The first official participation of Qatar at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale was rooted in the Arabic word “bayt,” meaning “home.” 

Across two sites, Beyti Beytak. My Home is Your Home. La mia casa è la tua casa surveyed how hospitality is embodied in the architecture and urbanism of the SWANA region and South Asia, featuring examples from as far as the Atlas Mountains to beyond the Indus River.

In the center of the Giardini, part one of the exhibition took the form of the Community Center, designed by Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari. The structure stood on the site of the future permanent Qatar Pavilion, designed by Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh—the first national pavilion to be built in the Giardini in 30 years. 

The Community Center, Lari told The World Around, was a “welcoming gesture," a low-carbon structure, designed to be “threatening neither to people nor the planet.” But beyond the Biennale, the humanitarian said she believes that an architecture of hospitality must open its doors to as many as possible: “We know that there is an extremely large gap between the rich and the poor of the world today. But as designers, we seem not to be there to help. I really feel that architects must change; I feel that our entire understanding of what purpose architecture serves must change.”