Picture the 36th floor of Emirates Towers. A 1,105-square-metre office for a government entity, suspended above one of the world’s most kinetic cities. Most architects handed this brief would reach for drama – a statement ceiling, a wall of glass, some grand architectural gesture that announces importance from the moment the lift doors open. Mustafa Khamash did something harder. He made it feel inevitable. Rooms that don’t demand to be entered. They simply make leaving feel wrong. Opal Blue and Patagonia marble carved into three-dimensional geometries rather than laid flat as embellishment. A sculptural sunburst ceiling in the boardroom that radiates outward and dissolves into the walls and the hand-tufted carpet below, as if the whole room grew from a single idea. And at the heart of it: a bespoke installation presenting the Arabic word نحن – “we” – rendered in 55 languages. Not as decoration. As a spatial manifesto. “True luxury,” Khamash tells MOJEH MEN, “lies in precision and efficiency.”
This is what it looks like when one of the Arab world’s most consequential architects is given a room and told to fill it.
Mustafa Khamash is the Founder and Creative Director of Kart Group, a Dubai studio he established in 2004 that has spent two decades delivering environments for government, royal, and corporate clients across the Gulf. He is, by most credible measures, a Power 50 designer – a trusted advisor to senior leadership, the person called when an institution needs a space that must carry symbolic weight without tipping into pretension. In a region that has often seemed locked in competition with itself over height and extravagance and the accumulation of superlatives, he has spent twenty years making a different kind of argument. “Silence in architecture means reducing visual noise so space communicates through light, proportion, and material,” he says. “I design for calm continuity. In one majlis project, filtered daylight, thick walls, and natural airflow created comfort without devices. Sustainability and adaptability were embedded through passive cooling and flexible layouts.”
What makes this interesting – and what gives it tension – is where he was formed. Khamash trained at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, the IUAV, where the built environment is the curriculum and the city itself is the lesson. He then spent his early career working alongside Paolo Piva, the Italian architect and designer whose sophisticated minimalism – honed under the legendary Carlo Scarpa at that same Venetian institution – became the bedrock of European material intelligence. From that foundation of precision and restraint, Khamash then moved into far more turbulent orbits: international collaborations with Zaha Hadid Architects, whose entire practice was the weaponisation of form, and Philippe Starck, a designer constitutionally allergic to understatement. That Khamash held his course through all of this – that he emerged more convinced than ever of the power of discipline – is the defining fact of his creative life.
The work bears this out across every scale. In Dar Mira, a private residence in Morocco, he reinterprets the full richness of Moroccan craft tradition – Zellige tilework, hand-carved wooden details, Majorelle Blue dining rooms – through a contemporary lens precise enough that nothing reads as costume. Double-height volumes and sweeping glass pull natural light through every corner. Sunken majlis courts blur the line between interior and landscape. “This project was conceived as a dialogue between craftsmanship, atmosphere, and intention,” he says. “Every detail is designed to feel intuitive yet deliberate – creating spaces that invite people to slow down, connect, and experience beauty through material, light, and proportion.”
His public art installations are where the same sensibility finds its most monumental expression – and where you begin to understand the full range of what this studio is capable of. His portrait series are 3D multidimensional sculptures of treated metal sheets, cut and arranged vertically with such precision that a human face materialises from what initially reads as pure abstraction. The reveal is perspectival: from one angle, one portrait; from another, an entirely different face. The layers symbolise, beyond their visual trick, the depth of character and wisdom of the leaders depicted. Then there is The Code, a TECOM-commissioned installation at Dubai Internet City composed of solid glass sheets arranged in a cylindrical formation. On one side, lines of coding script weave together verses from a poem by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – the code itself becoming an image when viewed from precisely the right angle.
On the other, the emblem of Dubai Internet City is constructed from one of his most cited quotes, letters and symbols fused through a unique coding language. Innovation and heritage, not as opposing forces, but as the same impulse expressed in different registers. “I translate cultural memory into abstract forms people can interpret freely,” Khamash says. “Geometry, scale, and material reference heritage without copying it. Public interaction is key. I use durable, climate-responsive materials and modular construction, ensuring longevity while allowing the structure to adapt to different urban contexts and uses.”
Navigating the world in which this work is made requires a special type of fluency – the ability to hold creative integrity in the same hand as institutional expectation, to serve governments, royal clients, and corporate entities without becoming their instrument. His answer is less strategic than it first appears: “I focus on principles rather than style. Spatial clarity, human scale, and environmental response guide every project. Whether institutional or private, I align function with cultural context. Adaptable planning systems and passive environmental strategies ensure each project performs efficiently while maintaining a consistent architectural language.” Principles as anchor. The brief, the client, the context – these shift. The principles don’t.
A large civic project with layered stakeholders was, he says, his most testing experience. The balance between symbolic identity and strict technical demands, the sheer complexity of keeping clarity at the centre of a process designed to fragment it. “I learned that leadership in architecture means listening and simplifying. Flexible spatial systems and passive environmental solutions helped resolve complexity while maintaining cultural relevance.” Not imposing or asserting. Listening, and then cutting to what matters.
Beyond the studio itself, Khamash has invested in what comes next. In collaboration with Dubai Holding, Kart Group established a scholarship programme with the Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation – a commitment rooted in a specific belief about where designers go wrong. “I encourage critical thinking and respect for context,” he says. “Designers should understand climate, materials, and cultural narratives before form-making. The goal is to create architecture that serves society effortlessly and responsibly.” The profession, in his view, has a tendency to reach for form too early, before the thinking is ready for it. The scholarship is a structural argument against that tendency.
Ask him what he would build without limits and he doesn’t reach for scale or display. He goes somewhere still – a desert-based cultural sanctuary, earth and light and wind as the primary materials, spaces that evolve with climate conditions, passive cooling and shaded courtyards and water-sensitive planning. Not a landmark. A place to feel something. “Visitors would feel stillness, orientation, and connection.”
