Installation, 2025
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Design: ZHANG Jie
For Dubai Design Week 2025 Open Call
At the edge of built form and open sky, this project reimagines the courtyard not as a fixed enclosure, but as a living threshold — a space where boundaries breathe, and where geometry becomes invitation.
This installation proposes a soft architecture of openness and transition. Three walls rise in dialogue with an existing building façade, forming a temporary courtyard defined as much by absence as by structure. Standing at 2.4 meters, the walls are perforated with abstract openings — some suggest doors, others windows, all invite the eye and body to move, to look through, to step across.
Crafted from reclaimed cardboard, the structure is porous and breathable. Sunlight pours through its apertures, casting ever-shifting patterns on the ground, marking time like a sundial. It becomes a spatial instrument — at once sheltering and revealing, static and responsive.
Beyond form, this is a framework for community. The courtyard becomes a stage for collective rituals — conversation, performance, rest. Its surfaces become a canvas for the city: local artists and passersby are invited to leave their mark, transforming the wooden walls into a shared journal of expression and memory.
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