AAD_SU21_028

this is not a portfolio about buildings.

collected works sarah hejazin Columbia GSAPP 2021

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Air Crimes Made Visible; an essay about air as an entanglement and ‘Air Drifts’ as a medium.

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Interspecific City; an essay about interspecific relationships and Broadacre City as a case study.

4 Amazon Air; a future amazon facility that conflates different airs of the corporation - from truck pollution and warehouse dust, to the data center heat and the artificially purified air in the offices - into a single space. Page

5 Grounded Chairs; an ongoing research about natural building materials like clay and subsoil in seating systems. m a m a; a 160-page book that explores clay and soil as a material that has the ability highlights the crimes that happened to morningside park’s earth. Page

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Tracing Architectural Violence; an essay about excavation as a tool to alter histories to help enact oppression. Page

7 D I S C L A I M E R

geometric tiling made of crayons and rockite with a organizational, experientatial and aesthetic performance Braids;

This is a mirror; a device that reflects who I am, my experiences and beliefs. It is a collaboration and a reaction. In every piece, my accumulative self collaborates with and reacts to the world...past, present and future.

In these agglomerations of fights, I acknowledge and highlight the political modes which architectural devices perform. In every device, the amalgamation of economy, politics, climate , society and technology behaves as an intersectional ecosystem.

10 Commoditized Warfare; aims to address the ongoing colonization and co-optation of art in the service of colonial and imperialist crimes having MoMA as a starting point.

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Heterotopia of Deviation; an essay that analyzes Beirut through its margins and takes 'Capernaum' as a case study.

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From Models to The Built World; a selection of photographs taken on the move.

Masaha; a student organization that investigates contemporary issues facing the Arab World.

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Studio / Fall 2020 Perspective from the dried river

1 AMAZON AIR Typology: Industrial Location: San Bernardino, CA Partner: Denise Jiang Studio: Plein Air Critic: Nahyun Hwang Fall 2021

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Studio / Fall 2020

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Throughout history, enclosed space for an artificial nature had always been related to control, perfection and protection. However, in this project we ask, who is the user of the “perfected air” and who is excluded and for what reason?

Whether it is for education, leisure, or merely expirements of technological capacities, we want to acknowledge that the closed environments are responding to environmental problems, while creating new ones.

In the end, all closed and conditioned environments are part of one artifical space, where nature is only recruited rather than reclaimed. and air is perfected only for the privileged ones.

Encapsulated Nature Analysis

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Envisioning a future Amazon facility that conflates different airs of the corporation - from truck pollution and warehouse dust, to the data center heat and the artificially purified air in the offices - into a single space.

While challenging Amazon’s publicized “green” image, the project produces new atmospheric and programmatic conditions for production as well as resistance.

The project suggests a system and allows life’s natural flow to hack it.

Amazon Air Analysis

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Studio / Fall 2020 Proposed Site Plan

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Studio / Fall 2020 Program Diagram

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Studio / Fall 2020 H O R I Z O N T A L I T Y Redistributing the ratio of warehouse associates to office workers, providing spaces for all functions to act simultaneously and efficiently as one system that gives all of the workers the same experience and air quality.

The plan shows how the indoor spaces engage with the outdoor spaces, without hard borders. The ambiguous spaces that are born allow the public to engage with the workers. Walls can be moved and rotated to create different relationships between spaces and allow the different interiors to spill out to the exterior.

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Sectional Perspective

Studio / Fall 2020

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The building expands from the adjacent street to the river following the site’s topography. In order for Amazon’s futuristic system to function, the envelope has to be penetrated by humans and nonhumans such as freight trains, underwater storage and the dried river. Moving to the upper floors, people meander the space through open-air pathways and platforms that connect different programs together, and allow people to experience amazon patents like the drone hives closely.

Second Floor Plan

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Studio / Fall 2020 Programmatic Sectional Model

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Drone View

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Interspecific Cafeteria

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As we zoom closer into the human scale, the sectional model and the collages show how different programs function in proximity, and how people can interpret the ambiguous spaces.

