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Work

21 projects

The Thoughts

  1. 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.
  2. neuroaestheticsDEC 2025Neuroaesthetics is the unglamorous name for a question everyone already feels: why does one room settle you and another keep you on edge?
  3. physics solversAPR 2026A physics solver is the most honest collaborator I have: it doesn't care what I intended, only what I actually built.
  4. generative aiJUN 2024Generative AI made the inspired gesture free. Anyone can produce a thousand renders before lunch, and a render is a promise, not a product.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. heritage meets new techAPR 2026The 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.
  10. 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.
  11. connecting the dotsJUN 2020When the art class was asked who here dislikes drawing, mine was the only hand that went up. Awkward.
  12. pelagñouJUN 2026Some projects hand you a tool; Pelagñou handed me a library card.
  13. explaining thingsJUL 2026How do you explain a complex, honestly boring technical subject so someone leans in instead of glazing over?
  14. 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.

The Encounter

Can a cemetery be designed around life instead of loss?

A cemetery for Anfeh that rotates around life: planted tomb terraces circling a sunken court, shortlisted as finalist.

JEMMA CHIDIAC ARCHITECTS · ANFEH · 2022

SKETCHUP · AUTOCAD · PHOTOSHOP

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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.

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.