Join Night School 2025 this January to explore urbanism, history and their intersection in the port city of Dubai. In this fourth season, led by architect and writer Todd Reisz, participants will trace the lifelines—the paths of movement that shape our environments.

Lifelines convey the essentials. Over land and through the city, they deliver water and electricity. Thrown at sea, a lifeline brings you back to solid ground. A person can be your lifeline.

Lifelines may leave only a trace: the trail of one traveler’s past guides the next one’s future. Lifelines merge with more lines, interwoven through time and space.

Lifelines, unlike deadlines, are never completed.
They are living tasks that we sustain and attend to.

At Night School, we will consider taking time as requisite for taking care: of a place, of an object, and of life around us. We will meet with thinkers and practitioners who reveal the lifelines that run through our workaday lives and render the city we inhabit.

Night School offers two ways to participate: either by attending public events open to all or by applying for the closed four-week seminar course. Public events will be held throughout the four weeks of Night School to give the public a chance to hear more about this year’s themes, while the seminar course will meet from January 8 until February 1, 2025, on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, 7:00–9:30 p.m. The detailed programme will be shared soon.

Everyone is welcome to apply for the seminar course, but seats are limited and determined by an admission process. The requirements: a commitment to attend all seminar sessions and public events; and proficiency in reading English texts. Prior academic experience is not required. Those accepted will be contacted from November 13, 2024.

APPLICATION ARE NOW CLOSED
Successful candidates will be notified from Tuesday, November 19

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Todd Reisz is the author of Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai (Stanford University Press, 2020) which explores architecture’s packaging to sell Dubai on a global stage. At Jameel Arts Centre, he curated the exhibition Off Centre/On Stage (2021), wrote the eponymous publication (Khatt Books, 2021) and led the first Night School (2022). He also co-edited with Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi Building Sharjah (Birkhäuser, 2021), an archival investigation of that city’s vanishing 20th-century landscape.

This year’s theme Lifelines learns from anthropologist Tim Ingold’s work on lines.