Meriem Chabani “South South Cosmogonies”
Meriem Chabani “South South Cosmogonies”
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About this Event
PLEASE NOTE: This event has been rescheduled to Thursday, October 23rd, from its original date of Wednesday, October 22nd.
“The South does not exist.”
—Paul B. Preciado, The Invention of the South, 2017
How do we design from a place defined by its erasure? A place whose epistemologies have been obscured, digested, distorted? Engaging with “the South” as a fictional construct, shaped by subjugation and uneven power relations, this talk explores an architectural practice of anchoring: between the sacred and the profane, the intimate and the planetary, the buried and the visible, the remembered and the not-yet-imagined. Chabani’s practice is situated at the intersection of architecture and research and embraces the in-between. It resists disciplinary enclosures and instead inhabits a space of speculation, translation, and negotiation. Drawing on recent work from NEW SOUTH, this lecture frames architecture as a relational and adaptive practice, one that listens, compromises, and evolves across time, context, and encounter. Ultimately, Chabani’s talk invites a shift from ownership to stewardship and from architecture as commodity to architecture as covenant–a commitment not simply to making space, but to holding it.
Speaker
Algerian-born and Paris-based, Meriem Chabani is the founder and principal of NEW SOUTH, an award-winning architecture, urban planning, and anthropology practice focused on designing for vulnerable bodies in contested territories, and the Aga Khan Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her work spans complex sites around the world, including the Swann Arr Cultural Center in Myanmar, the Globe Aroma refugee art center in Brussels, and the upcoming Mosque Zero in Paris. She is currently a finalist for the Grenfell Memorial project in London. Her speculative and built work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, the Biennale de Versailles, the Istanbul Design Biennial, and the Oslo Architecture Triennale. Her projects are held in the permanent collections of the MAXXI in Rome and Qatar Museums. She has previously taught at the African Futures Institute in Morocco, École d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais in France, and EPFL in Switzerland. She was awarded the Europe 40 Under 40 distinction and a Graham Foundation Grant in 2020, and, in 2025, Le Monde named her one of France’s leading creative voices.
Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “African Art and Universal Museums”
Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “African Art and Universal Museums”
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Speaker
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a professor of philosophy and francophone studies at Columbia University and the director of the Institute of African Studies. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he did both his BA and his PhD at the Sorbonne. His fields of research and teaching include the history of philosophy, the history of logic and mathematics, Islamic philosophy, and African literature and philosophy.
He is the author of numerous books: Boole, l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (Belin, 1989); Islam and Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (Codesria, 2011); African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (Seagull, 2012, with a new edition published by The Other Press, 2023); The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (Codesria, 2016); Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition (Columbia UP, 2018); Postcolonial Bergson (Fordham UP, 2019); and In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought(Polity, 2020). The original French version of Postcolonial Bergson won the Dagnan-Bouveret Prize given by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 2011, and in the same year, Diagne was awarded the Edouard Glissant Prize. In 2019, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest book, From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation, will be published by The Other Press in spring 2024.
Jala Makhzoumi, “Landscape, Garden, and a Colonial Legacy”
Jala Makhzoumi, “Landscape, Garden, and a Colonial Legacy”
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Event Description
My search for a grounded language on landscape architecture relies in great part on the search for Arabic terms that capture the complexity of the layered English meaning of “landscape.” Until then, we must contend with inadequate translations—and sometimes transliterations—that reduce “landscape” to scenery and narrow the professional scope of the landscape architect to urban beautification. Moving away from the “borrowed” landscapes in cities, we encounter “rooted” conceptions in rural cultures. These ideas have endured over time and are in tune with the regional ecology and cultural values. Here, we find many iterations of “landscape,” even if they can’t be captured in a single word. For example, the traditional house garden typology, the hakura, which originated in the eastern Mediterranean, combines production and pleasure and is grounded in a love of nature and caring for the land. Can these examples inform and inspire a contextualized landscape architecture in the Middle East and beyond?
