Arabia Interrotta Symposium

The Arabia Interrotta Symposium is free and open to the public.

Once home to the earliest cities and organized forms of cultivation, the region known as the Arab East (Al Mashriq) is today host to a diverse and contradictory spatial production. Here, archaeological sites, folk architectures and monuments of empire intermingle with extralegal settlements, low-rise high-density sprawl, stylish office towers, artificial islands and luxury desert resorts. Underlying this simultaneous collapse of past and future is the relatively recent shift in the locus of cultural production from the once-vibrant urban centers of Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Beirut to the super rich and relatively sparse nations of the Arabian peninsula (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman).

This symposium examines the implications of this shift and anticipates alternative futures by reclaiming the region’s spatial, material and symbolic practices as sites for a renewed architectural imagination.

This event is curated and organized by Zehra Ahmed, 2024–25 Douglas Garofalo Fellow at the UIC School of Architecture.

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