ShareKUWAIT: The National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL) opened on Thursday an exhibition featuring Kuwait’s pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, Biennale Architettura 2023. The exhibition, which opened at the Yarmouk Cultural Center and is titled “Rethinking Rethinking Kuwait”, provides people in Kuwait with the opportunity to view the architectural models within the pavilion, which was on display for six months in Venice.
NCCAL Secretary General Dr Mohammed Al-Jassar said in a statement to KUNA during the opening of the exhibition that it aims to raise questions about the urban development witnessed by Kuwait in the fifties and sixties of the last century and reimagine what the city could look like.
The team behind “Rethinking Rethinking Kuwait” engaged with local participants through an open call to reconceptualize Kuwait’s urban planning systems through rethinking transportation, walkability, and accessibility. The project’s focus is to improve the human scale of the city by enhancing urban transitional and interstitial spaces as well as prioritizing mass transit over individual vehicular modes of travel. The open call resulted in various projects ranging from vernacular design to planting ecologies.
Curators of ‘Rethinking Rethinking Kuwait’ pavilion told KUNA in 2023 that it explores new methods for architectural and urban design that emerges from the intersections of space and time. The project is an ongoing investigation attempting to rectify the effects of modernist urban planning that led to the erasure of most of Kuwait’s historic-built fabric. The NCCAL-sponsored pavilion also delves into the ideas of “decolonization and decarbonization” by rethinking means of transportation and accessibility. It looks at Kuwait on a national scale with a focused study on Kuwait City as a prototypical condition. It features various studies that explore transitional spaces in the city that ranges in scope and scale.
The team included 27 Kuwaiti young women and men who worked with NCCAL to bring the project to life. Abdulaziz Al-Mazidi, commissioner of the pavilion, said the team was “honored” to represent Kuwait in Biennale Architettura 2023, which marked the country’s fifth participation in international architecture exhibition. Kuwait first participated in 2012.
Mazidi, who is Head of the Design and Planning Department at NCCAL, added that the Venice Biennale is one of the most important cultural events related to architecture, as it is not just an exhibition, but a competition between the participants. The exhibition includes photographs of urban project designs and artworks that simulate urban designs and models for a number of existing and future urban projects.
