The third edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial will open on 14 November with a five-day programme of exhibitions, talks and performances spread across the emirate. Titled Architecture Otherwise: Building Civic Infrastructure for Collective Futures, the triennial runs until 14 April 2027 and is curated by Vyjayanthi Rao, with Tau Tavengwa as associate curator.

Thirty-five participants will present work at venues that are themselves part of the argument. The sites include the Al Qasimiyah School, the Al Jubail Vegetable Market, the Al Madam Buried Village and the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization, places where everyday civic life, trade and memory intersect with the built environment. The choice of venues is deliberate: the triennial wants visitors to encounter architecture where people actually live and work, not only in a gallery.

The opening programme runs from 14 to 19 November and closes with a two-day conference at Africa Hall, the historic Sharjah venue that hosted the emirate's first cultural gatherings. The conference will bring together architects, planners and civic thinkers to discuss how architecture can serve collective life rather than simply mark skylines, and how the buildings and spaces a city already has can be put to new civic uses.

By staging the triennial in working markets and schools rather than in a single exhibition hall, the curators are making a case for architecture as infrastructure in the broadest sense, something that belongs to daily life. It is a deliberately grounded edition, and one that will test whether a biennial format can speak to the people who actually use the buildings it shows, as well as to the architects who design them.