Speaker
Jala Makhzoumi is an adjunct professor of landscape architecture at the American University of Beirut, and Acting President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, the Middle East Region. Teaching and practicing in a region where landscape architecture is still an emerging profession has brought many challenges but freed Jala to engender a definition of landscape architecture that is responsive to the ecological, socio-cultural, and political context of the region. She applies this contextual landscape approach to the conservation of natural and cultural heritage, to framing human rights and citizenship and in her approach to postwar recovery.
Her publications include Ecological Landscape Design and Planning: The Mediterranean Context, co-author Pungetti, The Right to Landscape: Contesting Landscape and Human Rights, co-editors Egoz and Pungetti, and Horizon 101, a collection of paintings and prose, reflections on landscape and identity. Jala is the recipient of the Tamayouz Women in Architecture and Construction Award (2013), was profiled by the Aga Khan Women Architects (2014), received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (2019) and is the 2021 laureate of the IFLA Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award for her outstanding contribution to education and practice in landscape architecture.
This event is co-sponsored by the GSD and The Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University.
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Catherine Mosbach, “Design is a Language: Being Receptive, Being in Motion”
Catherine Mosbach, “Design is a Language: Being Receptive, Being in Motion”
A recording of this event is available with audio description .
Event Description
Drawing works both ways. Behind the outline, there is a goal to be reached: to give visibility to the masses in the process of being produced. It is only a revelation of possibilities. It is clearly the outline that produces the narrative. The masses evolve at their own pace, whether micro or macro. The outlines are a matter of a ‘self’, of a ‘singular’ that exposes itself to the ‘multiple’; for the time being, we don’t know about tomorrow.
What would be our sensitive imprint if we gave up on interpretation, in other words, on the subtle interplay between the eye, sensitivity, and the raw material of a world that we look at and that looks back at us?
What would this imprint-trace-landscape-desire be if we gave up drawing, an instrument of open dialogue, revealing the living ongoing, which teaches us and helps us evolve in our relationship with the host land and the beings who inhabit it?
Passing on is a matter of solidarity, relay, memory, and transition from one state to another. Our practices are rooted in these different strata of ‘reading’ and their ‘possible embodiment’ into new uses.
Speaker
Catherine Mosbach is a landscape architect and the founder of Paris-based design firm mosbach paysagistes & the magazine Pages Paysages. Catherine’s key projects include the Solutre Archaeological Park in Saone-et-Loire, Walk Sluice of Saint-Denis, the Botanical Garden of Bordeaux, the other side in Quebec City, Shan Shui in Xian & Lost in Transition in Ulsan. She was the recipient of the Equerre D’argent award with Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa for the Louvre Lens Museum Park & was honored in the Iconic Concept Award category by the German Design Council and Platine Award by INT.design 15th Montreal for Phase Shifts Park in Taichung. The team was honored Firm of the Year 2021 in Landscape and Urban Design by Architecture Master Prize Los Angeles. Catherine was named a knight of the Legion of Honour proposed by the President of the Republic Francois Hollande in 2016. “In the net of desires” with ovvo studio explores the infinitesimal of the living by XXI Triennale de Milano 2017. Some of her latest essays are ‘emersion’, dialog Jerome Boutterin with Catherine Mosbach, Jerome Boutterin Reboot 1999-2022, (eds.) snoeck MMBOOKS BELGIQUE and ‘de passage’ la couleur en questions, directe by Michel Menu, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Romain Thomas; Collection la Nature de l’oeuvre, ed Hermann, 2023.
Tosin Oshinowo, “Aṣẹ: Intentional Contextuality and Adaptability in Design”
Tosin Oshinowo, “Aṣẹ: Intentional Contextuality and Adaptability in Design”
A recording of this event is available with audio description .
Event Description
Lagos-based Nigerian architect, designer, and curator of the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial – Tosin Oshinowo is renowned for insights into socially-responsive approaches to urbanism and design. In her talk for GSD, she will address the importance of considering context in design and embracing local solutions, which have roots in often overlooked techniques and traditions that have been with us for centuries. She questions how these techniques and ways of understanding the world from the Global South can lend themselves as solutions to the global challenges posed by resource extraction and climate change.
The 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial, titled – The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability, explores how practitioners across the Global South employ contextual and contemporary techniques to build a world that is can be more sustainable, more equitable, and more community-oriented than the standard practices celebrated by the canon. Tosin will unpack some of the core themes emerging in the development of the Triennial, spotlighting architects and designers who will be included and whose work is emblematic of the approach to materiality, adaptability, and impermanence that is a cultural imperative across the Global South, and a fresh perceptive for the field at large.
