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Vernacular architecture is too often misread as a residue: a remnant of rural pasts, frozen in folklore or nostalgia. Architectures from other ways of being often teach us ways of listening, mapping, and making with the rhythms of place and people.
As cities are increasingly designed through erasure, speed, and spectacle, other knowledge offers counter-pulses. It is the architecture of the everyday, shaped by intuition, the seasons, adaptation, climate, and collective memory. It resists the homogenizing grid. It is realized in the cracks – in agile, informal economies, in temporary structures, in the rituals of how people gather, sit, trade, take shelter, and celebrate.
Far from notions of romanticizing the past, vernacular architecture is about recognizing that the “vernacular” is alive. It is not fixed, but rather evolves through use, through time, through necessity. It teaches us that architecture is not only about buildings, but about relations – between body and street, material and meaning, the past and the future.
In the urban context, vernacular methods can become tools of research: tracing how intelligences live in gestures and rituals, in scents and sounds, in textures. They can reshape our design practice as a communal act; one that emerges through listening deeply, uncovering histories and stories, and building from what is already there. To engage the vernacular in the city is to put trust in the intelligence of communities. To see improvisation not as lack, but as abundance. To honor the invisible architectures that hold us. It is not an esthetic. It is an ethic.
When I was invited to design the Serpentine Pavilion in 2021, what I wanted to bring was not a form, but a method; one that listens, one that gathers, one that remembers. I have always been drawn to the architectures that do not make it into the archive. The ones passed hand to hand, folded into daily ritual, held in the ways people gather, cook, mourn, and make music. What some might call vernacular. But for me, the vernacular is not a style or a nostalgia. It is an ethic – a way of being with place, of paying attention to what already exists and who has already been building, long before we arrived with drawings.
During my research for the design of the pavilion, I searched for spaces of significance within London’s diasporic and displaced communities; places that formed out of necessity, care and generosity. Places like community bookshops, informal markets, mosques and prayer rooms, cooperatives, cultural centers – often temporary, often invisible to the official city map, but vital. They were acts of translation; fragments gathered as evidence that something existed, that something still exists, often unrecorded by formal archives. I visited them, sat in them, listened. And from those fragments, the pavilion began to emerge. In this way, it enacted a new kind of vernacular – one born not of fixed tradition, but of movement, displacement, and resistance.
The whole was always intended to exist as a composition of fragments. It was meant to reflect how we hold space in multiplicity. While the main pavilion lived in Kensington Gardens, other fragments were placed across the city – in Brixton, Peckham, Barking. Because the center is never just one place. And architecture, for me, does not begin with buildings. It begins with bodies, with language, with story. The pavilion’s diasporic logic represented a redefinition of the vernacular in an urban context. It asked: What if the idea of “vernacular” is not bound to a single place, but held in the ways people remember, gather, and inhabit space?
It mapped the black and brown immigrant architectures of London that have long shaped its social and spatial fabric, not through master plans, but through improvisation, migration, resistance. Its form invited people to sit, speak, eat, pray, remember – activating space through use, not spectacle. The Serpentine Pavilion, then, was less a finished object than an offering. A gesture toward another way of building; one that listens to the margins, and understands that the most powerful architectures are often the most ephemeral.
Too often, the structures and methods we inherit from architectural practice are extractive. They flatten and erase. I wanted to offer something else – a way of working that listens before it draws, a practice that makes space not just for people, but for their histories and futures to be held, side by side.
What might architecture become if we trusted the vernacular as a way to build the future?
Vernacular as Bridging the Past, Present and Future
For the 2023 Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, under the theme Awwal Bait (The First House), I wanted to honor the layered meanings of “home” in Islam: from the sacredness of the Ka’bah to the everyday spaces where prayer, gathering, and memory reside. For me, the vernacular is not just about esthetics or materials – it is about lived experience, the language of ritual, and the collective stories we inherit and reimagine.
I have always believed that Islamic art cannot be reduced to a particular style or era, and this Biennale provided the opportune moment to explore this. It is a lived tradition, shaped by geography, ecology, movement, and memory. The Biennale brought together over 60 contemporary works with 280 historical artifacts to create a dialogue across time. Artists like Igshaan Adams, who transformed used prayer mats into woven landscapes of devotion, showed how the spiritual can be embedded in the everyday, and how memory is often carried in the textures of our most familiar spaces.
Joe Namy’s sound installation Cosmic Breath weaved together the diverse threads of the Muslim call to prayer, the adhan, from various corners of the world. It comprises 18 loudspeakers arranged in a semicircle, each projecting recorded adhan from different countries and eras. These include the earliest known recording from the Haram Mosque in Makka in the late 19th century, as well as calls from locations as varied as Kaga in Japan, Tbilisi in Georgia, Durban in South Africa, and Michigan in the USA. This multiplicity of voices, dialects, and acoustic environments underscores the universality and adaptability of Islamic practices across cultures and geographies. By capturing the adhan in everyday settings, be it a petrol station in Jakarta or a chip shop in Cape Town, Namy highlights how sacred rituals permeate daily life, transcending the confines of formal religious spaces. The synchronized yet distinct calls create an undulating rhythm that mirrors the continuous cycle of prayer across time zones. This sonic tapestry not only honors the historical depth of Islamic practices but also invites contemplation on their contemporary relevance and future trajectories. In Cosmic Breath, the vernacular becomes a powerful medium through which the sacred and the everyday coalesce.
