WORKSHOP 19 — TEN INFLUENTIAL ARAB ARCHITECTS WORLDWIDE: WHEN ARCHITECTURE BECOMES IDENTITY, MEMORY & FUTURE

WHEN A BUILDING IS MORE THAN A BUILDING

What makes an architect influential?

The number of buildings they design?

Their height?

Their fame?

Their technology?

Or does architectural influence begin somewhere deeper?

Perhaps it begins with a new question.

Hassan Fathy asked whether architecture for ordinary communities could emerge from local materials, climate, craftsmanship, and knowledge.

Zaha Hadid challenged the architectural dependence on conventional geometry and static space.

Rasem Badran explored how contemporary Arab cities might evolve without losing their cultural memory.

Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil reconsidered the accumulated intelligence of traditional building and craftsmanship.

Ammar Khammash looked toward geology, archaeology, landscape, and climate and asked:

What if a building listened to the land before it spoke?

This workshop does not present ten names simply for students to memorize.

We explore ten different ways of thinking architecturally.

We enter the project.

Read the site.

Study the plan.

Cut through the section.

Follow the light.

Examine the material.

Understand the climate.

Observe human movement.

Question the relationship between architecture, history, technology, culture, and city.

Then we reach the most important question:

WHY DID THE ARCHITECT MAKE THIS DECISION?

We do not want students merely to learn how to look at buildings.

We want them to begin thinking like architects.

WHAT WILL STUDENTS EXPLORE?

Students investigate:

• Modern and contemporary architecture across the Arab world

• Architecture and cultural identity

• Climate-responsive design

• Local materials and traditional craftsmanship

• Islamic architectural traditions and contemporary reinterpretation

• Earthen architecture and traditional construction

• Sustainability and environmental intelligence

• Human-centered and community-oriented design

• Regional Modernism

• Digital design and advanced geometry

• Heritage preservation and adaptive thinking

• Sacred architecture and spiritual space

• Architecture, landscape, geology, and archaeology

• Architecture and the evolution of cities

• The relationship between plan, section, structure, material, light, and human experience

THE TEN SESSIONS

1. ZAHA HADID — WHEN ARCHITECTURE ESCAPED GRAVITY

The journey begins with one of the most influential figures in contemporary architecture.

Students follow Zaha Hadid’s evolution from radical drawings and experimental compositions to buildings characterized by movement, continuity, complex geometry, and digitally enabled design.

We investigate space, circulation, perspective, fluidity, structure, and the computational methods that became increasingly important in the later work of her practice.

But the lesson is not to make buildings that look like Zaha Hadid’s.

The deeper lesson is her willingness to ask:

Why must a building look the way we have always expected a building to look?

2. RASEM BADRAN — WHEN THE MODERN CITY SPEAKS WITH ITS MEMORY

Students explore architecture rooted in city, culture, community, and social space.

We investigate courtyards, passages, squares, thresholds, massing, human scale, and relationships between buildings and the surrounding urban fabric.

Students discover how historical Arab and Islamic spatial traditions can inform contemporary architecture without simply reproducing historic forms.

The question becomes:

How can architecture belong to its own time without becoming disconnected from its place?

3. ABDEL-WAHED EL-WAKIL — WHEN CRAFTSMANSHIP BECOMES ARCHITECTURAL KNOWLEDGE

Students investigate El-Wakil’s engagement with traditional construction, natural materials, craftsmanship, and Islamic architectural traditions.

We examine arches, domes, load-bearing masonry, proportion, shade, detail, and the role of craftspeople.

Tradition is not treated merely as decoration.

Instead, students search for the environmental, structural, material, and social intelligence embedded within it.

Perhaps craftsmanship is not the opposite of technology. Perhaps it is technology accumulated across generations.

4. HASSAN FATHY — WHEN ARCHITECTURE RETURNED TO THE EARTH

Students enter one of the most important architectural experiments involving community, climate, affordability, local knowledge, and material.

They explore mud brick, vaults, domes, passive environmental strategies, traditional construction knowledge, and community-centered thinking, including the famous experiment of New Gourna.

The central question is simple but profound:

For whom do we build?

If a building is beautiful but fails the people it was intended to serve—

has the architecture truly succeeded?

5. MOHAMED MAKIYA — BAGHDAD BETWEEN MODERNITY & IDENTITY

Students explore Mohamed Makiya’s long search for a modern architecture capable of belonging to Iraq, its climate, history, craftsmanship, and cultural identity.

We investigate relationships among modernism, heritage, material, shadow, ornament, craft, and urban space.

Students learn that architectural identity cannot be created simply by attaching an arch or historical motif to a contemporary façade.

Identity is deeper than appearance. It is a way of understanding place.

6. JA'AFAR TOUKAN — CIVIC ARCHITECTURE & ARAB MODERNITY

Students examine Ja'afar Toukan within the development of modern architecture in Jordan and the wider Arab region.

We study material, mass, proportion, public space, civic and cultural architecture, and relationships between modern design and local context.

A new question emerges:

How can a public building be unmistakably contemporary while still belonging to its city?

7. SAMI ANGAWI — SACRED ARCHITECTURE, HERITAGE & THE MEMORY OF PLACE

This session introduces students to questions surrounding sacred architecture, cultural heritage, traditional urban fabric, craftsmanship, and the architectural memory of the Hijaz.

Students investigate how historically significant environments can evolve while maintaining continuity with place and human scale.