While open-rooftops can act as a platform for self-expression by humans, we expect other amazon elements such as the drone hives and the warehouse pool to be taken over by non-humans like algae and birds.

As we create spaces for Amazon’s futuristic system to function, we allow life’s natural flow to hack it.

Studio / Fall 2020

Protestors hacking the system

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2 AIR CRIMES MADE VISIBLE Transscalarities Instructors: Andres Jaque Elliott Sturtevant

The research group was intrigued by NASA’s animations of global pollution, and the way that data is collected, compiled, and organized from international resources.² The animations are a cinematic representation of the endless ways we are vulnerable and indebted to each other. They are a scientific tool that allows us to put authorities, industries, and institutions under the microscope, question their claims, and make their crimes more visible.³ Urban and industrial activities continue to produce emissions of black carbon, sulfates, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, dust, and other particulates, which scale of repercussion, is underrated. NASA’s work at the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office is

focused on creating climate projections by merging the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere, and the biological processes with satellite observations using ‘GEOS-5’; a highresolution computer model that mimics the earth’s systems and air pollution flow. This model compiles millions of data points every 6 hours and combines ground and satellite observations to regenerate animations of the earth’s atmosphere at any given time.⁴ These kinds of animations and imaging technologies that made the world visible to us have been around since the late 1960s. However, transparency and interaction were the two major keys in bringing these images and animations closer to the public. Air Drifts allowed the visitors to see the transscalar layers unfolding in interactive displays, taking them on the journey of investigation, collection, compilation, and production of these images through various mediums, from a digital video and a physical model to large-format drawings.

In this project, architecture plays the role of the mediator. It becomes a tool to materialize the intangible; the air, and by doing that it bridges the gap between people and data.

Air Drifts is not just a project that raises awareness about the current state of the atmosphere, and its future. It is an instance of our entanglements. As air continues to drift from country to country, from nation to nation, we are reminded of how connected we are with everyone, and how lucky and doomed we are to have this connection.

Theory / Fall 2020

Spinning the planet, carrying particulates that are almost always unseen, Air becomes a vital weapon. While politics promote air pollution as a national or private responsibility, air remains a public resource, a medium that connects us with the world as it circulates through our bodies, the earth, and the atmosphere.

Air Drifts responds to the issue of trans-boundary air pollution. It analyzes how localized toxic particulates are in fact a global responsibility and portrays that through forms of visual evidence. It is a multimedia project for the Oslo Architecture Triennial 2016 by an interdisciplinary research group that consists of Kadambari Baxi, Janette Kim, Meg Mclagan, David Schiminovich, and Mark Wasiuta in collaboration with scientists from NASA.¹ The Triennial considered, among others, the role of architecture and its position in relation to the grave issues facing the globe today, such as the refugee crisis, climate change and environmental displacements.

1. Kadambari Baxi, “Air Drifts”, accessed on September 25, 2020, https://www.kbaxi.net/air-drifts 2. Kadambari Baxi, “Air Drifts – Preview 2016”, accessed on September 25, 2020, https://vimeo.com/184859705 3.Mark Wasiuta, “Representing the Environment”, interview

by Daniel Roche, PLAT Journal, December 24, https://www. platjournal.com/articles/representing-the-environmentmark-wasiuta-shares-with-daniel-roche 4.idle

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3 INTERSPECIFIC CITY Transscalarities Instructors: Andres Jaque Elliott Sturtevant

In Broadacre City, Wright envisioned a nation-wide (sub)urban landscape dotted with low-cost Usonian Homes, with the aspiration for freeing America of congestion. This, to me, sounds a lot like suburbia, where the need for car as means of transport is a prominent sideeffect. However, back in the 1920s, Ford’s Model T cars were taking over the streets and the American culture, which makes Wrights’ idea of a nature-filled Usonian America progressive. It responded to the promise of the car, while also trying to accentuate the natural world.² This vision summarizes Wright’s designs because it represents his search for a balance between embracing new technologies on the one hand and respecting the natural world on the other.³ By proposing an interspecies relationship between humans, nature and machine, Wright set a new vision for city planning. He reconnected the human with what was disregarded during the industrialization while profiting from the advancement of technology.

