DAAS
A research platform for DAAS, the Decolonizing Architecture Art Studies program DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti) runs with the Sharjah Architecture Triennial — designed by Olfa Farhat, built by me to make a dense, multi-city body of architectural research fast and easy to actually navigate.
DAAS (Decolonizing Architecture Art Studies) is a research and education program initiated by DAAR — architects Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti — and run in collaboration with the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, one of the most prominent architecture and urbanism platforms across the Middle East, North and East Africa, and Asia. I built the platform in Next.js with Tailwind CSS and Sanity, working from Olfa Farhat's design and concept — Olfa is also one of the program's own 2025 Sharjah participants. My job was turning a genuinely complex body of work — open calls, city-specific editions like Daas In Cairo and Daas In Sharjah, participant profiles, public programming — into something people could explore without getting lost.
Architectural research platforms tend to bury the work: dense text, inconsistent navigation, no clear path through years of programming spread across multiple cities and editions. DAAS needed the opposite — information legible at a glance, a way to move through participants, editions, and public programs without friction, and a build that held up to the program's own design standards rather than reading like an academic afterthought.
Olfa Farhat led the design and conception — herself one of the program's 2025 Sharjah participants; I built it in Next.js with Tailwind CSS, wired to Sanity so the program's team can manage editions, participants, and programming without needing a developer for every update. The build prioritized exactly what the brief called for: information easy to understand at a glance, navigation without friction, and an experience fast and clean enough to match the Triennial's own identity rather than compete with it.
The site organizes DAAS's programming — open calls like Daas In Cairo, city editions like Daas In Sharjah: Site In Conversations — into something genuinely navigable, for a program where the research and the participants are the point and the site's only job is to get out of the way.
Have a project like this in mind?
Freelance projects and full-time roles both welcome. A short note about scope and timeline is enough to start.
Riad Hallouch
Senior Next.js Developer