In Fall 2021, Seikaly was Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. There she presented the lecture “A Bedouin Girl in New Haven” where she described the process behind the creation of her work and considers the question of what new architecture can be born from traditional cultural heritage.
For this review I would like to focus on examining the relationships between architect and community and the connection between the act of weaving and the act of creating architecture that is offered up through Meeting Points by Abeer Seikaly.
Documentation of Meeting Points from the architect’s website.
Original caption: The three dimensional lattice membrane structure creates varried patterns and tessellations as one moves around it. Photography: © David Walters, 2019
To get a full picture of the project the review will rely on the presentation of the project on the architect’s website which contains photographs and videos of the process, documentation of the installation and technical drawings of the project. The project has been documented and written about in various media outlets. Those reports will also be examined in this review. In addition to the project itself, previous iterations from the architect around the same topics will factor into this review understand the connections made in this iteration.
Excerpt from Matters of Time, Abeer Seikaly, 2019.
A video piece exploring the role of the matriarch in the shadow of patriarchal modernization in the Jordanian Badia
In her project statement Seikaly mentions the phrase “architectures without architects” to set the context in which the project was created and in which she wants to operate. Another realm of the project is the act of weaving and women’s labor and their relation to the act of creating architecture. In order to present a theory and understanding of these topics, I will look for scholarly articles that theorize about these themes and connections. Specifically I hope to find feminist readings on invisible architecture and previous projects that offer new ways of considering these themes.