Architecture
Arabia Interrotta Symposium
Arabia Interrotta Symposium
Thursday, April 10, 2025, 10:30 am–5:30 pm
1100 Architecture + Design Studios,
845 W Harrison St, Chicago, Illinois
Once home to the earliest cities and organized forms of cultivation, the region known as the Arab East (Al Mashriq) is today host to a diverse and contradictory spatial production. Here, archaeological sites, folk architectures, and monuments of empire intermingle with extralegal settlements, low-rise high-density sprawl, stylish office towers, artificial islands, and luxury desert resorts. Underlying this simultaneous collapse of ‘past’ and ‘future’ is the relatively recent shift in the locus of cultural production from the once-vibrant urban centers of Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and Beirut to the super-rich and relatively sparse nations of the Arabian peninsula (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Oman). This symposium examines the implications of this shift and anticipates alternative futures by reclaiming the region’s spatial, material, and symbolic practices as sites for a renewed architectural imagination.
Arabia Interrotta is curated and organized by Zehra Ahmed, 2024–25 Douglas Garofalo Fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) School of Architecture, and moderated by John McMorrough (University of Michigan) with Zehra Ahmed.
Program
10:30 a.m.
Welcome by David Brown
Introduction by Zehra Ahmed
10:45 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Session 1: Landscape & Memory
Ahmad Al-Jallad
Ohio State University
“The Written and the Unsaid: Mortuary Monuments Among the Nomads of the Pre-Islamic Ḥarrah”
Faysal Tabbarah
American University of Sharjah, Carleton University, & A.+ O.T.
“‘A Goodly River Runneth’: An Incomplete Story of Barada, Écochard, and Damascene Imaginaries”
Pascal Ménoret
University of Oxford
“Floating Weeds Haunting the Egyptian Post-Plantation”
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) & RIOT Laboratory
“Housing Cairo, Unlearning Field Research”
1:00 p.m.
Lunch Break
2:00 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.
Session 2: Urban Ethnography & Design Research
Ali Karimi
Civil Architecture
“Architecture Between Seasons”
Amale Andraos
Columbia University, GSAPP & WORKac
“Hotel Beirut”
Hussam Dakkak
Architectural Association (AA) & Malcolm Reading Consultants
“The Sacred and the Unmaking of Memory”
Ziad Jamaleddine
Columbia University, GSAPP & L.E.FT Architects
“After Typology”
4:15 p.m.
Coffee Break
4:45pm–5:30pm
Student & Panelist Roundtable Discussion (4530 Octagon + Ribbon Gallery)
Moderated by Alex Serbanescu and Harry Warnaar
5:30 p.m.
Reception (4530 Octagon)
Further details can be found here.
Sponsored by the UIC School of Architecture and the UIC College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts (CADA), with the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
This event is free and open to the public.
Image credit: Documentation from The Mobile Exhibition, 2003. Photos by Abdullah Al Saadi. Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.