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.

Under the theme 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 have now closed for the five-week seminar course, running from January 8 to February 12, 2026.

Alongside the seminars, a series of lectures and screenings will be open to the larger public, exploring this year’s themes. The public events of Night School 2026 are:

An Unwritten Country: Frauke Heard-Bey in conversation with Meitha Al Mazrooei
Sunday, January 11, 2026 | 7pm – 9pm
Frauke Heard-Bey joins Meitha Almazrooei to discuss the long arc of writing and archiving history in the UAE over 40 years. Learn more and RSVP to attend here.

Off the Menu in Dubai: Public Lecture by Arva S. Ahmed
Wednesday, January 14, 2026 | 7pm – 9pm
Entrepreneur Arva S. Ahmed reflects on her unconventional path toward building a Dubai-based business around less-marketed aspects of UAE cities through Frying Pan Adventures, one of the city’s most respected food guides. Learn more and RSVP to attend here. 

Memory under Construction: Rashad Bukhash in conversation with Lina Najem
Sunday, January 18, 2026 | 7pm – 9pm
Rashad Bukhash revisits decades of work in heritage conservation on both shores of Dubai Creek, including his long tenure at Dubai Municipality, in conversation with Lina Najem. Learn more and RSVP to attend here.  

Constant Adjustment: Film Programme by Hind Mezaina
Saturday, January 24, 2026 | 7pm – 9pm
This year’s five short films explore how neighbourhoods and other places endure over time through ways of the property markets, political erasure, and the whim of human interest. Learn more and RSVP to attend here. 

School is a City: Public Lecture by Prasad Shetty and Rupali Gupte
Sunday, January 25, 2026 | 7pm – 9pm
Gupte and Shetty reflect on the motivations and challenges that shaped their commitment to the founding and sustaining of the School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai, India. Learn more and RSVP to attend here. 

Biographies of a Cairo Neighbourhood: Public Lecture by Khaled Adham
Wednesday, January 28, 2026 | 7pm – 9pm
Khaled Adham traces the personal and familial impulses that have shaped Mohandiseen district in Cairo, Egypt. Learn more and RSVP here.

Architecture after The Gulf: Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Tala Gharagozlou
Saturday, January 31, 2026 | 6pm – 7pm
Rem Koolhaas joins architect Tala Gharaglozlou for a conversation on his two decades of examining, questioning and working within Dubai and Gulf cities across architectural, publication and curatorial projects. Learn more and RSVP here. 

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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.

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