Apart from his obsession with nature and technology, Wright wanted to provide the space, freedom and beauty necessary for the growth of the individual or, the expression of democratic ideas as he saw them. He hated urban cities and believed that urban planning resulted from impersonal forces and disregarded people’s preferences and possibilities to grow.⁴

Wright took Broadacre city as a means to free the people from urban planning. He instead offered them a democratic city that decentralizes urban city planning and the concentrated power and privilege it stems from. In his low-density population city, services were grouped based on typology, and all units were planned in a way that individuals would get any commodity they needed within a radius of one hundred and fifty miles accessible by road or air.

Broadacre City was never realized.

This low-density garden city was his vision of a futuristic suburban utopia, and Frank Lloyd Wright, indeed, was a product of his time in regards to thinking about cities and society. He was responding to current urban issues and his proposal arose from a deep concern for cities and in an effort to save them from what he thought was a path of destruction.5

As years pass by, the issues that architects and city planners have to deal with change.

However, 100 years after Wright’s proposal, Rem Koolhaas redirects the city planning lens once again towards the countryside. With “a necessity to remain in a complicated dance with capitalism”6 both Koolhaas and Wright failed to leave the countryside pristine of the architects’ ego. AMO states that 98% of the Earth’s surface is not occupied by cities, and I believe that our failure in the other 2% suggests that we leave the 98% alone.

Theory / Fall 2020

To understand Broadacre City, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s other organic architecture, one must dig into his worldview. Wright had a firm connection with the natural world: “I attend the greatest of all churches; I put a capital N on nature and call it my church”.¹

1. Wright, Frank Lloyd. “The Mike Wallace Interview” Interview with Frank Lloyd Wright by Mike Wallace. ABC American Broadcasting Company, 1957, https://hrc. contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll90/id/23/ rec/1 2. Meis, Morgan. “Frank Lloyd Wright Tried To Solve The City” The New Yorker, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/ culture/culture-desk/frank-lloyd-wright-tried-to-solvethe-city 3. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. “Revisiting Frank Lloyd Wright’s Vision for Broadacre City” 2017, https:// franklloydwright.org/revisiting-frank-lloyd-wrightsvision-broadacre-city/ 4. Wright, Frank Lloyd. “The Mike Wallace Interview” Interview with Frank Lloyd Wright by Mike Wallace. ABC American Broadcasting Company, 1957, https://hrc. contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll90/id/23/ rec/1 5. Levine, Neil. “The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright” Princeton University Press, 2016 6. D. Scott, Felicity. Review on “Countryside: The Future” Art Forum 2020, https://www.artforum.com/print/202006/

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Buiding Technology / Spring 2021

4 GROUNDED CHAIRS Natural Materials Lab Typology: Furniture Advisor: Dr. Lola Ben Alon Partner: Bisher Tabbaa Materials: Soil, Straw and Bamboo Spring 2021

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Mixture Testing

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Fishmouth Joint

Buiding Technology / Spring 2021

0.5 reed 1 clay 0.5 fiber

Mixture Making

As part of this trajectory, the Natural Materials Lab at Columbia GSAPP developed Grounded Chairs, a 100% organic biodegradable low-carbon seating system. The Grounded Chairs series aims to use natural building materials such as clay, sand, fibers, and bamboo, to provide a new interpretation of seating sculptures.

By using the thermal advantages of naturally driven mass materials and experimenting with electric heating wires, Grounded Chairs provide sculptural comfort seating that can store heat and absorb moisture to provide optimal thermal comfort,

while having sustainability at its core.

Our first iteration of Grounded Chairs is ‘Jandug’; a structurally sound cob chaise with an internal bamboo skeleton and a radiant heating system to further enhance the user’s thermal experience. Throughout its construction process and phases, Jandug has posed intriguing challenges to the structural and durability limits of the materials used.

