Affiliated 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 co-founded 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 Mali’s 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 with 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.
Tansel Korkmaz, Turkey
Tansel Korkmaz is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, İstanbul 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 Sayın (Nevzat Sayın: Düşler, İşler, Düşünceler -Nevzat Sayın: 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.
Past Affiliated Visiting Fellows
Affiliated Doctoral Students
Neyran Turan
is an architect and currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She received her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Istanbul Technical University and holds a masters degree from Yale University School of Architecture. Currently focusing on the twentieth century Istanbul for her dissertation and Dubai for a complementary research, Turan's work concentrates on contemporary interpretations of scale, infrastructure and ecology, and their potentiality for new positionings in architecture and urbanism. Recent publications include articles in Thresholds, ACSA Surfacing Urbanisms, Bidoun: Technology, Corporations-Cities, and upcoming book chapters in: Landscapes of Development, The Superlative City, Dubai: Growing through Architecture, and MegaCities. Turan has also acted as the assistant editor for the book, Josep Lluis Sert: The Architect of Urban Design (with Hashim Sarkis and Eric Mumford, Yale University Press, 2008). She is a cofounder of NEMEstudio, a design and research collaborative engages in architecture and urbanism , and the founding chief-editor of the recently launched GSD journal New Geographies.
Gareth Doherty
Gareth Doherty is a doctoral candidate the GSD, where his research focuses on contemporary landscape and urban design in the Persian Gulf. Gareth previously studied landscape architecture and urban design at the University of Pennsylvania and University College Dublin. In Fall 2007, Gareth was a Teaching Fellow for Professor Hashim Sarkis’s “Constructing Vision”, and a Head Teaching Fellow for Professor Alex Krieger’s undergraduate lecture course “Designing the American City,” for which he received a Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching. Also, in 2007, Gareth won a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard University for a year of travel in the Persian Gulf and a Penny White Award from the GSD for research in Brazil on landscape in non-formal cities. Doherty participated in the Visiting Teachers Programme at the Architectural Association, London, in June 2007. He has lectured at Boston University, the Charles McGlinchey Summer School, in Donegal, Ireland; and in the GSD’s Career Discovery Program. He has also taken part in the Gulf Research Project organized by Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Publications include: papers in Projections: MIT Journal of Planning, in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Working Paper Series (Vol. 183), and (with Moisés Lino e Silva) in Kerb Magazine (Vol. 16, forthcoming); and book chapters in Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty-First Century, GSD, forthcoming.), and in Dubai: Growing through Architecture (Thames and Hudson, forthcoming).
Stephen J. Ramos
Stephen J. Ramos is a Doctor of Design candidate researching the impact of intensified trade flows, infrastructure, and technology on the physical form of cities with professors Hashim Sarkis, Peter Rowe and Joan Busquets. He holds a BA in English and Spanish Literature from Gettysburg College and a Joint Masters Degree in Community and Regional Planning (MS) and Latin American Studies (MA) from the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent teaching post was Principal Instructor of the Urban Planning and Design concentration of the GSD’s Summer Career Discovery Program in 2007. Ramos was also a Head Teaching Fellow for the Harvard College Core Program Course “Designing the American City” (spring 2007) and Head Teaching Fellow for the GSD Course “Public/Private Development” (fall 2006). He has recently published “Dubai : Port as Prototype” co-authored with Gareth Doherty and Hashim Sarkis for Neutra.Revista de Arquitectura del Colegio de Arquitectos de Andalucía (fall 2006); forthcoming book chapters include “Prototype and Replication in Dubai Urbanism” coauthored with Peter G. Rowe for The Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty-First Century (GSD, forthcoming), “Dubai Urbanism and Port Infrastructure” for Dubai: Growing through Architecture (Thames and Hudson, forthcoming), and a coauthored chapter with Gareth Doherty and Hashim Sarkis on Dubai’s urban development for Cuatro Ciudades (Universidad Católica, forthcoming).
Rania Ghosn
Rania Ghosn was born, raised, and educated in Beirut where she received her Bachelor in Architecture degree from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2000. With a British Council Chevening scholarship, she pursued her interests in the relations of space, capital and power and completed her MSc in “Modernity, Space and Place” at the University College London in 2003. She has taught basic and advanced level studio courses at AUB and at the Lebanese American University, and has been a teaching fellow at the GSD. Ghosn’s research is on the Pan-Arab Highway, a proposed highway linking the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf; she has traced the politics of infrastructural development from the concession of the Beirut-Damascus Carriage Road under the Ottoman Empire to the post Lebanese civil-war toll-highway that reasserted Beirut as the Gateway to the East.
El Hadi Jazairy
El Hadi Jazairy is an architect and a doctor of design student at the GSD. He was born in Algiers, received a Diplôme d’Architecte from the Institut Supérieur d’Architecture La Cambre in Brussels (1999), and holds a Master of Architecture II from Cornell University (2007). At Cornell, Jazairy conducted exploratory research on cinematic landscapes. He analyzed, through film, the Sahara desertscape in terms of its structural qualities and designed an interactive virtual space reconstructing, through a 3D architectural layout, the cinematic perceptions experienced while crossing the territory. His thesis was entitled “Sahara Drive, Rest and Walk: An Interactive Journey into a Polarized Territory.” He has worked in Belgium for more than six years, including for Louis de Beauvoir Architects, Gigantes Zenghelis Architects, and as a Lead Project Architect for Xaveer de Geyter. Several of his awarded projects are currently being realized and are featured in publications such as A+U and El Croquis. He is a member of the Belgian National Accreditation Board, the “Ordre des Architectes du Brabant.” In 2000, through his independent practice, he won the second best award for the EUROPAN 6 international competition. Jazairy has taught advanced-level courses such as professional practice as well as design studios at Cornell. His research at Harvard focuses on analysis and representation tools in architecture, such as video and interactive media to explore the subjective relationships of the neo-nomad and his territory.
Antonio Petrov
Antonio Petrov is an architect and urban designer currently in the Doctor of Design program at the GSD. He holds German university degrees in foreign trade business, architecture and urban design. As a Fulbright Fellow he researched the relationships between human and nonhuman interaction in brownfield environments and received his Master of Architecture degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Petrov taught design studios, urban design, and digital design as a fulltime faculty member at IIT, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Iowa State University. He also serves on the board of directors of Extension Gallery in Chicago and is principal of WAS, an interdisciplinary practice of architects, urban planners and graphic designers, with studios in Chicago and Berlin. He has won numerous international design competitions, and his work is published and exhibited internationally. His teaching, practice, and research emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration, the synthesis of the moment and the anti-moment, dynamism and simultaneity in experimental urban schemes, and responsive architectural structures. In his doctoral research Petrov investigates the sociocultural phenomenon of megachurches and their transformative impact on twenty-first-century American urbanism, architecture, culture, and politics.
Past Affiliated Doctoral Students
GSD Faculty Research:
Jorge Silvetti, Core History Course, research on Islamic Architecture
John Beardsley, Core History Course, research on Islamic Gardens
Robert France, Lakes in Central Asia
Eve Blau, Post-WWII Urbanism in the Balkan States
Virginie Lefebvre, Desert Tourism in the Arab World