Makram el Kadi & Ziad Jamaleddine

Lecturers
(Visiting Faculty Spring 2012

Makram el Kadi
Born in beirut in 1974, Makram el Kadi received his bachelor of architecture degree from the American University of Beirut in 1997 and his masters of architecture from Parsons School of Design in 1999. After working at the offices of Fumihiko Maki in Japan, he joined Steven Holl Architects where for 5 years he was project architect on numerous international projects, among them the World Trade Center proposal with Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman and Charles Gwathmey, and the winning entry to the natural history museum of Los Angeles county competition. Mr. El Kadi taught architecture studio with Steven Holl at the Columbia University School of Architecture Planning and Preservation GSAPP in 2004 and 2005 and as part of L.E.FT at Cornell University in 2006, and currently teaches graduate studio at MIT where he serves at the Aga Khan visiting Lecturer. He also has a regular teaching position at Yale where was the Louis Kahn visiting assistant professor of architecture and has been part of the Yale faculty since 2009.

Ziad Jamaleddine
Born in Beirut in 1971, Ziad Jamaleddine received his Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the American University of Beirut in 1995, where he won the Areen Award for excellence in design. He received his Masters degree in architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in 1999. Mr. Jamaleddine worked for Steven Holl Architects for 5 years where he was the assistant to project architect for Simmons Hall dormitory at M.I.T, (winner of the National AIA Design award in 2003 and the New York AIA award in 2002), and the project architect for the design and development of the Beirut Marina project in downtown Beirut. Mr. Jamaleddine co-taught Vertical studio and seminar at Cornell University, Third-Year Graduate Advanced Architectural Design Studio at PennDesign, and Vertical Studio at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

Spring 2012 course

4.514 Architecture Design Option Studio – Affordable Housing in KSA

Socio-Cultural Context:
Access to adequate housing has been a central issue in socio-economic policies and urban governance dynamics since the creation of the modern states in the Middle East. From the utopia of the suburban detached houses of North America, to the slums of Mumbai, and the cities of living dead in Cairo, lies a range of housing “conditions” that present clear testimony of the complex matrix of issues and forces that come into play.
Acute rural to urban migration, coupled with some of the world’s highest ratios of population growth, renders countries in the Middle East, and their governments, struggling with the rising challenge of access to adequate housing for the vast majority of the population. The latest events of uprising and unrest loosely referred to as the “Arab Spring” will definitely push this matter to the forefront. Reports indicate a shortage of anywhere between 4.25 to 6 million housing units in these countries, collectively, until 2015, with an estimated annual take-up rate of 1.25 to 1.5 million units a year.
Whilst it may be argued that the challenge is predominantly economic in nature, and that governments and countries have not been able to accommodate their citizens with respect to access to housing due to shortages of all kinds: shortage of land, shortage of money, shortage of regulation, shortage of technical building capacity; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the largest exporters of oil in the world, and the richest Arab country, presents a particularly interesting case study; specifically because it does not suffer from the shortages listed above, yet no more than 20% of the population own their homes. In this studio, we argue that a key hurdle for access to adequate housing in this context is the shortage of imagination and lack of design sensitivity to the needs of the end user. Golf course residential compounds, high rise modern apartment buildings, do not seem to be among the “adequate” housing types desired by the vast majority of Saudi Arabian families, the bulk of whom belong to the middle and lower middle class, on the income level scale.
Site:
The studio aims at investigating design typologies for adequate housing for middle and lower middle income Saudi families. It will take as a case study the city of Riyadh, capital of KSA, where the students will pick their sites after the initial workshop and site visit. The sites will re-examine through infill within the existing urban fabric, the conditions of affordable housing, from notions of privacy, to those of accessibility, constructability and ecology and from the scale of the Unit, to that of the urban block/tray, to that of the larger city block.
Program and Typological Investigation:
The focus will be on developing a home/dwelling rather than a house, the difference being one of a spatial experience that is set within the cultural backdrop of Arabian/Saudi patterns of domesticity. The studio will address the idea of expanded living at the collective scale in relation to the culture of privacy by shuffling the housing programmatic components either internally to create a larger public entity or externally by introducing urban amenities within the housing component. This notion of expansion will also be addressed at the unit scale by designing a flexibility that caters for the expansion and growth of the family unit.
Research:
Students will benefit from close exposure to the issues at play through presentations by officials from various public authorities such as the municipality of Riyadh, Ministry of Public works and Housing, and The King Abdallah Charitable Foundation for Cooperative Housing as well as from the perspective of developers, presented by Al Mutawir – studio advisor-, a private real estate developer with interest in affordable housing projects in KSA, and other GCC countries, and that have expressed interested in helping the students with their research.