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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 Homage

EXPLORATIONSTOP 100 @ TAMAYOUZ (opens in new tab)

How do you revive an unfinished Niemeyer masterpiece?

A homage to Oscar Niemeyer’s unfinished fair in Tripoli: the housing bar brought back to life, past, present and future in one section.

LAU THESIS · TRIPOLI · 2023

ADAPTIVE REUSE · COLLECTIVE HOUSING · EXHIBITION

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WHAT

My bachelor thesis at LAU, supervised by Issam Barhouch: an adaptive reuse of Oscar Niemeyer’s Rachid Karami International Fair in Tripoli, the fairground left unfinished when Lebanon’s war stopped the works. The intervention re-inhabits the remnants of his collective housing bar as three homages at once: the past kept in the original units, the present dug into sunken courts that hand the ground back to nature, and the future inserted as new unit typologies, workshops and an educational exhibition.

WHY

Niemeyer said Tripoli has two hearts, the old city and the port, and that the fair would become the third. Half a century later the third heart still is not beating. A homage, the thesis argues, is not a museum piece: it is the building lived in again.

HOW

  1. Read the site through its own timeline: the 1960 design, decades of piecemeal interventions, then the two moves that matter, reconnecting the ground to nature and connecting past, present and future in one section.
  2. Keep the old Niemeyer typology and insert three new unit types alongside it, studios, luxury units and affordable artisan apartments with their own workshop space, under planted roofs.
  3. Invent the Transfer Box: a rail mounted glass container that moves materials and artworks through an underground gallery and doubles as a moving exhibition room.

WHAT CAME OF IT

The Tamayouz Excellence Award panel selected The Homage among its Top 100 architecture graduation projects for 2023, out of 422 entries from 141 universities in 36 countries. It is also where this record starts: the first project that asked what a building owes the people, and the past, inside it.