Traces of Abyss Part 1 Project 2025 Amir Shahnoor Heriot Watt University - Dubai Campus | UAE Set in Hor Al Anz, within the old district of Deira Dubai, a densely populated neighbourhood often bypassed by the city’s grand visions, ‘Traces of Abyss’ reclaims absence as a spatial and social necessity. Rooted in the elemental quality of Space, it resists the pressure to define, dictate, or perform.In a place where lives are shaped by the relentless logics of commute, transaction, and labour, the proposal introduces a cultural complex that refuses to dictate use. It offers space for pause, where the absence of imposed function becomes the only ethical gesture, a quiet resistance to hyper-functional urbanism that leaves no room for reflection or care.These absences are not voids, but spaces of potential. Occupied without instruction, they become active forms of care, reclaiming the right to gather, connect, redefine and create.For a community long overlooked, the project offers a soft landmark: quiet, present, and open. It doesn’t declare itself - it listens. And in doing so, reframes architecture as a container of communal identity.Traces of Abyss is a defence of leaving space open - where absence of function creates conditions for presence, encounter, and for care. Tutor(s)