Year 2 (2019-2020) students visited the Wasit Wetlands Centre, nestled within Sharjah’s beautiful conservation area preserving the once common sabkha found along the UAE’s coastal plains. A golf buggy tour took them around the site’s numerous observation points, showcasing the well-preserved salty lagoons, mudflats, and freshwater pools home to numerous wild birds, before descending down to the Centre itself, an awe-inspiring experience of unobtrusive architecture that takes advantage of the site’s natural topography by making it appear as if it had been submerged into the ground. The students walked through the AKAA award-winning design that consists of a long viewing gallery flanked by 60 species of birds in their natural habitat, observing technical and design details that the students sketched into a section as a hands-on exercise of comprehending the complexities of architectural drawing.