What if a space could feel different every time you entered it? For Urban Commissions 2026, NAO Architects looks to light, colour and landscape to create an ever-changing garden at Dubai Design District (d3).
Each year, Urban Commissions gives architects and designers the opportunity to experiment with outdoor infrastructure and rethink how we experience the public realm. The 2026 theme, Atmospheres, starts with something instinctive: we often feel a space before we understand it. A change in light, temperature, sound or material can alter our mood, our movement and even how long we choose to stay.
These ideas come together in Three Gardens and a Room, this year’s winning Urban Commissions proposal by NAO Architects, a Dubai-based practice founded by Lebanese-Emirati architect Reem Nassour. For Nassour, the experience of a place begins with atmosphere. Her research looks beyond architecture simply as the making of structures, towards the conditions that shape how a space is actually felt and inhabited.
That thinking led her to the garden. Trees already hold many of the elements that create atmosphere: they filter light, cast moving shadows, carry scent and sound, respond to temperature and change with time. With Three Gardens and a Room, Nassour brings those conditions to a human scale.
Positioned between the saturated hues of the eastern sunrise and the warmth of the western sunset, Three Gardens and a Room is conceived as a “vessel for light and colour”, its atmosphere continuously rewritten by the movement of the sun. At its center sits a room, introducing another way of experiencing the landscape. From inside, visitors become both participants and spectators, looking out towards the gardens through framed views while remaining aware of the spaces beyond. But the experience isn’t contained within the room: it unfolds on approach and across the thresholds between garden and interior.
The garden itself is imagined as a world in miniature, where light and shadow meet colour, scent, texture, sound and memory. Within the concrete, glass and engineered surfaces of d3, it introduces something deliberately different: softness, growth and change. And no two encounters with it are intended to be quite the same. As the day moves from morning to evening, light shifts, shadows move and the landscape responds, making time itself part of the architecture.
For Nassour, whose practice moves between architecture, research and urban design, Three Gardens and a Room continues a wider interest in how architecture is experienced rather than simply observed, and how climate, material, landscape and everyday rituals shape our relationship with place. She founded NAO Architects in Dubai in 2023, approaching architecture through research and spatial storytelling rooted in context.