you the predicted temperatures, how much electricity and water you need to operate the greenhouse.”

The final aspect of Pressure Cooker shows an enclosed storage and office space that has been walled using porous polycarbonate panels. The walls feature vertical channels that can be filled with running water, cooling the space within. A video of greenhouses from across the UAE is projected on to one of the walls, but the structure itself offers ideas into how greenhouses can be used in more domestic contexts.

Fruit and vegetables will grow at the National Pavilion UAE throughout the biennale. Photo: National Pavilion UAE

“Hopefully we can take some of these kits and integrate them within a neighbourhood in the UAE,” Aboualam says. “It can be in someone's backyard, in a school park or within a compound.”

While Pressure Cooker positions these greenhouse kits in a UAE context, the design's potential is not limited to within the country’s borders. The project prompts new ways of thinking about food sustainability in the face of rising global temperatures.

This is one conversation that Aboualam hopes Pressure Cooker sparks during the biennale, which runs from May 10 to November 23. There is a poetic element in bringing a revamped greenhouse back to the country that is credited with its invention, and Aboualam hopes that the kit further democratises the technology and promote self-sufficiency.

One clue to that aim lies in the title of the exhibition itself.

“In a pressure cooker, you essentially put ingredients together and it gives you another outcome. That’s how the project was conceived,” Aboualam says. “The goal is that it's approachable enough so people that don't have that much expertise can build these structures and grow their own food.”