Exploring techniques, materials and concepts from her context in West Africa – including the Yoruba philosophical concept of Aṣẹ, which references the order to effect change and adapt as a fundamental principle for our existence – Oshinowo will demonstrate how she considers context in her designs, share her inspirations, and give insights into how a more intentional approach to design can build a collectively progressive future for us all. Illuminating her own local inspirations, she will delve into historic and often overlooked examples from indigenous solutions and tropical modernism, including the work of Alan Vaughn-Richards, alongside building techniques and design traditions from her native Yoruba culture, demonstrating how these influences have impacted her practice from high-end residential projects, to furniture design, to her work with the United Nations Development Programme in Northeast Nigeria, building an entirely new community for a village displaced by Boko Haram.
AIA members who attend this event may be eligible for continuing education units. Please reach out to [email protected] if you are interested.
Speaker
Tosin Oshinowo is a Lagos-based Nigerian architect and designer renowned for her expansive residential and commercial spaces, and insights into socially-responsive approaches to urbanism. Grounded in a deep respect for Yoruba culture and history and coming from a markedly African context, Oshinowo’s designs embody a contemporary perspective on the next generation of African design and afro-minimalism: a responsive reflection of the past, present, and future of architecture and design that prioritizes sustainability, resilience, and poise. She is also the curator of the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial.
As an architect, Oshinowo is best known as the founder and principal of cmDesign Atelier (cmD+A), established in 2012. Based in Lagos, the practice has undertaken a number of predominant civic projects, including the design of the Maryland Mall, as well as a wide range of residential projects, including luminous beach houses on the coast of the oceanside city. Her interest in architecture extends into a broader vision of urbanism and community as well; she is currently working on a project with the United Nations Development Programme in Northeast Nigeria, building an entire new community for a village displaced by Boko Haram.
Prior to founding cmD+A, she worked in the offices of Skidmore Owings & Merrill in London and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture Rotterdam, where she was part of the team that designed the 4th Mainland Bridge proposal in 2008. Upon returning to Lagos, she practiced at James Cubitt Architects and led on notable projects including the master plan and corporate head office building for Nigeria LNG in Port Harcourt.
As a product designer, her work is primarily focused on the design of chairs; in 2017, she created Ilé-Ilà, which means House of Lines in her native Yoruba language. A luxury brand, Ilé-Ilà chairs are made to order, designed and handmade in Lagos and has been featured as a highlight of contemporary African furniture design in publications around the world, including Harper’s Bazaar Interiors April 2018, Elle Decor January 2020, and Grazia online June 2020.
Oshinowo’s work also spans into the conceptual sphere, with a strong interest in architectural history and socially-responsive approaches to architecture, design, and urbanism, underpinned by a passion for supporting African design and innovation. In 2020, she partnered with Lexus on conceptual design explorations for Design Miami/, and written prolifically on urbanism, afro modernism, design, and identity in publications including Expansions, a publication as part of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale and Omenka Online, a topic also explored in her TEDxPortHarcourt talk in November 2017. She also co-curated the second Lagos Biennial titled How to build a Lagoon from a bottle of Wine? in 2019.
Oshinowo is a registered Architect in the Federal Republic of Nigeria and a member of the Royal Institute of the British Architects, with design and architectural degree from Kingston College in London, a masters degree in urban design in development from the Bartlett School of Architecture, a Diploma in Architecture from the Architecture Association London, and an MBA for Architecture and Design from IE University. She has won numerous awards, including 3rd City People Real Estate Awards for Architect of the Year 2017 and the Lord’s Achievers Awards for Creativity, in celebration of World Achievers day 2019.
Mariam Kamara, “atelier masōmī: pedagogy, practice and (shifting) possibilities”
Mariam Kamara, “atelier masōmī: pedagogy, practice and (shifting) possibilities”
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| The guest speaker for this event will be joining us virtually.
