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“A Convergence in Riyadh,” a two-day gathering forming the first session of The Um Slaim School, February 2025. © Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture of Saudi Arabia
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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.
Below you can read an excerpt form the contribution by Beatrice Leanza and Maryam AlNoaimi featured in the publication.
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BOOK LAUNCH
This Sunday, November 23, 3 pm
at the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia
Arsenale, Sale d’Armi, Biennale Architettura, Venice
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The Saudi Emblem Archives from bytwo, presented during “Archiving Otherwise” as part of the first year of The Um Slaim School. © bytwo 2025
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Relational Pedagogies and Participatory Spatial Practice
(or how to build collective spatial knowledge)
by Beatrice Leanza and Maryam AlNoaimi
The Um Slaim School—a propositional initiative launched through Saudi Arabia’s participation in the Biennale Architettura 2025—is an organic evolution of the agential and experimental efforts of Syn Architects and the Um Slaim Collective, whose methods, values, and ambitions constitute the foundational lines of inquiry guiding this generative endeavor.[1] The school aims to chart new directions for architectural education rooted in the situated condition of Saudi Arabia and its surrounding regionalism by fostering transnational dialogue among kindred generational experiences invested in practice-led pedagogies and research-driven methodologies.
In doing so, it seeks to nurture forms of learning that respond to urgent global challenges intertwined with ecology, identity, and urban making, while consolidating novel networks of cooperation to expand established fields of study and action in the region and beyond. Accompanying the exhibition presented in the Arsenale, a durational project, started in the Um Slaim neighborhood in February 2025, activated an investigative process to collectively prototype an alternative pedagogical model to be established in Riyadh following the Biennale.
Until November 2025, the program unfolded in a hybrid format: online and offline interactions between the curatorial team, over fifty practitioners and thinkers—who also appear in this publication alongside more invited contributors—and a selected group of Saudi architecture students were consolidated in a series of on-site laboratorial and public sessions held in Venice between the Saudi Pavilion and Palazzo Diedo, the headquarters of Berggruen Arts & Culture. Adopting various formats of encounter and articulation—ranging from visual narratives and oral histories to sonic gestures and performative acts—these sessions established a working dynamic that rethinks spatial and urban discourse as pluridisciplinary, focused on process and collaborative empowerment.
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“Archiving Otherwise,” June 2025, as part of The Um Slaim School, the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the Biennale Architettura 2025. © Alvise Busetto 2025, Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture of Saudi Arabia
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Through this evolving framework, the program opened new pathways for transnational exchange, shaping both the structure and ethos of the future school. Central to this effort is a critical line of inquiry: how can we facilitate the development of more informed architectural practices, grounded in the local while nurturing new relational mechanisms of alliance—transscalar, transmaterial, and transregional in nature? As the field continues to shift, how can architectural education evolve to cultivate skills to navigate the dynamic interplay of practical and intangible knowledge and theoretical and contextual expertise, to ultimately inform novel virtuous relations among urban stakeholders?
With Bricklab, Studio Ossidiana, and Institute for Postnatural Studies—the practices selected to accompany each of the three thematic research processes as lab leads—the program framed architecture not as a static discipline, but as an evolving space of continuous learning, archiving, and material experimentation. Realms of investigation were expanded through the sessions in Venice, with each lab producing reflective positions around specific working methodologies, teaching approaches, and research agendas to be adopted by the future school. Collectively, these approaches challenge traditional pedagogy through relational, context-specific practices that prioritize dialogue, shared knowledge, and embodied learning.
A group of Saudi architecture students participated in a two-way mentorship model with the lab leads, immersing themselves in research-based and experimental forms of exploration. Here, the process became an ongoing conversation and a testing ground for the ambitions of The Um Slaim School, demonstrating that learning does not require a walled classroom, but a space of togetherness shaped by collaborators working with a sense of partnership molded through mutual learning, observation, and imagination.
CONTINUE READING
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Dakar-based studio Worofila’s ongoing LABO × FOU PROJECT, blending bioclimatic design and vernacular materials for sustainable African architecture. © Nzinga Biegueng Mboup 2025
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[1] The practice of Syn Architects and the Um Slaim Collective is the subject of the first publication produced under the umbrella of the Saudi Pavilion in 2025. See Syn Architects, The Um Slaim School: An Architecture of Connection, ed. Ahmad Makia (Mousse Publishing and Kaph Books, 2025).
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