At the Edge of Where God Built

Ziad Jamaleddine (GSAPP, L.E.FT Architects) reflects on At the Edge of Where God Built, a critical examination of L.E.FT Architects’ diverse body of work from the past decade, with speakers Waleed Arafa (DAA), Nebahat Avcıoğlu (Hunter College), Iheb Guermazi (USC), Nasser Rabbat (MIT), Kishwar Rizvi (Yale), Avinoam Shalem (Columbia Department of Art History & Archaeology), and Sumayya Vally (GSAPP, counter-space).

Waleed Arafa is an Egyptian architect, founder & principal of Dar Arafa Architecture. He holds a B.Sc. in Architecture, Urban Design and Planning, Ain Shams University, Egypt and a post-graduate degree in the Conservation of Historical Buildings, AA School of Architecture in London, UK. His thesis was titled: “The Mosque in Britain: British Heritage?”

Nebahat Avcıoğlu specializes in cross-cultural artistic interactions and connected histories between Europe and the Islamic world, with a particular focus on the Ottoman Empire and Turkey from the 17th century to the present. Her research focuses on the dissemination and transformation of forms and material practices, theories of artistic contact, as well as the socio-political aspects of the history of art and architecture.

Iheb Guermazi is an art historian, architect, curator, and Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California. His research explores the intersections of Islamic thought, aesthetics, and modern political formations, focusing on the modern Muslim world. His current book project, The Eyes that Saw the Prophet: A Braided History of Art, traces how Sufi mystics, artists, and anti-colonial thinkers developed a distinct theory of art in response to European imperialism. Guermazi’s architectural and curatorial projects have been exhibited internationally, including at the Institut du Monde Arabe, the Islamic Arts Biennale, and the Sharjah Architecture Triennial.

Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. An architect and a historian, his scholarly interests include Islamic architecture, urban history, heritage studies, urbicide, Orientalism, and postcolonial criticism. He has authored and edited numerous books, most recently Writing Egypt (winner of the 2025 British-Kuwaiti Award for Best Book in Middle Easter Studies), Taqiyy al-Din al-Maqrizi: Wijdan al-Tarikh al-Misr (Winner of the 2025 Arabic Book Award, History Section), and Reconstruction as Violence in Assad’s Syria (2025).

Kishwar Rizvi is an architect and art historian whose work moves between early modern Iran and contemporary West and South Asia, with a focus on the histories of mobility, subjecthood, and empire. Her publications include The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East (2015), Emotion, and Subjectivity in Early Modern Muslim Empires: New studies in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal art and culture, editor, (2017) and the anthology, Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and politics in the twentieth century (2008). She teaches at Yale University, where she is the Robert Lehman Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture.

Avinoam Shalem is an art historian. He holds the Riggio Professorship for the Arts of Islam at Columbia University in New York. He has published extensively on the arts of Islam, especially on ‘the art of the object’. His main field of interest is the global context of the visual cultures of the world of Islam in the Mediterranean, Near East, North Africa, Spain, South Italy and Sicily, as well as on medieval aesthetic thoughts on visual arts and craftsmanship, the image of ‘Islamic’ art, and the historiography of the field.

Sumayya Vally is the principal of Counterspace, an architecture and research practice exploring hybrid identities and spatial relationships, with an interest in the complex relationships between territories and places. She is Honorary Professor of Practice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.