Limiting ourselves to the amount of bamboo that we would need, we created a structural truss skeleton containing 3 triangles with diagrids that would respond to the ergonomics of the human body, a section for each; the shank, the thighs, and the torso.

The thin bamboo structure was then joined by lashing biodegradable jute rope to provide the necessary strength to sustain the tension within the earthen mass material.

After having built the bamboo structure, we created a jute rope “net”between the diagonal bamboo members to act as a surface for the infill mixture. Once the weaving was done, the

Infill layer was placed in between the bamboo members and on the joints to give the skeleton more rigidity and strength. The density of this layer is very low and therefore would make the chair less heavy.

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Jandug

Buiding Technology / Spring 2021 Jandug with Megan

This realization could lead to more experiments that utilizes the tensile quality of the weaved straw reinforcement to create structurally innovative forms without the need for a skeleton. While this first demonstration used cob in a structural manner, additional experiments should test cob in compression, which could add to its structural performance.

Another takeaway is the ability of cob to act as a thermal mass. With every layer added on top of the electric wires, the heat trapped inside the thermal mass of the chaise was felt more intensely. Critical investigation into the

thermal properties of cob construction should determine optimal layer thickness, mixture ratio and shape of the chair that would provide enhanced thermal experience and control.

Jandug with Megan - Thermal Qualities

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Studio / Spring 2021

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Typology: Public Installations Location: Morningside Park, Manhattan Studio: Makergraph Critic: Ada Tolla + Giuseppe Lignano Materials: Clay and Soil Spring 2021

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monograph by sarah hejazin

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monograph by sarah hejazin

mama book cover, 2021

To view the full book click here Studio / Spring 2021

making oyster

D E S C R I P T I O N This book revisits my obession with earth, the mother to many children.

Morningside heights park was always controversial. started from formation of the manhattan schist millions of years ago, to manhattan’s grid, and later columbia university’s racist gym.

While highlighting the many crimes that happened to this earth, on this earth and because of this earth, I introduce earthen materials as binders; public installations that bring people closer together, closer to nature and eventually to earth.

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tower projections

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site 04/ tower site 02/ carpet

site 01/ capsule

Studio / Spring 2021

site 03/ oyster

site plan

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OBJECT

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CAPSULE

Capsule is derived from intuition.

Take a chunk of clay and you’ll find yourself making a ball out of it. Take a metal bar and you’ll stick it into that ball. The result is an object with a mechanism; a capsule that can be opened or closed.

In this object, I take the conscious decision of embedding it in the ground and allow it to transform and connect to the existing soil of the site.

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Relationship to the body

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Studio / Spring 2021 Capsule Field

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Malleability

Studio / Spring 2021

OBJECT

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CARPET

Carpet is the result of accumulating many layers of clay and soil and reinforcing them with metal bars.

It is everchanging through people’s touch. when first placed on site, it acts as corridors that connect east (harlem) to west(columbia). when transformed, it becomes a carpet that smoothens the blast scars of the columbia university’s gym.

Studio / Spring 2021

Influence

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Carpet Section - After

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Carpet Section - Before

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Carpet Section - After

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Carpet Section - Before

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Studio / Spring 2021 Carpet on site

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Carpet on site

Carpet transformation

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OBJECT

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OYSTER

An object that mimics the qualities of a shell that is meant to open up and stand allowing me to see the messiness and the beauty of the void.

Placed gently beside the cliff to safeguard its rocks.

It sheds a light on the architectural violence that happened to the cliff and allows people to examine the excavation marks closer. Its structure naturally provides a double interspecific amphitheater, one that is on the interior facing the cliff, and one of the roof of the shell, facing the pond and harlem.

The Making of Oyster

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Studio / Spring 2021 Oyster Section

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Studio / Spring 2021 Oyster Section

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Oyster Plan on Site

Oyster Section on Site

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Oyster Section on Site

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Studio / Spring 2021 Oyster on Site

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OBJECT

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A result of the experimentation of movement through form. As i add rotating layers, the tower become s like a spiral staircase that ascends, descends and moves but is also still.

