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Exhibition - [Im]Possible Abu Dhabi: An Exploration of the City’s Architectural DNA
Start Date
Oct 26, 2026
End Date
Nov 13, 2026
Time
04:30 PM - 08:00 PM
Open for Public
Yes
Venue
Description
Opening Ceremony – 26 October 2026
4:30 pm – 5 pm
The exhibition investigates how generative artificial intelligence can reveal, distort, and reimagine the architectural language of Abu Dhabi.
Developed by the a Collective at Zayed University, the exhibition grows out of “The Dis-Orientalist”, first presented at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. The project challenges stereotypical representations of Gulf cities by training AI on a locally constructed visual dataset focused on Abu Dhabi’s everyday built environment.
The exhibition asks a simple but provocative question: what does an AI model learn when it learns a city?
Across panels and digital screens, visitors will encounter AI-generated architectural variations, diagrams, three-dimensional studies, and animations exploring recurring elements of the city—façades, screens, arches, materials, climatic devices, patterns, and volumetric relationships.
Rather than imagining an arbitrary future, [Im]Possible Abu Dhabi uses AI to investigate the architectural DNA already embedded in the city: its repetitions, mutations, hybrids, and latent possibilities.
Presented beneath the central atrium dome of Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, the exhibition invites visitors to encounter a city that is at once familiar, transformed, possible—and impossible.
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