Historically, Arab architecture has most conspicuously been identified with the tent. Indeed, the term ʿarab once referred exclusively to the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula who lived in movable tents. Because of its symbiosis with the camel, the Orientalist Alois Musil regarded the paradigmatic black tent—the beit ash-shaʿar, or “house of hair”—as a marvel of desert technology. In architectural theory, Deleuze and Guattari would later oppose the “smooth space” of the tent to the “striated space” of the house. Yet the region itself has never been concerned with such distinctions. It is, rather, a place where stones are words, where settlement is transient, where oil and water mix, and where “drawing a line” and “measuring the land” share the same linguistic root. Its most generative quality lies in its refusal to choose. Adapting the genre of the glossary and the interplay between word and artifact, this talk proposes new narratives of Arab architecture and urbanism—ones that highlight what it has already done and what it might yet do for the field.
Zehra Ahmed is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) School of Architecture, whose work examines the architectural history and culture of the modern Middle East and North Africa. As the 2024–25 Garofalo Fellow, she organized a conference and exhibition at UIC to reclaim the region's spatial, material, and symbolic practices as sites for a renewed architectural imagination.
About the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship
Named in honor of architect and educator Doug Garofalo (1958–2011), this nine-month teaching fellowship provides emerging designers the opportunity to teach studio and seminar courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs and conduct independent design research. The fellowship also includes a public lecture at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and an exhibition, typically held at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) School of Architecture. To learn more about the fellowship, click here.
Many thanks to the Society of Architectural Historians for hosting this event and for their continued support of architectural discourse and education.
Image credit: Ahmad Al-Jallad, “Inscribed Perimeter Wall,” Badia Epigraphic Survey, 2019.
