We are thrilled to announce that Zehra Ahmed has been selected as the 2024–2025 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow. During her fellowship year, Zehra will teach courses in design, history, and theory, and prepare a public exhibition and lecture for Spring 2025.
Zehra Ahmed is a researcher and writer based in Chicago whose work focuses on architectural history and culture in the modern Middle East and North Africa. Currently, she is developing an archive of projects and architects to expand knowledge of the Arab city and resurface its overlooked histories, typologies, elements, concepts, and modes of representation for contemporary design. Prior to joining UIC, she earned an MA in the History and Theory of Architecture, where her research considered the history of postmodernism in a postcolonial context. She served as text editor for the publication Crown Hall Dean’s Dialogues 2012-2017, and her writings have been published in DAr, a journal that investigates the formal architectural values of the Islamic world, and Flat Out, a journal of design criticism on which she also serves as a member of the editorial board.
Her research proposal, excerpted below, will pursue the Arab city as a project:
“As the birthplace of law, writing, agriculture, and the first cities, the region popularly referred to as the Middle East played a seminal role in the development of our abstract, modern way of life. And yet its recurring role in architectural discourse is as a foil to the West: from Le Corbusier to Aldo van Eyck to recent materialist discourse, perceptions of the Middle East and North Africa as either archaic and primordial or trapped between lost empires and colonial encounters, tend to dominate.
The fellowship project, titled Arabia Interrota, will 'interrupt' these narratives by operating at the intersection of reality and fiction. Beginning with a graduate seminar and design studio in the fall and culminating in an exhibition and conference in the spring, each respective format will selectively engage with a different aspect of the Arab city (generically speaking)—language and typology; landscape and ecology; representation and the canon; critical archaeologies and speculative futures. Ultimately the ambition of the research is to harness new points of view and open space in this unique region for a renewed design imagination.”
Images:
Rifat Chadirji, Monument in Amman, Jordan. Image courtesy of the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT.
Michael Graves, Golf Club and Villas, El Gouna, Egypt. Image courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum.