AGUA Y ACEITE
Competition | Design Doha 2026

Site: Doha
Project: 2025
Team: Guillermo Sánchez Cárdenas, Kevin Santus, Arianna Scaioli, Sara Ghaderi

Agua y Aceite reflects on Doha as a city where tradition and modernity coexist like water and oil, preserving distinct structures and densities while sharing the same container. From its origins, Doha’s urban development has been shaped by two resources: water and oil. Communities once gathered around water wells, and later cities grew around oil wells. Today, both typologies are largely obsolete, as extraction has shifted offshore. This shift raises a question: can a more socially and environmentally sustainable future be found within the city’s own public spaces?
The project understands heritage, culture, and knowledge as living and intangible resources. From this perspective, it proposes a covered public pavilion conceived as an educational and recreational facility for the entire city. The title, Agua y Aceite, references both Arabic linguistic influence and multicultural collaboration, highlighting the shared roots of languages and cultures.
Located in the courtyard of the Mohammed bin Jassim House within Msheireb Museums, the pavilion is embedded in a district historically linked to water, knowledge, and the discovery of oil. The project reinterprets two Gulf typologies—the tent and the well—through a modular timber structure with a light, semi-permeable canopy. A pulley system inspired by traditional wells lifts the canopy, recalling the act of drawing resources from the ground and reinforcing Msheireb’s role as a place of gathering and exchange.
Conceived as a flexible cultural arena, the pavilion hosts educational activities by day and performances by night, accommodating diverse users and programs. Modular, demountable, and site-specific, the structure merges climate-responsive design with cultural storytelling, weaving together past and present while looking toward a more sustainable future for Doha.