The musallah called anywhere can be a place of worship by syn architects was constructed using local palm reeds and referenced the simplicity of the Prophet’s earliest spaces of prayer. It reflected my conviction that sacredness does not require monumentality – only intention, community, and care. Simple maintenance – raking the ground and compacting the earth that supports the walls – was performed each day. Without these acts of care, the structure would disappear entirely over time. Through their repetition, its identity as a musallah and a civic space is sustained. These architectural gestures, grounded in the vernacular, challenge us to rethink permanence and tradition through the lens of accessibility and ecological sensitivity.
I was also deeply moved by Sun Path, Rajab to Shawwal 1444, an installation by Civil Architecture. This work reimagines the traditional mosque sundial, a vernacular tool that historically aligned daily prayers with the sun’s movement. Using the oculus of the Hajj Terminal’s canopy to direct sunlight onto marked lines representing hours, months, and seasons, the installation created a living calendar that connected visitors to both celestial rhythms and significant moments in Islamic history. This piece exemplifies how vernacular methods, rooted in local traditions and materials, can bridge temporal divides. By drawing on the architectural language of the Hajj Terminal and the ancient practice of solar timekeeping, Sun Path offers a contemplative space that honors the past while engaging the present. It invites us to consider how traditional knowledge systems can inform contemporary expressions of faith and community. Through such installations, we explore the potential of vernacular practices to create dialogues between history, spirituality, and modernity. Sun Path stands as a testament to the enduring relevance of indigenous knowledge and its capacity to inspire future narratives in Islamic art and architecture.
Curating this Biennale was not just about celebrating Islamic art; it was about expanding its definitions. I wanted to create a platform where multiplicity could thrive, where our cultural expressions are not frozen in time but are constantly unfolding. The vernacular, for me, is where that unfolding happens – in the spaces we build, the stories we tell, and the futures we imagine together.
Vernacular as Living Memory
During my research for the Asiat-Darse bridge in Vilvoorde, Belgium, we discovered the story of Paul Panda Farnana, one of the most important, yet least acknowledged figures of the city of Vilvoorde and Belgium more broadly, who epitomizes the region’s complex relationship with the Congo. We then centered the concept on this beautiful, untold legacy.
The first Congolese person to earn a university degree in Belgium, Farnana was a horticulturist, a thinker, a soldier, and above all, a radical advocate for pan-Africanism and the liberation of the oppressed. His overlooked legacy became a narrative and spatial anchor for the project, for which we were not interested in form as an answer, but rather what form could hold. What stories could be gathered here, what absences acknowledged, what futures initiated?
As with the Serpentine Pavilion, I turned again to the vernacular; this time as a method of assembling the fragmented. A way of working that begins with listening: to memory, to movement, to what has been made invisible. In the project, I treat the bridge not just as a connector between green banks, but as a threshold – a site of passage, of reckoning. A space where colonial legacies meet the potential of community-led memory.
The form of the project takes its inspiration from the water architectures of the Congo – beautiful boat structures configured next to each other, which also function as a place to gather and trade. Ancillary boat structures will also embed themselves along the river bank, expanding the “form” of the bridge to the broader ecosystem. Through workshops, conversations, and spatial research, we are co-authoring a new kind of monument – one that refuses to fix the past into a singular narrative, but allows it to be felt, heard, and experienced.
Phase 2 of the Asiat-Darse Bridge deepens the project’s engagement with landscape, heritage, and community by transitioning from initial planting into a build phase grounded in experimentation, education, and remembrance. This stage introduces and tests new landscape technologies, such as the integration of reused pavement and construction waste into soil substrates. These experimental substrates allow for an innovative approach to regenerative soil-making, aiming to contribute deployable strategies for urban ecological recovery. The bridge becomes a platform for this material and ecological testing, not just a connector of place, but a site of research and transformation.
In honoring Farnana’s legacy, the project repositions the landscape as a space of memory and resistance. His presence, woven into the conceptual and physical structure of the bridge, challenges dominant historical narratives and brings forward a more plural and just reading of the site. His agronomic work and commitment to knowledge-sharing underpin the participatory ambitions of this phase: to create a space where learning is shared, and heritage is not only preserved, but activated.
To work vernacularly, in this context, is to treat architecture as memory work. To see space not as neutral, but as something always contested – marked by who has been allowed to stay, to speak, to build. And in Belgium, where colonialism often lingers unacknowledged in the built environment, this work feels especially urgent. What would it mean for a bridge to carry not just people, but memory? What if its structure held buried stories that were returned to the public, slowly, in fragments, over time? In this way the Asiat-Darse bridge becomes not just an infrastructural gesture, but a vessel. A communal archive. A vernacular of refusal, and of imagining otherwise.
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