Designing for Tomorrow: The Datecrete Bee Hotel and a New Generation of Abu Dhabi Makers

There exists a particular kind of creative alchemy that emerges when art meets science, when the ancient wisdom of a region intersects with contemporary environmental urgency. Such is the essence of the Datecrete Bee Hotel, a public installation born from the research and imagination of Khaled Shalkha and Sara Abu Farha, whose work has captured something increasingly rare: a genuine synthesis of disciplinary boundaries in service of something larger than itself.

The project itself speaks to a quiet revolution in material innovation. The artists developed a cement-free material derived from date pits, transforming a byproduct of Abu Dhabi’s agricultural heritage into the structural foundation of a living installation. The work functions simultaneously as architecture, as sculpture, as environmental intervention, as habitat. This is the kind of thinking that the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation was established to nourish and amplify.

The Datecrete Bee Hotel earned the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Award for 2024, recognition that extended far beyond the honour itself. The award provided funding, mentorship and production support that enabled the artists to bring their vision from research into public space, and offered exhibition opportunities across Abu Dhabi that positioned their work within the broader conversation about what art and design might become in an era of environmental consequence.

This is the foundation’s essential purpose: to identify young creatives whose ambitions stretch beyond personal expression into territory that feels necessary. To give them not merely permission but resources and infrastructure, the kind of sustained support that transforms experimental practice into work that exists in the world, that people encounter, that shifts what feels possible. As Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation marks thirty years of building such possibilities, the work of Shalkha and Abu Farha stands as evidence of what can emerge when vision meets institutional support, when research becomes public art, when the material world itself becomes a canvas for ideas about how we might live differently.