UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School will be hosting Iman Fayyad, designer and assistant professor of architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), at 4 p.m. on Feb. 26 in the Stuckeman Family Jury Space for a lecture titled “Transient Form.” The event is free and open to the public, and will be live-streamed via Zoom.
Fayyad’s lecture will cover geometric systems, such as projective drawing, surface modeling and material manipulation, examining the connections and rifts between the parallel labors of design and construction. Speculative and built work will be shown to explore the projective relationship between flatness and three-dimensional form. The definition of flatness will be examined as a primary medium of spatial thinking and the necessity for it in construction.
The talk will be expansive across different cultures, from the stereotomy of 17th century France to the designs of the Native American Tipis to the tessellations of Islamic muqarnas vaults. New digital technologies, climate change and accessibility standards will also be addressed in relation to the changing role of design and social change.
At Harvard, Fayyed she teaches and conducts research in spatial geometry with a focus on tectonics, construction and representation. She is also the founding director of projectif, an award-winning research practice that explores architectural geometry’s relationship with material economy, sensory perception and the politics of physical space and building practice.
Her public work and research on zero-waste geometric construction techniques has been funded by grants through the MetLife Foundation and Lender Center for Social Justice, and has received recognition by the Architects’ Newspaper Best of Design Young Architects Prize, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Faculty Design Award and Architizer’s Design For Good Award. She is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow.
Fayyad's writing and design work have been published and exhibited in venues including The New York Times, Technology: Architecture and Design, Nexus Network Journal (Architecture and Mathematics), Log, Pidgin, Archinect, Yale Architecture Gallery, Carnegie Museum of Art, citygroupNY and the Roca Gallery in London.
She has been the recipient of the American Institute of Architects Certificate of Merit, Faculty Design Award and the Araldo A. Cossutta Prize for Design Excellence at Harvard. She holds a bachelor of science with honors in architecture from MIT and a master’s degree in architecture with distinction from Harvard GSD.