Join Night School 2026 this January to explore urbanism, history and their intersections in the port city of Dubai. In this fifth season, led by architect and writer Todd Reisz, participants will meet with experts and thinkers who foster yearslong commitment to their investigations into cities and how we inhabit them.

Themed Pardon Our Progress, Night School takes its cue from the ever-present roadside signs that urge patience while the city takes new shape around us. If the present moment is a work in progress, then the future, forever out of reach, dangles the potentiality of completion.

This year’s seminar participants will meet with experts and thinkers who foster yearslong commitment to their investigations into cities and how we inhabit them. As alive as they are, their projects are slow burns, with a constant openness to renewal in purpose and meaning. Even if the enduring project can never be entirely resolved, that hasn’t discouraged any of them from pursuits through streets and hallways, into the historical record, and with their trustworthy companions.

Night School has, in past seasons, examined how histories get made; how our physical surroundings reveal more than they might at first appear to and how today’s lived experiences comprise lineages that stretch as far into the past as into the future. In this fifth season—a moment for Night School to take stock of its own present and future—Pardon Our Progress will ask what fuels the investigation, even when the pieces can never really ‘add up’.

Applications are now being accepted for the five-week seminar course, running from January 8 to February 12, 2026. 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 held every Monday and Thursday and the accompanying public events, and proficiency in reading English texts. Prior academic experience is not required.

Please submit your application here.  Applications will close on November 5, 2025.

Alongside the seminars, a series of lectures and screenings will be open to the larger public, exploring this year’s themes. More details about the public events will be announced soon.

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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.