Alwah House
RCR Arquitectes, 2022, Dubai, UAE
Javier Arpa Fernández (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
Alwah House by RCR Arquitectes is read against Dubai’s landscape of artificial islands, sprawl, and architectural spectacle. The article argues that the house does not escape these contradictions, yet makes them spatially visible. Embedded in the desert, organised around a sunken oasis, and shaped by shade, wind, sand, and water, it proposes architecture as microclimate rather than object. Its patios, curved shells, and geological interiors suggest a more adaptive relation to nature. Still, as a single-family house within expanding urbanisation, it remains implicated in consumption, exposing the unresolved tension between ecological care and territorial excess at urban scale today itself.