A new academic center will transform the skyline of the UAE’s third-largest city thanks to a partnership between a renowned architect and an ascendent academic institution dedicated to the study of Africa in the Arab world.

Adjaye Associates has released its designs for the new Africa Institute campus in the city of Sharjah. The project was announced in September following a two-year collaboration between the firm and the Institute first established in 1976. 

The 343,000-square-foot plan will provide a new home for the Institute’s academic programs, which focus on African culture, languages, and the African Diaspora. Five reddish concrete blocks form a program of interconnected outdoor courtyards cooled by large overhangs and bookended by a post office roundabout in the city’s Al Mankah neighborhood. 

Per the architect: “The project contemplates how one lives and learns, stimulated by this region where the language of the courtyard becomes a central form in which climate and construct cohabitate.” The institute’s courtyard takes on a particular focus owing to the regional typologies that their design draws from. Water features, native plants, and a quartet of perforated openings work to moderate the arid climate while defining the library and classroom areas which ultimately creates an “atmosphere for intellectual exchange” throughout the easily accessible downtown campus. 

“I envision the new campus as a springboard, connecting and embodying the incredible history of Africa, the African diaspora, and the Arab world,” the 54-year-old Adjaye said in a press statement.

According to Adjaye: “The space expands within the city as a newly centralized space of learning. A site of intellectual exchange between the Arab World and Africa, the Africa institute presents an architecture that redefines the ways in which the public, the regional landscape and the landscape of academic excellence, exist in conversation and support of one another.”