Sharjah Art Foundation Art Spaces

The Sharjah Biennial spent two decades in borrowed rooms before the Art Foundation asked Mona El Mousfy for buildings of its own. Her answer, finished in 2013, refuses the single museum box: five new concrete galleries are threaded through six restored courtyard houses in the old Al Mureijah quarter, and the alleys, stairs and roof terraces between them stay open to the town. Inside, the new volumes are column-free and lit from above; outside, they hold the height and grain of the coral-stone houses they sit against, so that a visitor moves between 1930s plasterwork and a raw concrete gallery without a threshold announcing either. The scheme was shortlisted for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2019, and it is the most sustained argument yet for building contemporary art space inside a Gulf historic centre.