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21 projects

The Thoughts

  1. explaining thingsJUL 2026How do you explain a complex, honestly boring technical subject so someone leans in instead of glazing over?
  2. adjacency is not accessJUN 2026A floor plan tells you which rooms touch. It will not tell you which rooms you can actually reach, and the gap between those two drawings is where the architecture is hiding.
  3. buildings that respondJUN 2026Right now a building is a fixed guess. Someone chose the ceiling height and the window size years before you arrived, and you live inside their averaged assumptions whether they fit you or not.
  4. experiences are dataMAY 2026You learned what a room does to you by being in rooms. Nobody sat you down with a dataset.
  5. comfort as dataMAY 2026You don't walk into a room and average your experience. You walk in and the thing that's wrong is the thing you notice: the glare, the echo, the cold draft on the back of your neck.
  6. when the tool scores peopleAPR 2026I build things that give a room a score. The obvious next question, and the one I would ask me, is what happens the day somebody uses that score to decide who gets the room.
  7. latent spaceAPR 2026Machine learning borrowed the word space from us, and I would like to check what it did with it.
  8. drawing as interfaceMAR 2026For most of my life the drawing was the output. You designed the thing, then you drew it to prove it existed.
  9. behavior information modelingJAN 2026For thirty years we've been getting very good at Building Information Modeling: every beam, every duct, every clash, tracked to the millimeter.
  10. heritage meets new techDEC 2025The usual choice with an old building is a trap: treat it as a museum piece no one may touch, or drop a glass-and-steel box in the middle and call it modern.
  11. neuroaestheticsDEC 2025Neuroaesthetics is the unglamorous name for a question everyone already feels: why does one room settle you and another keep you on edge?
  12. evolutionary searchNOV 2025Evolutionary search is what I reach for when a problem is too tangled to solve head on: describe what good looks like, then let a population of designs breed, mutate, and compete until something clever falls out.
  13. physics solversNOV 2025A physics solver is the most honest collaborator I have: it doesn't care what I intended, only what I actually built.
  14. computationOCT 2025Computation is not the same as using a computer, and separating the two took me longer than I would like to admit.
  15. what an llm actually isSEP 2025A large language model is a machine that guesses the next word. That is not me being kind to you, that is the whole thing.
  16. generative aiDEC 2023Generative AI made the inspired gesture free. Anyone can produce a thousand renders before lunch, and a render is a promise, not a product.
  17. extended realitySEP 2022I started in a lab strapping headsets onto students to see whether a lesson lands harder when you can walk around inside it.
  18. connecting the dotsJUN 2020When the art class was asked who here dislikes drawing, mine was the only hand that went up. Awkward.

The Encounter

Can a cemetery be designed around life instead of loss? 

TYPEDesign & PracticeAWARDSHORTLISTED (opens in new tab)TEAMJEMMA CHIDIAC ARCHITECTS · ANFEH · 2022STACKSKETCHUP · AUTOCAD · PHOTOSHOPLINKSJEMMA CHIDIAC · PROJECT (opens in new tab)
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WHAT

The Encounter, the practice’s entry to Ctrl Act Design’s Cemetery Challenge for Anfeh: concentric crescents of semi-buried, planted tombs rotating around a sunken court, with a slit-lit chapel, a condolences hall and a split bell tower crossing the terraces. As an architectural designer at Jemma Chidiac Architects, my part was concept support, the planning of the landscape, the trials for the tomb details, and rendering alongside the team.

WHY

The concept turns a cemetery toward the living: the visit circles an epicenter of life rather than a field of loss, and the tomb roofs are planted flowerbeds where visitors sow their own seeds, a fifth facade that slowly grows into a collective landscape echoing Anfeh’s salt pans.

HOW

  1. The concept set the rotation: the chapel as epicenter, crescents of semi buried tombs turning around it, every burial keeping its claim on the living.
  2. A directional line bounds the view toward the burials and walks the visitor through the landscape to the chapel and the condolences hall.
  3. The in-between carries the landscape: courtyards and gathering pockets where the planting runs with the built form. My part lived here and in the trials for the tomb details, planning the terraces and testing how a flowerbed roof sits on a tomb.
  4. Renders with the team carried the entry: the split bell tower, the chapel light, the sunken court.

WHAT CAME OF IT

The entry was shortlisted as finalist and the certificate of achievement carries my name. The full project lives on the practice’s site.