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Click here to read this post in Chinese. Introduction: Critical Heritage Practice in the “Test Tube” In the lexicon of global capitalism, few places carry the symbolic weight of Shekou, the free-trade zone located at the southern-most point of Shenzhen’s Nanshan District in Guangdong Province, China. Officially established on January 31, 1979, as China’s “test tube” for economic reform, the city…
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) and Kazakhstan-China (KzC) oil pipelines are not simply infrastructures for moving hydrocarbons across vast distances; they are worldmaking devices that inscribe political rationalities, financial architectures, and territorial regimes onto the landscapes of post-Soviet Eurasia (Figure 1). While their physical purpose is to carry crude oil, these pipelines’ political…
The following text, “Al-khirba: Building renewal while preserving community value,” is an excerpt from L.E.FT Architects’ book At the Edge of Where God Built (Akhir ma ‘Ammar Allah) : Language, Concepts, Islamic Architecture (Figure 1). L.E.FT, a bilingual practice run by Makram el Kadi and Ziad Jamaleddine and positioned between Beirut and New York, explores the ambiguities of Arabic spatial…
This spring came earlier than usual, and more insistently. The sky over Tehran was an unlikely shade of blue; rain fell when it wasn't expected, and the air carried the petrichor that makes the city briefly feel like somewhere else, somewhere gentler. The kind of spring, one could not help but think, was too beautiful for anyone walking under it to be carrying grief. But many Iranians were. Figure…
The rehabilitation of Lycée Fresnel in Paris reveals the tensions hidden behind contemporary celebrations of adaptive reuse. Through the transformation of a 1957 school building designed by Roger Richez and Michel Raclot, this essay argues that reuse is less an ethics of preservation than a practice of negotiation. Existing buildings resist through material limits, inherited meanings, regulatory…
As a scholar focused on interpreting vernacular cultural landscapes, fieldwork is at the core of my research. While what constitutes “the field” of fieldwork is broad, the idea of moving outside of the office, laboratory, or classroom is foundational. I have spent the better part of three decades attempting to bring this approach into undergraduate courses. I have led several project-based…
Into the urban cacophony of New York City’s Financial District, a new memorial arrived a few weeks ago: Al Qalam: Poets in the Park . The artwork sits in Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza , a small oblong park opened in 2018 with plentiful benches and three entrances to the Rector Street subway station. The site commemorates the Syrian American community that lived in the neighborhood at the fringes of…
North American suburbs are aging, both their residents and built landscapes. Shopping centers built in the 1960s are reaching the end of their life cycle, with mixed-use high-density projects replacing modest shopping plazas. For many who are graying in colder climate suburbs such as Toronto, malls offer a space for socializing, exercising, and running errands. Aging malls with their lower rents…
In early May, the Hong Kong government’s Housing Bureau announced that the average waiting time for a public housing unit in the special administrative region (SAR) had dropped to 4.7 years—the lowest in more than eight years. The positive report followed concerted efforts on the part of Chief Executive John Lee and his administration to boost the number of public housing units in response to…
“Brown indexes a certain vulnerability to the violence of property, finance, and to capital’s overarching mechanisms of domination. Things are brown by law insofar as even those who claim legal belonging are still increasingly vulnerable to profiling and other state practices of subordination.” - José Esteban Muñoz Figure 1. Model Adobe Home at Luna Community College. October 2025. Photographs…
