Down the length of the Saudi Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale ran a long table, topped with a sand-casted section cut through the center of Riyadh. A collage of sparse grids, the map imprinted on its surface revealed the location of the Saudi capital’s surviving vernacular adobe buildings. “It’s essentially a negative map of the city,” Beatrice Leanza, the pavilion’s curator, explained.

Titled The Um Slaim School: An Architecture of Connection, the Saudi Pavilion was an incarnation of the Um Slaim Collective, a collaborative research initiative led by Sara Alissa and Nojoud Alsudairi, founders of Riyadh-based architecture practice Syn Architects.

Through archival investigation and extensive documentation of Riyadh as it exists today, the Um Slaim Collective aims to offer a critical re-reading of urban development in the Saudi capital, contextualizing this process within the displacement of a rich heritage of traditional Najdi architecture which once formed the fabric of the city center.

Building on Syn Architects’ research, the pavilion in Venice was conceived as both an immersive archive and a site of learning: “an alternative pedagogical platform” for an approach to architecture that is rooted in the collective knowledge of the communities who inhabit a place. “It’s about the connection between the past, present, and future; across generations, across disciplines,” Leanza emphasized. “The aim is really to return a sense of purposeful agency to architecture.”