Iman Fayyad

Assistant Professor of Architecture

Iman Fayyad is a designer and Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she teaches and conducts research in spatial geometry with a focus on tectonics, construction, and representation. She is founding director of projectif, an award-winning research practice that explores architectural geometry’s relationship with material economy, sensory perception, and the politics of physical space and building practice. Her writing and design work have been published and exhibited in venues including the New York Times, Technology: Architecture and Design, Nexus Network Journal (Architecture and Mathematics), Log, Pidgin, Archinect, Yale Architecture Gallery, Carnegie Museum of Art, citygroupNY, and the Roca Gallery in London. Her public work and research on zero-waste geometric construction techniques has been funded by grants through the MetLife Foundation and Lender Center for Social Justice, and has received recognition by the Architects’ Newspaper Best of Design Young Architects Prize, the ACSA Faculty Design Award, and Architizer’s Design For Good Award. She is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow.

Previously, Fayyad was Assistant Professor at Syracuse University where she coordinated the first-year design studio curriculum and taught courses in digital media. Her course on Projective Systems and Architectural Form, designed for the new Directed Research Program, was the recipient of the 2024 Britton Memorial Collaborative Research Prize. Fayyad has served on the faculty at MIT, Princeton, and Harvard, where she was also the inaugural John Irving Innovation Fellow. She was twice named the Architecture Faculty of the Year at Harvard University.

Fayyad holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from MIT (Phi Beta Kappa Academic Honors), and a Master in Architecture with Distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was the recipient of the AIA Certificate of Merit, Faculty Design Award, and the Araldo A. Cossutta Prize for Design Excellence. Prior to starting her own practice, she worked at offices in Boston, New York, and Paris.