project:if is a laboratory of ideas centered on experimentation, projection, and application. The research practice uses techniques of geometry to facilitate design transformations across scales, subjects, and media. The work is centered on the relationship between flatness and three-dimensional form; it celebrates projective systems as they relate tectonic and material expressions of space to modes of inhabitation, cognitive perception, and the political domain of architecture. Equally invested in open-ended research and practice, the work values the speculative and theoretical as venues to continually question the boundaries of design within its cultural and historical context.
Iman Fayyad is a designer and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University. She is founder and director of project:if, a research practice based in Syracuse, NY. Her independent and collaborative work has been published and exhibited in Log, Pidgin, Archinect, PLOT, Rumor, Yale Architecture Gallery, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Roca Gallery in London.
Prior to Syracuse, Fayyad was a Lecturer in Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she taught graduate core architecture studios and courses in projective representation and served as the coordinator of the Digital Media Workshop Program. Previously, she served as lecturer at Princeton University and the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Fayyad was the inaugural John Irving Innovation Fellow at Harvard GSD where she conducted research on historical and contemporary geometric techniques in architecture, examining the relationship between three-dimensional form, representation, and construction in digital media and culture.
Fayyad holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from MIT and a Master in Architecture with Distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was the recipient of the American Institute of Architects Certificate of Merit, Faculty Design Award, and the Araldo A. Cossutta Prize for Design Excellence. She has given lectures and served on juries at several institutions including MIT, Harvard, Princeton, RISD, The Cooper Union, Northeastern University, UCLA, CCNY, and the AIA Center for Architecture in Washington, DC. Fayyad has practiced in several offices in the United States and Europe. Prior to starting her own practice and returning to academia, she was a designer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in New York.