Sharjah Architectural Triennial announces the theme for the inaugural event – 'Rights of Future Generations', exploring how architecture influences concepts of community, inheritance and legacy in the region.

Coinciding with Dubai Design Week 2019, it is set to take place from 9 November 2019 - 8 February 2020. The triennial will take on the concept of ’Rights of Future Generations’, emerging from the need for architects, urban designers and planners to scope and rethink at a rudimentary level, exploring the power that architecture holds to create and sustain across generations, challenge the way we design societies and environments, and the consequences that come with decisions made in the present.

Dissembling the stereotypes and challenging the western views of Asian, African and Middle Eastern architecture, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial is setting the stage for the next generation of architects from the MENA region and the Global South to engage in a conversation that tackles unique circumstances and changes deeply held pre-conceptions.

The first platform of its kind in the Arabic-speaking world, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial will take place in and around the heart of Sharjah, which historically is a port for trade across the Indian Ocean. They intend to draw on Sharjah’s various cultural institutions and the cities historical urban form, distinctive neighborhoods and multi-ethnic communities to develop the essential framework for an event such as this.

The selected theme is directed towards establishing a legacy and structure of institutional support, be it educational, cultural, legal, financial, or humanitarian that resonates through architectural discourse within the Arab states and beyond. Along with the platform and framework that the Triennial will offer, the goal is to enable architectural experimentation that is historically, socially and politically aware.

"The thing that excites me the most is the opportunity to make a space for dialogue, to create a platform for an emerging generation of architects, of scholars, of artists, planners, urban designers, who are working in parts of the world that sometimes don't have access to really basic things like national archives, to a documentation of their own histories because of colonialism, because archives were taken back to Europe or destroyed,” shared Adrian Lahoud, curator of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial and key note speaker of the Dubai Design Week 2018.