All are invited to watch and participate online in this program by tuning into this page at the noted start time. No pre-registration is required. Online audience members will be able to submit questions throughout the event using Vimeo’s Q&A function. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here. Harvard ID holders are also welcome to attend programs in person, except where an event is listed as online only. Live captioning will be provided during this event livestream. Learn more about accessibility services at public programs. |
This event recording is also available to watch with audio description .
Event Description
The Architecture canon, the way it is researched, taught and practiced, has a singular point of view. Accepting that point of view as universally valid has been one of the biggest missed opportunities in architecture. What we are taught as universal masterworks are, in reality, only a representation of a small homogenous group. This talk will cover the way I have merged practice and research to fill the gaps left by the absence of authentic scholarship outside of the canon. I will also discuss the ways in which this approach continues to shift my conception of what is possible given the contexts, narratives, and challenges of the places in which we work.
Audience members who attend this event in its entirety may be eligible for continuing education credits from AIA. Please reach out to [email protected] for more information.
Speaker
Mariam Issoufou Kamara is an architect from Niger who studied architecture at the University of Washington. In 2014, she founded atelier masōmī , an architecture and research practice with offices in Niger’s capital, Niamey. The firm tackles public, cultural, residential, commercial, and urban design projects. Kamara believes that architects have an important role to play in creating spaces that have the power to elevate, dignify, and provide people with a better quality of life.
The Hikma Community Complex, designed by Kamara and Yasaman Esmaili, won the 2017 Gold LafargeHolcim Award for Africa and the Middle East, and the 2018 Silver Global LafargeHolcim Award for Sustainable Architecture. Other projects include the Dandaji Regional Market, which was shortlisted for the Dezeen Awards in 2019. Upcoming projects include an office building in Niamey as well as the Niamey Cultural Centre, which Kamara designed under the mentorship of Sir David Adjaye as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Initiative.
In 2019, Kamara was named as a Laureate of the Price Claus Award. She was a 2019 Royal Academy of Arts Dorfman Awards finalist. The New York Times named her as one of 15 Creative Women of Our Time. The Royal Institute of Canada named her as one of their 2020 Honorary Fellows. The firm has appeared twice on the AD100 list.
Follow Mariam Kamara on Twitter and Instagram .
This event is part of International Womxn’s Week 2022, presented by Womxn in Design .
Nasser Rabbat, “History’s Currency: The Afterlife of al-Maqrizi’s Khitat”
Nasser Rabbat, “History’s Currency: The Afterlife of al-Maqrizi’s Khitat”
The GSD is pleased to present a series of talks and webinars broadcast to our audiences via Zoom.
*This lecture will be ONLINE ONLY. For security reasons, virtual attendees must register. Scroll down to find complete instructions for how to register.
Event Description
This lecture offers a reading of the stages of modernity in Egypt through a medieval lens. It explores how a leading urban history book, al-Maqrizi’s Khitat (written 1415-42), came to absorb and articulate the country’s encounters with colonialism, modernization, Orientalism, historical academicism, nationalism, pan-Arabism, and authoritarian capitalism. Appropriated by the Savants of the French Occupation (1798-1801) in their monumental Description de l’Égypte, the Khitat became the go-to source for anyone studying Cairo. ‘Ali Mubarak, an engineer/minister who Haussmannized Cairo in the 1860s, used it to write his own paean to the remodeled city. K. A. C. Creswell, a British officer turned Orientalist architectural historian, relied on it to anchor his pioneering architectural history of Egypt. Egyptian nationalist historians deployed it as their authenticating native referent. Novelists and poets, like Gamal al-Ghitani and Naguib Surur, assimilated it as a voice of the undying spirit of Egypt and a parable of resistance to corruption and oppression. Eventually, the book acquired a transhistorical sheen that embodied the epistemic and political changes in Egypt from the early 19th century to the present.
Speaker
Nasser Rabbat , RF ’12, is the Aga Khan Professor and the Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT . His interests include the history and historiography of Islamic architecture, medieval urbanism, modern Arab history, contemporary Arab art, and post-colonial criticism. He has published several books, most recently ‘Imarat al-Mudun al-Mayyita: Nahwa Qira’a Jadida lil-Tarikh al-Suri (The Architecture of the Dead Cities: Toward a New Interpretation of the History of Syria) (2018) and an online book, The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Napoléon to ISIS , co-edited with Pamela Karimi (2016).
