Super Limbo in Sharjah: reimagining the unfinished
- Limbo Accra Project
- Photographs by Edmund Sumner
In the heart of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, the Ghanaian studio Limbo Accra has transformed an unfinished shopping mall into a poetic and reflective pavilion titled Super Limbo. This project, presented at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023, turns unfinished architecture into a manifesto on the potentiality of the unfinished-a symbol that invites us to rethink our spatial and urbanistic expectations.
Spatial and material strategy
Super Limbo occupies one of Sharjah Mall’s missing industrial structures, an abandoned concrete volume of nearly 65,000 m². Inside, Limbo Accra has installed large-scale raw cotton curtains woven by Ghanaian and Ivorian communities. These curtains, stretched between pillars and slabs, are inspired by the veils used in construction processes, creating folds that weave a suspended space.
Light, shadow and movement
The intervention responds with lightness to a brutalist structure. The fabric acts as a “spatial software”: it filters the zenithal light, generates changing stains on the concrete floors and, when the wind stirs them, animates the volume with ephemeral life. When it rains, water flows between the fabrics, turning the building into a living organism, capable of absorbing the cycles of the weather.
Narrative and participation
Under the unfinished roof of the mall, Super Limbo does not impose a use: it proposes a narrative scenario. Inspired by the mushairas-poetic encounters in the desert-the space invites visitors to tell, record, project, rehearse. Even after the triennial, the canvases will be dismantled to become objects and clothes, thus prolonging the pavilion’s narrative beyond its physical presence.
Altering the urban narrative
Its impact is not contemplative: it questions the logic of abandonment in current urban developments. Through its intervention, Limbo Accra claims unfinished architecture as a cultural material, a space of synthesis between failure and hope, between speculative economy and poetic gesture.
Super Limbo is not a closed architectural object, but a posture: an architecture that recognizes its unfinished state and turns it into a virtue. Its fragile materiality and monumental scale invite us to rethink the role of the unfinished in the contemporary landscape. Because, as Limbo Accra demonstrates, unfinished architecture can also be an open text, a possibility.
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