As the tower registers 45 feet tall, it highlights the height of the proposed gym, and further accentuates the privilege of leveling up.

Facing the lafayette statue across the street, the tower questions the idea of monumentality. as I place this object closer to Harlem, but high enough for it to be seen from the upper west side, I see my tower as a form of resistance.

The Making of Tower

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Studio / Spring 2021 The Making of Tower

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Studio / Spring 2021 The Making of Tower

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Tower Plan

Tower Section

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Tower Section on Site

Tower Plan on Site

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Studio / Spring 2021 Tower on Site

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Tower on Site - Before

Tower on Site - After

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6 TRACING ARCHITECTURAL VIOLENCE Transscalarities Instructors: Andres Jaque Elliott Sturtevant

Excavations in occupied territories have been illegal since 1954. However, the ancient city of Sebastia has been continuously excavated over the last century by colonial archaeologists that are funded by Zionist individuals and institutions.³ Whether by looting the findings, displacing the objects, or restructuring the land, Israeli authorities have been selectively disgorging the past to prove their preexisting narratives and right to land. Through many seasons, agents like the Israeli Civil Administration, Harvard University, and the British School of Archeology in Jerusalem have superimposed their assumptions onto the ground, silencing Sebastia’s full story.⁴

Dima Srouji, alongside a team of archaeologists, artists, and anthropologists, take the constantly shifting Palestinian ground as a multilayered canvas and try to map its “architectural imaginary, the disregarded strata, the displaced objects, and the entangled narratives of Palestine”5. Featured in Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2019, visitors get to experience the displacement of the objects in a

museological display. The team designed gridded exhibition spaces that transverse these objects unevenly and randomly. This aims to represent the endless warehouses and museums, often outside of Palestine, that display the intentionally displaced and shifted objects outside of their context. As Sharjah Architecture Triennial discusses the rights of future generations, “Depth Unknown” aims to reveal past and present illegal actions that target archeological sites and history as a way of resisting the future manipulation of the ground.6

The team restitutes the context that was destroyed in excavations by creating models that represent each monument through the inversion of its volumetric spaces. As you move around the different and gridded exhibition spaces, “Depth Unknown” materializes sound. It takes you on a sonic journey with audio recordings of the different sounds you hear across Sebastia’s terrain. Accompanied by the different vitrines and models, the team makes sure that the bulldozer marks, the uprooted trees, and the voids tell future generations of the abuse of the Palestinian stratum.7 One can argue that in this project, the architect, the archeologist, the artist, and the anthropologist cross disciplines to become a messenger and nothing more.

Today, the Israeli government encourages illegal settlers to carry weapons and enter Sebastia for religious tourism. Used as a set to perform the singular narratives of Ancient Samaria, the archeological monuments continue to be carved out, leaving the strata hollow and echoing.

Theory / Fall 2020

Relying on the Bible as a history book, a team from Harvard University directed by Gottlieb Scuhmacher began excavating Sebastia in 1908, with the goal of verifying the apocalyptic visions of the prophets of Israel.¹ In ‘Depth Unknown’, an interdisciplinary team aims to map the displacement of archaeological fragments and the constant alteration of their context in Palestine. The project presents archaeological excavation as architectural violence, as it progressively removes layers of earth and sometimes ancient structures or remains to reach an archeological revelation. ²

1. Dima Srouji, “Echoes of a Depth Unknown”, Jadaliyya, accessed on November 10, 2020, https://www.jadaliyya. com/Details/40173 2. “Depth Unknown”, About the Project, Depth Unknown, accessed on November 9, 2020, https://depthunknown. com/3. idle 4. Ron Tapper, “The Harvard Expedition to Samaria: A Story of Twists and Turns in the Opening Season of 1908”, Buried History: Journal of the Australian Institute of Archaeology no. 52: 3-30, https://www.academia.edu/31827791/The_ Harvard_Expedition_to_Samaria_A_Story_of_Twists_and_ Turns_in_the_Opening_Season_of_1908 5. “Depth Unknown”, About the Project, Depth Unknown, accessed on November 9, 2020, https://depthunknown. com/ 6. Rights of Future Generations, Projects, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, accessed on November 12, 2020, https://rfgen.net/en/project/depth-unknown 7. Dima Srouji, “Echoes of a Depth Unknown”, Jadaliyya, accessed on November 10, 2020, https://www.jadaliyya. com/Details/40173

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7 COMMODITIZED WARFARE Typology: Public Intervention Location: MoMA, NYC Studio: A Loudreading Is In The Making. But No One Has Noticed.

