House of the Future

Al-Naseem House is OLOSOMA's inaugural competition project: a courtyard-based residential concept entered in the Dubai House of the Future Competition and shortlisted in the top 100 from over 10,000 global submissions. The project was developed jointly with Manuel Echavarria Romero under the OLOSOMA studio name, with a clear division of labour between the two collaborators reflected in the folder structure. AI was used as a genuine creative partner throughout, with every competition visualisation produced through AI-assisted workflows with architectural models built in Rhino and CAD, and presentation boards designed in Figma. The competition brief was dated 21 November 2024; the submission was lodged on 2 June 2025.

The design's central argument is that Emirati architectural tradition already solved the problem of desert habitation, and that the task of the contemporary architect is to restate these solutions through current material and digital technology. The courtyard house typology returns as the organising principle: all primary rooms face inward to the enclosed outdoor space, minimising exposure to the harsh external environment while maximising shared family life. The central courtyard contains a water mirror feature for evaporative cooling, date palm trees for biological shading, and a CNC-cut palm element pergola overhead, forming a domestic microclimate engineered from traditional precedent.

The passive cooling stack operates through three interacting systems. Solar chimneys exhaust hot air from the interior by thermally induced convection, creating negative pressure that draws cooler air through the Riyah vent air bricks at low level. The Riyah vents, porous clay air brick wall elements adapted from the traditional Arab wind tower, filter dust while admitting filtered cross-ventilation, enabling passive night purging without mechanical systems. The Al-Mawj ventilated brick tile envelope provides the outer thermal defence: clay and dune sand tile modules clipped onto a precast concrete wall core create a ventilated air cavity that intercepts solar radiation before it reaches the structural layer.

Internally, the partitions use hempcrete with embedded phase-change material (PCM) capsules, a bio-based construction that buffers temperature swings through latent heat absorption and release. The material palette throughout reflects the desert context: earth-concrete walls, natural lime plaster, palm fibre composite cabinetry, earth-stabilised tile flooring, and low-e glazing with palm fibre composite shading hoods. The domestic programme is organised around the culturally specific spatial requirement of the majlis, a dedicated hospitality room with traditional Emirati floor-level seating, Mashrabiya screen filtering daylight for privacy, and earth-plastered walls.