Visiting Fellows
Lara Zureikat, Jordan
Lara Zureikat is the associate director of the Center for the Study of the Built Environment (CSBE), a non-profit interdisciplinary research center focusing on urban design and planning, conservation, architecture, and landscape architecture, in Jordan and beyond. Lara is also a practicing landscape architect and holds a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Notre Dame, and a master's degree in landscape architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. Her work at CSBE has focused on water conservation in designed landscapes including public awareness and outreach, training and capacity building in the private and public sectors, as well as the implementation of pilot projects in urban and rural areas. Lara also designed the first model water-conserving park for the National Gallery for Fine Arts.
Behrang Behin
Behrang Behin holds a Master in Architecture with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His research interest is the synthesis of technology, architecture, and urbanism in new cities. His thesis project, "Stack City," explored the potential for new forms of urbanism within the framework of a zero-carbon new city in the UAE, and was awarded the James Templeton Kelley Prize for outstanding final project. He also received the AIA medal for highest academic achievement in his class, and the Peter Rice Prize for innovation in architecture and engineering for his work on deployable structures.
Behrang has worked on international projects at several architectural firms in the U.S., as well as Transsolar, a German environmental engineering firm focused on sustainable practice. Prior to his work as an architect, he received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley, and a B.S. with honors in Applied Physics from Yale University, and cofounded a company which developed hardware for the telecommunications industry.
Oussouby SACKO
Oussouby SACKO is Associate Professor at Kyoto Seika University, Department of Art and Cultural Studies, Japan. Born in Mali (Bamako), he went to China (Beijing and Nanjing) after graduating High School to pursue his education in the field of Architecture. He got a Bachelor Degree from South East University, Nanjing China. He moved to Japan afterward and got a Master Degree and a Doctor Degree of Engineering in the field of Architecture and Architecture Planning from the Graduate School of Engineering at Kyoto University, Japan. He is now teaching Comparative Architecture Culture, Introduction to research in Architecture, Housing Planning and Design, and supervising master thesis. He has been conducted field works and worked on housing planning and design in Mali and Japan. Recently, his main interest is on the architecture, community organization and preservation of Malis historical cities of Timbuctu and Djenne.
Aziza Chaouni, Morocco
Aziza Chaouni practices architecture and landscape in the United States, Europe and Morocco. She graduated with an MArch with Distinction from the GSD and a BS with Honors in Civil Engineering from Columbia University.
She is director of the research board of DOCOMOMO Morocco, a chapter of an international organization that seeks the preservation of the modern heritage. Her research on the late Moroccan architect Jean-Francois Zevaco was published in the DOCOMOMO journal and Architecture du Maroc and will appear in Detailing Modernism, to be published with the support of a Graham Foundation grant and the Archilab Center in Orleans. In 2007, she was awarded a Progressive Architecture award for her research project, “Hybrid Urban Sutures: Filling the Gaps in the Medina of Fez.” At the GSD, she has collaborated on the Desert Tourism conference, seminar, and publication and on a studio on Fez. Chaouni exhibited her research last spring on Desert Ecolodges at the GSD.
El Hadi Jazairy
El Hadi Jazairy is a post-Doctoral fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He received a Diplôme d'Architecte from La Cambre in Brussels (1999), and holds a Master of Architecture from Cornell University (2007) and a Doctor of Design from Harvard University (2010). He is editor-in-chief of New Geographies #4: Scales of the Earth.
Tansel Korkmaz, Turkey
Tansel Korkmaz is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Istanbul Bilgi University. Her research areas include history and theory of modern architecture, historiography of architecture and architectural criticism. She is the author of a monograph on Nevzat Sayin (Nevzat Sayin: Dsler, Isler, Dsnceler-Nevzat Sayin: Visions, Works, Thoughts; YKY, 2004) and the editor of Architecture in Turkey Around 2000: Issues in Discourse and Practice (Chambers of Architects of Turkey, 2005).
Jala Makhzoumi, Iraq and Lebanon
Jala Makhzoumi studied architecture in Iraq and continued to receive a Masters of Environmental Design from Yale University and a PhD in Landscape Architecture from Sheffield University. She has practiced architecture, ecological landscape design and planning in Iraq, Lebanon and Cyprus and is currently a member of the UN-HABITAT Advisory Council for the Reconstruction of Iraq. Her professional and academic area of interest is in method and application of a landscape approach to biodiversity conservation, rural development and urban greening. Among her publications is Ecological Landscape Design and Planning. The Mediterranean context, with co-author G. Pungetti (Spon, London, 1999). Dr Makhzoumi is associate professor and program coordinator for the Landscape Design and Eco-Management Program at the American University of Beirut.
Manuel Heitor
Manuel Heitor is Full Professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico, IST, the engineering school of the Technical University of Lisbon, and served as Secretary of State for Science, Technology, and Higher Education in the Government of Portugal from March 2005 to June 2011. He earned a PhD at London’s Imperial College in 1985, and did post-doctoral training at the University of California San Diego. He pursued an academic career at IST, where he served as Deputy-President from 1993 to 1998. Since 1995, he has been Research Fellow of the IC2 Institute, Innovation, Creativity and Capital, at the University of Texas, Austin. He was the founding director of IST´s “Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research,” awarded in 2005 by the International Association of Management of Technology, IAMOT, as one of the top fifty global centers of research on “Management of Technology.” In 2003, he received the Dibner Award from the Society for the History of Technology, SHOT.