Preservation does not mean freezing a city in time.

Development should not automatically mean erasing its memory.

The challenge is to allow the future to arrive without forcing memory to leave.

8. AMMAR KHAMMASH — WHEN ARCHITECTURE LISTENS TO THE LAND

Students enter an architectural world shaped by geology, landscape, archaeology, climate, material, and ecology.

They investigate how rock formations, topography, vegetation, sunlight, local materials, and archaeological history can directly influence architectural decisions.

Here, the architect does not arrive at the site carrying a predetermined form.

The architect arrives first to read.

Where does the sun move?

How does the land descend?

What materials already belong here?

What existed before us?

Good architecture does not always begin by speaking. Sometimes it begins by listening.

9. RIFAT CHADIRJI — CAN MODERNISM SPEAK WITH A LOCAL ACCENT?

Students investigate Rifat Chadirji’s contribution to modern Iraqi architecture and architectural thought.

We examine brick, façades, shadow, rhythm, proportion, screens, abstraction, and reinterpretations of regional architectural elements within a modern language.

Students encounter an important idea:

Modernism does not have to be one universal architectural language exported unchanged from one city to another.

Place can transform it.

Climate can reshape it.

Materials can localize it.

Memory can give it another voice.

10. HISHAM MUNIR — MODERN ARCHITECTURE & THE MAKING OF THE IRAQI CITY

The journey concludes by examining Hisham Munir within the development of modern architectural practice, education, institutions, and urban growth in Iraq.

Students consider architecture not only as the creation of individual buildings but as a professional and civic practice capable of participating in the transformation of entire cities.

The final session asks:

Is the architect's responsibility simply to design a beautiful building—or to participate in shaping the city in which generations will live?

THE ARCHITECT'S LAB — DON'T JUST LOOK AT THE BUILDING. READ IT.

During every session, students select a project and investigate it through a consistent architectural method.

SITE — Why is the building here?

CLIMATE — How does it respond to sun, heat, wind, and water?

PLAN — How do people move through it?

SECTION — What happens vertically?

FORM — Why does the building have this geometry?

MATERIAL — Why stone, brick, concrete, earth, timber, metal, or glass?

LIGHT — Where does daylight enter?

HUMAN EXPERIENCE — How does the space feel to the person using it?

CULTURE — How does the project relate to place, history, and society?

TECHNOLOGY — What did technology make possible?

Then comes the final question:

IF ONE OF THESE DECISIONS CHANGED, WOULD IT STILL BE THE SAME BUILDING?

Students begin to understand that architecture is not merely form.

Architecture is a system of interconnected decisions.

THE FINAL PROJECT — THE ELEVENTH ARCHITECT

After studying ten architects, the most important transformation begins.

Students are no longer asked simply to choose their favorite building.

Instead, we tell them:

NOW IT IS YOUR TURN.

Choose a site.

Read its climate.

Understand its users.

Research its history.

Study its materials.

Identify a problem.

Then develop an original architectural response.

The project may become:

A cultural center.

A pavilion.

A mosque or contemplative space.

A library.

A community center.

An educational space.

A house.

Or a small environmental intervention.

Students develop the project through:

CONCEPT + SITE ANALYSIS + SKETCHES + PLAN + SECTION + MATERIALS + LIGHT + 3D MODEL + FINAL PRESENTATION

But there is one fundamental rule:

DO NOT DESIGN LIKE ZAHA HADID.

Do not design like Hassan Fathy.

Do not design like Badran, Chadirji, El-Wakil, or Khammash.

Learn how they thought.

Then discover how you think.

FROM RECEIVER TO CREATOR

In the first session, the student looks at a building designed by someone else.

In the second, the student begins asking questions.

Then drawing.

Comparing.

Analyzing.

Questioning.

Choosing.

Until the final session arrives.

A blank sheet lies on the table.

There is no longer a famous building to analyze.

No finished project to explain.

There is only:

A SITE.

A HUMAN NEED.

A PROBLEM.

AN IMAGINATION.

And that is where the transformation happens.

THE STUDENT IS NO LONGER ONLY A RECEIVER OF KNOWLEDGE. THE STUDENT BECOMES A MAKER.

A maker of ideas.

A maker of places.

A maker of possibilities that did not exist before the first line was drawn.

WHAT STUDENTS TAKE WITH THEM

By the end of the workshop, students will have encountered the ideas and contributions of ten influential Arab architects and multiple approaches to modern and contemporary architecture.

They will better understand the relationships between:

HERITAGE & MODERNITY

CLIMATE & FORM

MATERIAL & CRAFT

ARCHITECTURE & IDENTITY

NATURE & TECHNOLOGY

BUILDING & CITY

MEMORY & FUTURE

But more importantly, students gradually stop asking only:

“Is this building beautiful?”

They begin asking:

Why was it designed this way?

For whom?

With what materials?

In what climate?

What does it preserve?

What does it transform?

What does it contribute to its place?

And what happens to human beings inside it?

Ten architects.

Ten visions.

Ten different architectural journeys.

From earth to algorithms.

From craftsmanship to digital design.

From village to metropolis.

From memory to future.

And finally, we return to the student's blank page.

Because perhaps the greatest lesson an architect can give a young designer is not:

“Design like me.”

It is to inspire a much more powerful question:

“WHAT ARCHITECTURE CAN I IMAGINE THAT DOES NOT YET EXIST?”