Critic: Cruz Garcia + Nathalie Frankowski Manifesto: Calculating the Colonial Footprint of MoMA Summer 2021

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Studio /Summer 2021 MoMA Visitor Guide

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We are not solely rejecting the actions and investments of MoMA’s board or chairperson. We are denunciating and interrupting the coloniality that is embedded in modernity which manifests in MoMA, as well as other museums. We are not standing against art, but against the colonization and co-optation of art in the service of colonial and imperialist crimes.

Standing against MoMA is not only a decolonial gesture, it is also a project that stresses on the idea that art should not be captured by oligarchs and capital, or assimilated into national myths, but rather how that creative action plays an important role in the process of combatting war and affirming the worth of communities.

Tribune Axonometric

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Studio /Summer 2021

Before the Loudreading Event

MODERNITY IS AN IMPERIAL CRIME Modern Art is the outcome of the plunder crime that was organized against non-white culture.

When the modern artists fetishized these looted objects, their market value increased, making the reunion between the people and their objects impossible.

It is important to understand the museum for what it is, a place where plunder continues to be appropriated as a private property to benefit the looters and their descendents.

During the Loudreading Event

Modern museums normalize the separation between past, present and future, and relegate imperial crimes to the past.

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Studio /Summer 2021 Post-Moma Future - Publication

POST-MOMA

Tribune Perspective Plan

FUTURE

This museum is not only a multipurpose economic asset for billionaires, but also an expanded ideological battlefield through which those who fund apartheid and profit from war polish their reputations and normalize their violence.

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Studio /Summer 2021 The Room of Plunder Crimes

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Studio /Summer 2021 The Room of Interconnected Struggles

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Studio /Summer 2021 Tribune Interior - During Loudreading

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Studio /Summer 2021 Destruction Graden - During Loudreading

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Still Life - Plunder

Studio /Summer 2021

Still Life - Desposession

To view the video click here

THEIR ARCHIVES ARE OUR RECEIPTS

Still Life - Destruction Garden

Through MoMA’s archive we expose their ties to war, racist prison and border enforcement systems, vulture fund exploitation, gentrification and displacement of the poor, extractivism and environmental degradation, and patriarchal forms of violence.

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Buiding Technology / Spring 2021

8 BRAIDS

Transitional Geometries Tiling System Instructor: Josh Jordan Materials: Crayons and Rockite Spring 2021

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Possible Tiling Alterations

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Inspired by the geometry of braids, I developed a tile that explores the organizational, experientatial and aesthetic performance of geometric tiling and its connection to architecture.

The process included digital 2D geometric exploration, 3D modularity translation, and physical fabrication through 3d printing, mold making and model making.

Braids - Top View

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Buiding Technology / Spring 2021 The Making of Braids

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9 HETEROTOPIA OF DEVIATION: ANALYZING BEIRUT THROUGH ITS MARGINS Arab Modernisms Instructor: Yasser El-Sheshtawy Case Study: Capernaum (movie)

Souk Al Ahad is often perceived as a gift to the public, a place where the state allows urban ‘informality’ on state-owned non-buildable land to take place, however, Marieke Krijnen sheds a light on the connection between the private actors who exploit the Souk and the ministry that licensed them to exploit it. This ‘informality’ is questioned when private actors are given the upper hand to regulate the Souk. The lease of land to Chedid and Irani families stripped the souk from its informality and made it a legal and structured business where daily matters of cleanliness and maintenance are present. So this image of ‘unregulated informal vendors’ that is portrayed in Capernaum is in fact not true. It is also important to mention that the souk has two parts, old and new. The new part, which is located under the highway, is populated with Syrian refugees and grew arbitrarily when they started entering the country in 2011. The xenophobia, which the movie also fails to portray, is amplified when people with racist resentment demand the eviction of the foreign vendors; “Here, we have a permit for the stallholders, they are registered.

