From Beirut to Harvard: Layal Merhi’s “Aamha” Reimagines the City Panorama By way of Design Analysis

Architect, designer, and educator Layal Merhi is a part of a rising technology of practitioners working on the intersection of analysis, illustration, and concrete inquiry. With a tutorial trajectory spanning Beirut, London, and Boston, her work explores how structure can uncover the layered histories, ecologies, and narratives embedded inside cities.

Most not too long ago, Merhi accomplished a Grasp of Design Research on the Harvard Graduate College of Design (2023), the place her analysis centered on ecological imaginaries and the political materiality of city landscapes. Previous to Harvard, she earned a RIBA-accredited Grasp of Structure from The Bartlett College of Structure at College Faculty London, following her Bachelor of Structure at Lebanese American College.

Central to Merhi’s current work is Aamha (قمحة), a design-research venture developed throughout her graduate research at Harvard and exhibited on the GSD in 2023. The venture examines the advanced relationship between infrastructure, ecology, and reminiscence inside the metropolis of Beirut.

Drawing on archival analysis, cartographic evaluation, fieldwork, and experimental illustration methods, Aamha investigates what Merhi describes as town’s “phantom ecologies” latent environmental and spatial situations that emerge from layers of political and infrastructural historical past. The venture takes as its place to begin the sudden development of wheat throughout elements of Beirut following the 2020 Beirut port explosion, when grain saved within the metropolis’s silos was scattered throughout surrounding neighborhoods.

As Merhi displays, “Beirut doesn’t overlook. It carries every little thing typically past what its areas can maintain. Aamha engages this extra: what leaks, what lingers, what resists settling.”

Moderately than framing this phenomenon solely as an emblem of resilience, her analysis examines the broader implications of those emergent ecologies inside the city panorama. By way of drawings, publications, and installation-based representations, Aamha proposes new methods of studying cities the place infrastructure, surroundings, and collective reminiscence intersect to form spatial narratives.

She additional explains, “Aamha is much less a publication than a construction for meeting. It builds on a protracted historical past of talking beneath stress, whereas shifting authorship outward so the archive stays open, repeatedly rewritten.”

Introduced as each set up and analysis publication, the venture situates Beirut inside a wider worldwide discourse on structure’s function in documenting and decoding city transformation. By combining design analysis with experimental modes of illustration, Merhi’s work positions structure as each analytical software and cultural medium.

Alongside her analysis, Merhi maintains an lively instructing observe throughout a number of educational establishments. Her pedagogy emphasizes narrative drawing, analytical illustration, and hybrid digital-analogue workflows, encouraging college students to strategy architectural design as a crucial mode of inquiry.

As she notes, “What seems as absence in Beirut isn’t empty. It typically marks one thing displaced, suppressed, or rendered invisible. Aamha stays with these situations, fairly than making an attempt to resolve them.”

In parallel along with her educational work, Merhi co-founded OFFSH, a design and analysis studio working throughout structure, analysis, and socially engaged observe. The studio’s initiatives vary from speculative city research to community-driven initiatives, together with the Karam Park playscape developed for displaced Syrian and Turkish kids alongside the Turkish–Syrian border.

Throughout her observe whether or not within the classroom, the studio, or the analysis surroundings Merhi continues to analyze how structure can interact critically with the social, political, and ecological situations shaping up to date cities. By way of initiatives like Aamha, her work demonstrates how structure can prolong past conventional design boundaries to perform as analysis, storytelling, and public engagement.