A Century of American Life: The Silent Architecture of Behavior
America did not change in sudden, tectonic shifts. It evolved quietly, almost imperceptibly, through the introduction of ordinary objects that…
Author: Ibrahim Fawakherji
Fawakherji is the editorial pen name of a practicing architect and researcher whose architectural practice dates to 2006. He has written the Fawakherji column on ArchUp since 2019, exploring architecture, cities, design culture, society and technology. Visit the Fawakherji column for essays and the column’s editorial focus, the author archive for posts attributed to this byline, or the community member profile for BuddyPress profile information.
Architecture Under a Rotating Sky
How the Coriolis Effect Quietly Shapes the Built WorldArchitecture is rarely discussed through the lens of planetary physics. We are…
Is Architecture Biased?
Why Some Cities Become Emotional Destinations While Others Remain SilentThere is a sentence people repeat without thinking about its implications:…
The Future of Living: Housing Beyond Ownership, Construction, and Habit
If the world is changing, it would be intellectually dishonest to assume that housing will remain untouched. Throughout history, architecture…
Architecture 6–7: A Year of Fracture, Acceleration, and Quiet Realignment
If architecture were a versioned software, 2025 would not be a clean release. It would be something closer to a…
Five Words Every Architect Must Know Before Speaking to a Real Estate Developer
Fifteen years ago, during one of my early years in practice, I was sitting in a meeting room with a…
Architectural Competitions: The Crown Jewel of the Discipline
Architectural competitions today are often reduced to announcements, deadlines, and prize amounts. Platforms publish updates, submissions circulate online, and winners…
The Last Resting Place of Architecture: Who Will Carry the Craft into 2026?
In Arab and Islamic cultures, the final act of honoring a human being is not symbolic. It is physical, intimate,…
Architectural Jobs in 2026: Who Stays, Who Shifts, and Who Disappears
“Six months into 2026 will mark two decades since my graduation, a span long enough to watch architectural labor reinvent…
Architecture of Civilizations: Tracing the Built Timeline of the Middle East
Discussions about the “oldest architecture” in the Middle East often collapse into cultural pride or symbolic narratives, yet the question…
Beyond the Void: Could THE LINE Become the World’s Largest Scientific Laboratory?
For the past weeks, much of the global discussion surrounding THE LINE has fixated on a single word: the trench….
When Media Loses Its Gravity: Warner Bros, AI, and the Architecture of the New Narrative
For decades, media empires were built the same way cities once were: around scarcity. Scarcity of distribution, scarcity of production,…
Architecture, With Emotion: How Memory Shapes Buildings Before Architects Do
There are memories we do not choose. They choose us. They attach themselves quietly, returning years later with the precision…
The Rain Test: When Rare Storms Become the Only Honest Inspector of Buildings
In much of the Middle East and other arid regions, architecture grows under skies that rarely darken. Buildings rise confidently…
Where Has Real Estate Gone? Architecture at the Edge of a Vanishing Market
It was a quiet conversation, the kind that should not have carried any significance beyond a routine design review, but…
The Architecture of Social Classes: How Urban Planning Is Quietly Shaped by Economic Layers
There is a dangerous misunderstanding in contemporary architectural discourse: that discussing social classes in planning is inherently discriminatory, or that…
🖤 Frank Gehry Has Passed… and Today, Architecture Feels Different
Today, the world of architecture has lost one of its most fearless spirits.For me personally, Frank Gehry was not just…
The Disappearance of the Kitchen: How Food Delivery Is Rewriting Domestic Architecture
In August of last year, I came across a research project titled Last Meal, a speculative investigation into how the…
The Halo Effect: How Media Narratives Shape Taste, Emotion, and Architecture
There are moments when the world reveals its psychological wiring in the smallest, most ordinary scenes. I was sitting in…
When Architecture Returns to Its Origins: The Quiet Comeback of the Pivot Door
There are moments in architectural history when innovation does not move forward, but rather folds back onto its earliest memory….
Rulers Who Built Architecture and Planning
It struck me yesterday, as I finished writing the long reflection on Ludwig II and his impossible castle, that some…