The other market won’t last, it’s the refugees, and it’s possible to get rid of it.”

While the press portrays the Souk as a dangerous place full of poor migrants with doubtful products, the Souk can be considered as a different form of globalization, one that ‘disseminates recovered products and sold mostly by the city’s undesirable persons, and contrasts with the kind of prestigious cosmopolitanism that is represented by the new souks of Beirut.”

Between the clothing, handbags, CDs and pirated DVDs, Souk Al Ahad can be linked to “a transnational network of a globalized economy of misery”.

Many Lebanese movies such as “In the Battlefields (2005)” were heavily censored and banned due to their criticality towards security institutions. Despite this, Capernaum is celebrated with pride as a Lebanese achievement by the Ministry of Culture as they nominate it to represent Lebanon at the Oscars. Which makes us wonder why did the Lebanese state promote it while burying more critical ones?

Labaki claims that the movie sheds light on the systemic and systematic structures of exclusion, marginalization, and dehumanization in Lebanon, but how can that be true if manifestations of power and control which produce these structures are not in fact addressed in the movie?

Lebanon is a fractured country with endless blurred lines. Distinguishing between public and private, formal and informal responds to the interests of the various authorities and people involved. The movie shows a topical view of that reality, where misery is portrayed as a result of people’s negligence, not the state’s.

And while Capernaum intricately captures the long-neglected housing and infrastructure crisis that is eating up Beirut, we believe that Nadine Labaki took the conscious decision not to capture the system of marginalization that is behind it which is a decision undoubtedly related to the economies of its production.

Keeping all of that in mind, we ask ourselves a realistic question; which can be a better catalyst for change: an affecting work that raises international attention but only captures a slice of reality or a local documentary that is censored and buried in the archives of unseen works?

2021

It was designed by Pierre El-Khoury, whose modernist design can be read clearly in this prison. Its massive interconnected set of triangles and hexagons generates a Lebanese panopticon. The intentional form of a central observation system assumes that the prisoners will be effectively compelled to stay regulated as big brother watches. However, despite this intention, Roumieh prison is only internally regulated. Its overcrowding resulted in a prisoner-run facility, where prisoners have their own governmental structures. Through the ‘Mas’ool’ which is an elected representative of the inmates, and the ‘Shaweesh’ who is often an older influential prisoner, the hierarchical structure which the government seems to have no say in, is maintaining the radicalization and extremism in the prison. Due to this overcrowding, another clear security issue occurs, which is the

Another heterotopia that is portrayed in the movie is Souk Al Ahad. Souk Al Ahad, or Sunday Market, is a vibrant and busy outdoor market that is located under the bridge of Jisr al-Wati in an industrial zone between the residential areas of Achrafiyyeh and Sin al-Fil. In one of the scenes, Zein is seen with Yonas, walking precariously on the highway, which the market lies underneath.

The white tensile fabric roof which that can be seen from the highway above protects a fractured space, in which many Syrian and Palestinian refugees’ marginality is highlighted.

Other than being a liminal space of sociability, the movie portrays the souk’s potential in being a fertile ground for misdeeds such as human trafficking and the illegal trade of documents and refugee babies. The movie showcases the souk as an informal public space with a collection of stalls, vendors, and affordable goods, but it fails to mention both the long conflict over its land ownership between the Lebanese Ministry of Energy and Water and the municipality of neighboring Sin el-Fil, and the social divisions between the vendors themselves which we

believe make the simplistic representations of the market as a homogeneous collective space unrealistic.

