For the final public programme event ahead of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial's third edition (SAT03), Architecture Otherwise: Building Civic Infrastructure for Collective Futures, a series of conversations convened by curator Vyjayanthi Rao brings together practitioners, artists and thinkers to ask how architecture responds to a world shaped by conflict, crisis and ongoing change.

Architecture is often associated with building and permanence. Yet today, it is equally defined by instability: by shifting urban conditions, environmental pressures and the realities of conflict and displacement. Anthropologist Filip de Boeck describes urban life as unfolding 'in the mirror of omnipresent death,' reminding us that even the most solid structures are shaped by forces of breakdown and repair. Across many parts of the world, these pressures are not abstract - they are lived daily, in cities where architecture must continuously adapt to disruption, scarcity, and change.

Planned in the shadow of ongoing war, Staying with the Trouble: Conversations around Architecture Otherwise looks to urban contexts where architecture has long had to grapple directly with destruction and instability. Rather than offering solutions, this series of conversations asks how architecture can support everyday forms of coexistence, care and interdependence, and how it might help foster collective futures across different places and geographies.

Taking place online on Saturday, 16 May at 5pm UAE time (9am EDT), the first conversation, themed 'Anticipation', opens this inquiry through the lens of Lebanon: a country shaped by decades of conflict where peace remains deferred, and futures are continuously renegotiated. Speakers Hiba Bou Akar (Associate Professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP) and Mohamad Nahleh (Assistant Professor of Architecture at Ohio State University), both trained in Lebanon and now based in the US, draw on their research and lived experience to reflect on the multiple conditions of the “post-war”, and what it means to practice architecture within prolonged uncertainty.

Further talks will be announced in due course.