Pressure Cooker Recipes: An Architectural Cookbook
Overview
Official catalog of the National Pavilion UAE at the 19th Biennale of Architecture in Venice.
Co-published with National Pavilion UAE.
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 this year’s 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.
Edited by Azza Aboualam
About the Authors
Azza Aboualam
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. Aboualam worked with the UAE Ministry of Culture’s Architecture Initiative, and her field research, sketches, and writing were published in the book In Search of Spaces of Coexistence: An Architect’s Journey (2019), edited by Dr. Alamira Reem Al Hashimi and Adina Hempel. She also contributed research to Building Sharjah (2021), edited by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi and Todd Reisz, and Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai (2020), written by Todd Reisz. While working in Sharjah’s Department of Public Works, Aboualam managed the design and construction of large-scale projects such as the Aga Khan Award–winning Wasit Wetland Center. In 2014, Aboualam was a Venice Intern at the National Pavilion UAE’s debut participation at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia with the exhibition Lest We Forget: Structures of Memory in the UAE, curated by Dr. Michele Bambling.
Sarah Saad Alajami
Sarah Saad Alajmi is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation examines the interrelationship between architecture and ecology in twentieth-century Arabia, where she focuses on nomadic and modern settlements in the Arabian Desert. Alajmi obtained her professional Bachelor of Architecture from Kuwait University in 2017 and holds a Master of Architecture II from Yale University. She practiced as a junior architect in Kuwait and held teaching positions at Kuwait University, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Alajmi’s work focuses on transience, informality, domesticity, and poetry in the desert environment.
Huma Gupta
Huma Gupta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at MIT in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. She is affiliated with the History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture group and the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Dr. Gupta's scholarship deals with the historical emergence of hierarchies and pathways toward dismantling them that span from critique to epistemic interventions. Her research historicizes and theorizes hierarchical systems that span urban housing, the devaluation of rural housing, and the relationship between building materials and the climate crisis. In her archival research that centers other human and more-than-human subjects, she challenges centuries of dehumanizing representation of rural migrants and marsh inhabitants through documentary filmmaking. Dr. Gupta’s current book project The Architecture of Dispossession theorizes the relationship between state-building and dispossession through architectural transformations of migrant reed and clay dwellings in twentieth-century Iraq. Her scholarship has been published by the Journal of Architectural Education, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, MIT Press, and Yale University Press.
Faysal Tabbarah
Faysal Tabbarah is the Associate Dean and an Associate Professor of Architecture at the American University of Sharjah. He is also Co-founder of Architecture + Other Things, an architecture and design studio based in Sharjah. Tabbarah’s teaching and research interrogate the potential of activating Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) material and environmental practices to drive innovative contemporary design and building solutions by exploring context-driven modes of production, alternative material systems, and the relationship between environmental and architectural imaginaries. At AUS, Tabbarah teaches core and option design studios, seminars integrate issues of Orientalism and the built and natural environments, computational design seminars, and required structures courses.
Kevin Mitchell
Kevin Mitchell is a Professor of Architecture at the American University of Sharjah (AUS), where he has taught courses in architecture, interior design, and the Foundations Program since 1999. His teaching contributions have been recognized with awards from AUS and the American Institute of Architects. He has served in a number of administrative positions at AUS, including director of the Foundations Program, Associate Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Design, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs and Instruction, and Interim Provost. In addition, he led the university as Chancellor from 2019 until 2021. In parallel to ongoing work as a designer, Mitchell continues to write on issues related to education, design, architecture, and urbanism in the Gulf region. In 2022, the AUS Board of Trustees appointed him as the university’s first Trustee Professor.
Brittany Utting
Brittany Utting is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Rice University in Houston, TX. She is the editor of the book Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common (Routledge, 2023) and co-editor of Log 60: The Sixth Sphere (winter/summer 2024). Utting was a MacDowell Fellow in Architecture and a Willard A. Oberdick Fellow at the University of Michigan. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation and the Buell Center.
Daniel Jacobs
Daniel Jacobs is an Instructional Assistant Professor in Architecture at the University of Houston. His research and writing centers around labor production and material ecologies of the built environment. He has previously served as the Secretary of the National Organizing Committee of the Architecture Lobby, taught as a Lecturer at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, and practiced as an Associate at SHoPArchitects in New York.
Dimitri Brand
Dimitri Brand is a Co-Founder and Director of Built Projects at Holesum Studio. He graduated from the Yale School of Architecture in 2018. Brand was previously a Bass Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he studied the history of conservatories and greenhouses and their cultural relevance. Focusing on carbon capture and energy efficiency in his design work, and he has integrated greenhouses and their associated technologies into the firm's built projects. In addition, Brand is the Technical Research Consultant and Design-Build Expert of the National Pavilion United Arab Emirates for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2025.
Elisa Iturbe
Elisa Iturbe is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Her work studies the relationship between energy, power, and form, with a focus on how the adoption of fossil fuels changed the spatial organization of the built environment, producing an urban and architectural paradigm unique to the carbon age — carbon form. This concept was first published in Log 47, titled “Overcoming Carbon Form,” which she guest-edited in 2019. She also co-curated and co-produced the exhibition Confronting Carbon Form at The Cooper Union, which exhibited original works in various media that define the spatial concepts of the carbon age. She has published in journals such as Log, AA Files, Perspecta, and e-flux, as well as several essay anthologies. Iturbe previously taught at The Cooper Union, Yale, and Cornell AAP. She is a co-founder of Outside Development, a design and research practice
Rashed Almulla
Rashed Almulla is the founder of MABNAI, co-founder of MamarLab, and an independent urban researcher, specializing in urban history and planning. Based in Dubai, Almulla employs multiple mediums focusing on the built environment through exhibitions, symposia, and research contributions. He authored Spaces that Remain (2024), directed the Future of Gulf Housing Symposium (2023), and curated Spaces that Remain exhibition (2022–2023) at Bayt AlMamzar. Almulla has also designed Nesmah (SIKKA 2023) and exhibited the Library Circles at the Jameel Arts Centre (2022). Almulla holds an MSc in Regional and Urban Planning from the London School of Economics.
Kit Elsworth
Kit Elsworth is an Associate and Building Performance Specialist in the transdisciplinary research group at the architecture firm KieranTimberlake. He uses his expertise in building science and building performance modeling to deploy a range of technical analyses on topics of carbon and energy modeling, occupant comfort, and envelope performance. A key aspect of this role is to interpret research and generate actionable design decisions for firm projects and elevate the architecture industry through publications and lectures. Elsworth is a member of ILFI’s Energy + Carbon Technical Advisory Group (TAG), the AIA 2030 Commitment Working Group, and ASHRAE Committees. Before working at KieranTimberlake, Kit received his MS in Building Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Technical Details
- Publication Date:
- Wednesday, May 7, 2025
- Language:
- English or Arabic
- Format:
- Softcover with 7 hand bound booklets
- Dimensions:
- 22 x 16 cm
- Weight:
- 0.5 kg
- ISBN:
- 978-614-8035-94-4
- Number of Pages:
- 316
- Publisher:
- Kaph Books x National Pavilion UAE
- Categories:
- Architecture