/Spring

Heterotopia is a concept used to describe certain spaces that are somehow “other”; disturbing, intense, and contradictory spaces that exist in order to make a real “utopian” space possible. One of those spaces seen in the movie is Roumieh Prison. As a facility holding up 300% more than its actual capacity with some of Lebanon’s most high-profile criminals, Roumieh prison can be considered as Lebanon’s most notorious.

imbalance between prisoners and guards. This has resulted in a “thriving market of resource smuggling”, where prisoners exchange their compliance to the guards with better internet access, a bigger supply of protein, and the waiving of visitor strip-search routines. Capernaum may have shed a light on the prison’s overcrowding, racial segregation, and smuggling, but it has failed to portray this system which seems to run the whole prison. Indi Phillips, an Australian research analyst based in Lebanon, believes that there are minimal efforts in exposing the processes and hierarchical structures within Roumieh and other similar institutions. We believe that this is related to Lebanon’s censorship practices; where glimpses of the repressive state apparatus and its repercussions are deemed “unfit for public consumption due to it being a threat to national security”.

Theory

Nadine Labaki uses Capernaum as a title, preparing the audience for what awaits them in the movie. She borrows it from Kfar Nahum, a fishing village on the Sea of Galilee, historically known for its disorder and chaos. This disorder and chaos that the movie is trying to capture starts from Zein’s apartment, and Rahil’s shack, but also continues to all the spaces in between.

Growing up playing, begging, and selling juice on the street, Zein is street smart. This gained quality, shared with many children facing the same conditions, drives him to run to the inbetween spaces, the heterotopias.

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10 FROM MODELS TO THE BUILT WORLD Architectural Photography Instructor: Michael Vahrenwald Spring 2021

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11 MASAHA

Student Organization Role: Co-founder and Co-director

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Masaha is a Columbia University GSAPP student Conflict: association that investigates contemporary Researching the many forms of conflict that issues facing the Arab world. Using the historic takes place in the arab world; whether that Saha as precedent, Masaha creates a platform conflict is urbanization warfare through politics where diversities coexist in order to question of space, or war and destruction. and redefine the many Arab identities. The association aims to connect its creative students Labor, Global Networks and Architecture: While many arab cities in the last century have across disciplines to contribute to the improvement and development of scholarship had building booms, we question to what extents that focuses on the Arab world. In an existential have these come to human cost. masaha researches and aims to understand the time where we are witnessing cities being flattened to the ground, while others ascend connection between architecture, labor and vertically and unsustainably, we offer this global networks that revolve around building platform for people who are interested in buildings.

learning about our past, present, and future issues that continue to shape our cities, and

shape us. Masaha is a non profit, non political,

non religious professional organization that is

open to all GSAPP students.

R E S E A R C H

Climate Change

The increasing environmental viotality as a result

of the anthropocene is impacting the world. the

contribution to climate change is seen through

resource extraction and exploitation that is

happening is areas throughout the arab world.

Nation State and The Issue of Representation:

Understanding the ability of architecture to

embody meaning, and to represent people.

this is particularly relevant in the false notion of local and global which leaves architects, societies, leaders, searching for a representation through the built environment.

To listen to Podcast click here

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This Summer 2021, GSAPP student organization Masaha hosts a new Podcast mini-series, Climate Change in the Arab World.

Episode 01: Tayyun + Midorization Forest creation as a means to help restore urban ecosystems. Their work extends to protecting the genetic diversity of native plants through seed harvesting and native plant production with different nurseries.

Episode 02: Yasser Elsheshtawy Pandemic urbanism in Arab cities. While discussing deglobalization, decentralization, and humanization efforts, Elsheshtawy explains how policy making and urban design during the pandemic can act as an opportunity to tackle other grave issues such as climate change.

Episode 03: Aisha Al-Sarihi Energy politics and post-COVID sustainability in Arab cities. The conversation not only highlights the importance of economic diversification as it coincides with climate action, but also Saudi Arabia’s (both government and citizen) attitude toward climate change.

Episode 04: Gökçe Günel Utopian city projects, sustainable futures, and social justice with a specific focus on Masdar City in the UAE. While speaking about her book (Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi), Günel explains how Masdar City is a status quo utopia.

this is a portfolio about agglomerations.

collected works sarah hejazin Columbia GSAPP 2021