Events

Fall 2023 Sciame Lecture Series: Mohamed Aly Etman

Measuring Built Ecologies

This lecture will be in person and is part of the Fall 2023 Sciame Lecture Series, titled "Crosscurrents: Architecture, Landscape, and Spatial Practices in Southwest Asia and North Africa."

Mohamed Aly Etman is a building science researcher and Lecturer at the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (CEA) in New York City and New Haven. His research focuses on the development of SEVA, the Socio-Ecological Visual Analytics web tool, to incorporate built environment data, human health, and well-being data, as well as building systems data and the use of computational tools into the design process at all scales. Prior to joining CEA, he was a member of CASE, the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology, at RPI where his research was supported by a HASS fellowship, Skidmore Owings & Merril (SOM), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. His interdisciplinary research approach was developed in collaboration with industrial collaborators such as SHoP Architects, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), HeliOptix, FABS (Fresh Air Building Systems), Entertaining Health, AMBIS Tech. Inc, Method Design, FutureAir, and Gray Organschi Architecture. Mohamed has taught environmental modeling to architects and urban planners at the American University in Cairo (AUC), RPI, CUNY, and Yale. Mohamed holds an MSc from Cairo University (2013), an MArchII (2014), and a PhD (2018) from RPI.

Suggested Reading: M Aly Etman et al 2020 IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 588 032062

"Crosscurrents: Architecture, Landscape, and Spatial Practices in Southwest Asia and North Africa" probes the radical reimagining of the region compelled by the expression Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA). In recent years, the acronym SWANA has gained currency among architects, landscape architects, urbanists, and historians who conceptualize the territories of the Middle East and North Africa through geography and place rather than colonial frameworks. The term “Middle East” was a British invention, a tool used to advance colonialism in a region where so many national borders resulted from imperialist interventions. In the Fall 2023 Sciame Lecture Series, groundbreaking designers, scholars, practitioners, and activists chart multiple—and sometimes competing—currents in the architecture of the region and its diasporas, while displacing essentializing colonial narratives. To do so, speakers from across the area shed light on global, transnational, and diasporic human stories about design, space, landscape, and architecture in SWANA, and advance new ideas about territory, buildings, places, histories, and belonging.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium.

See https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/return-campus for current requirements for in-person visitors.

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.