Erkin Ozay
Erkin Özay is an architect and a lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He received his BArch degree from Middle East Technical University in Ankara (1998) and his MArch II degree from Harvard University (2001). He practiced in various Istanbul, Boston area, and London practices, focusing on residential, institutional, and urban development projects. He has won numerous design awards as a collaborator and with his own practice. His award-winning proposal for a high-density housing competition in New Orleans was exhibited at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. Erkin Özay recently taught a studio with Prof. Hashim Sarkis at Harvard University, focusing on the Suleymaniye Complex and its relationship with Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula. He will be teaching a seminar in spring 2012, titled “School for Year 2030” in partnership with Harvard Graduate School of Education. His current research focuses on the clash of Istanbul’s expanding transportation infrastructure and the historic city.
Students
Amin Alsaden
Amin Alsaden is a first year PhD student. His research interests include the role of politics in determining forms of architectural Modernism in non-western contexts; civic and cultural developments, institutes, and their historiography; and museology and the social, cultural, and cognitive role of architecture in relation to artistic and curatorial practices. Amin's dissertation will focus on architectural developments in Baghdad in the postwar years up to the fall of the monarchical regime, a period that witnessed unprecedented intellectual and artistic growth and multifaceted cultural production.
Amin holds a Masters in Architecture from Princeton University and a Bachelor in Architecture, with a Minor in Interior Design, from the American University of Sharjah. He has worked at various architectural practices, most recently at OMA and MVRDV in The Netherlands, where his experience involved large-scale urban proposals and high-rise buildings, as well as cultural projects including art districts, museums, and exhibition design.
Peter Christensen
Peter Christensen is a PhD candidate in Architecture at Harvard University. His research centers on the practice and historiography of geopolitics as a field of inquiry since the nineteenth century onwards, and its implications on spatial practices with particular interest in infrastructure and the borders of Islamic and Judeo-Christian civilizations. His current doctoral research considers cultural, technological, and architectural exchanges between the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires in tandem with the speculation and construction of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, 1872–1914. In 2011–2012, Peter is on a Fulbright Scholarship conducting archival research towards his dissertation which includes the recent discovery of lavishly illustrated and previously unpublished topographic and settlement maps of a broad swath of the Ottoman Empire extending from Konya to Baghdad, executed by the German engineer Wilhelm von Pressel between 1872–1878. Peter holds a BArch from Cornell University and a MDesS and AM from Harvard.
Saira Hashmi
Saira Hashmi is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research interest focuses on designing an optimal water infrastructure network for sustainable cities that embodies the culture and environment with an emphasis on the Middle East. She is developing models that will help in maximizing reuse of water sources and minimizing water consumption, by investing in appropriate efficient sets of water saving technologies within the city along with unconventional water resources. Her research on water scarcity explores the connection between the cultural and technological sides of ecological solutions. Her background is in civil and environmental engineering, and she received her Masters in Environmental Engineering from Harvard University.
Aylin B. Yildirim Tschoepe
Aylin B. Yildirim Tschoepe received the Graduate Engineer Diploma in Germany in 2003 and began working as an architect on public and private projects soon after. In 2007, Aylin received a Master of Science degree after carrying out case studies in informal settlements in Istanbul, proposing an alternative strategy for gecekondu upgrading. As a Doctor of Design candidate at Harvard in her final year, Aylin pursues an academic career in the fields of urban studies and anthropology. At the GSD, Aylin has worked as a teaching fellow for seminars and design studios. Her research interest lies in interdisciplinary approaches to issues resulting from rapid urbanization and migration in regard to urban and rural development. Concurrently, Aylin began a PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at the GSAS at Harvard in fall 2011; this will allow her to expand and deepen her expertise in interdisciplinary work, research, and teaching.
Recent graduate
Antonio Petrov
Antonio Petrov received his doctorate from Harvard University. In his work he explores a range of subjects that include material culture, cultural memory, and postmodern paradigms inscribed in sacred architecture, landscapes, and urban formations. His research traces the emergence of new spatial paradigms in ecclesiastical architecture and argues that postwar American Protestantism not only overcame the traditional signification of sacred architecture, but also its dichotomy of form, function, and aesthetics. To this end, he is working on publishing his dissertation titled Superordinary! New Paradigms in Sacred Architecture. Presently, he is editor-in-chief of DOMA, a bilingual magazine in Macedonia, and volume five of the Harvard journal New Geographies. In volume 5, “The Mediterranean,” he aims to spatialize the Mediterranean as a larger geographic entity that straddles conventional boundaries between cities and hinterlands, and conceptualizes it as a geographic, spatial, and cultural meaning beyond known boundaries, cultures, and geo-political contours.
Faculty
Sibel Bozdogan, Lecturer in Architectural History, Department of Architecture
Rahul Mehrotra, Professor and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design
Hashim Sarkis, Professor, Department of Urban Planning and Design
