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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.

Falcon Square

Can an airplane’s takeoff become a monument? 

TYPEDesign & PracticeTEAMJEMMA CHIDIAC ARCHITECTS · 2022STACKRHINO · SUBD · ARCHVIZLINKSJEMMA CHIDIAC · PROJECT (opens in new tab)
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WHAT

A monument for a highway roundabout in Al Khobar: MIDAN AL SAKR, the office’s Moujassam Watan competition entry. Layered steel blades form a falcon, two wings of pierced Arabic calligraphy between them. As an architectural designer at Jemma Chidiac Architects, I started the concept sketches and led the design from brainstorming to proposal.

WHY

The concept began with my ink studies of an aircraft: takeoff angles, control surfaces, the lines a plane draws when it leaves the ground. Mirrored once, the drawings opened a void; mirrored again, they closed into a falcon, the national bird carrying the national script. A monument for a roundabout has one job, to be read at speed, and a takeoff line is the fastest line there is.

HOW

  1. Sketch the aircraft in ink: takeoff pitches, primary and secondary control surfaces.
  2. Layer the takeoff traces at different angles, then fold the set over itself until no void is read.
  3. Build the layered blades in Rhino SubD, thread the pierced calligraphy panels between them, and re-landscape the roundabout so the ground carries the bird.

WHAT CAME OF IT

The proposal shipped as the office’s competition entry, made the finalists, and lives on the practice’s site. The falcon stayed on the drawing board, which is where most competition monuments live; the sketches that started it are in the gallery.