Prof. Rabbat worked as an architect in Los Angeles and Damascus and held academic and research appointments in Cairo, Granada, Rome, Paris, Abu Dhabi, Munich, and Bonn. He regularly contributes to Arabic newspapers, serves on the boards of various organizations and consults with international design firms on projects in the Islamic World. In recent years, he began researching and publishing on immigration, refugees, heritage conservation, and destruction and reconstruction.
Follow Nasser Rabbat on Twitter.
How to Join
Register to attend the lecture here. Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here .
Live captioning will be provided during this event.
Virtual Public Lecture: Laleh Khalili, “Tankers, Tycoons, and the Making of Modern Regimes of Law, Labour, and Finance”
Virtual Public Lecture: Laleh Khalili, “Tankers, Tycoons, and the Making of Modern Regimes of Law, Labour, and Finance”
The GSD is pleased to present a series of talks and webinars broadcast to our audiences via Zoom.
*This lecture will be ONLINE ONLY. For security reasons, virtual attendees must register. Scroll down to find complete instructions for how to register.
Event Description
Excellent recent research on the politics of containerisation and the logic of logistics (Levinson; Cowen; Sekula) has shown how these new modalities of trade have transformed not only the form and extent of circulation of goods but also the processes of production. The argument about logistical forms of capital accumulation trace its begging to the 1950s when containers were invented, and especially to the period after the 1960s, when their usage was normalised during the Vietnam war. However, many of the practices we now associate with containerisation – foremost among them the automation of processes of maritime circulation, and the transformation of urban landscapes around the ports – go back at least two decades before the 1950s, to the legal, engineering, and financial innovations around petroleum tankers. By focusing on the tanker terminals of the Arabian Peninsula since the 1930s and the subsequent burgeoning of tanker-ships plying the trade between the Peninsula and the rest of the world, I will illuminate the radical changes in political economy, labour, law and production the specificities of tanker trade has wrought. This includes early instances of automated workplaces; terminals far enough from port-city centres to isolate them from public scrutiny; and disciplining of workers aboard tanker-ships. Further, the shift in ownership structures and financing of tanker trades over the last one-hundred years either foreshadows or dramatically illuminates the transformations in financial capital itself. Finally, much of lex petrolea, the legal and arbitral corpus that sets the parameter of extraction and circulation of oil, itself provides the ground on which late capitalist legal property regimes are founded.
Speaker
Laleh Khalili is a Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London, and the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine (Cambridge 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies(Stanford 2013). Her Sinews of War and Trade, on the politics of maritime infrastructures, is published by Verso.
How to Join
1. Have a Zoom account. Members of the Harvard community who have not yet set up their Zoom account can follow the instructions here . Guests without a Zoom account can set one up for free at zoom.us .
2. Register to attend the lecture here . Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you. Please make sure the email you use to register is the same email connected to your Zoom account.
The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A.
Rania Ghosn
Rania Ghosn
Sahel Al Hiyari
Sahel Al Hiyari
Sahel Al Hiyari is the owner and principal architect at Sahel Al Hiyari Architects. He holds Bachelor Degrees in Architecture and Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (1990). He carried out post-graduate work at the School of Architecture at the University of Venice, where he also taught from 1993-1995. In addition, his teaching activities include design studios “Arch Lab” organized by the Centre for the Study of the Built Environment (CSBE) in collaboration with the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2002 and 2004, as well as an option studio at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (fall 2010), and a vertical design studio at the American University of Beirut (fall 2011). He has lectured at Columbia University, Physical Development Research Centre in Iran, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Harvard University, the American University of Beirut and ETH Zurich. His work has been published internationally, as well as exhibited in Jordan at “The Khalid Shoman Foundation” and in New York at “The Center of Architecture”. In 2002, Al Hiyari was chosen as the first architect to receive the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, according to which he has been a protégé of architect Álvaro Siza of Portugal. He has served as a reviewer and a member of the Master Jury for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Additionally, he is a painter and has exhibited in Jordan, Lebanon and Italy.
This event is supported by the Aga Khan Program at the GSD .