Azra Akšamija
MIT Future Heritage Lab | Memory Matrix, Cambridge, MA, 2016. Image credit: Dietmar Offenhuber
The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices program spotlights North American architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who have significant bodies of realized work and the potential to influence their field.
Azra Akšamija is a 2022 Emerging Voice.
Azra Akšamija is the founding director of MIT Future Heritage Lab, an art, education, and preservation lab based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Akšamija’s work explores “[the] destruction of cultural infrastructures within the context of conflict, migration, and forced displacement,” according to her website. Through textiles, photography, design, animation, and writing, she develops “resistant infrastructures” that aim to challenge social incongruities and improve the lives of communities under threat.
Projects include:
- Design to Live: Everyday Inventions from a Refugee Camp, a bilingual book featuring design projects created by Syrian refugees in Jordan;
- T-Serai, a series of tent prototypes for refugee camps produced from donated textiles and discarded clothes;
- Memory Matrix, a temporary monument consisting of over 20,000 small fluorescent Plexiglas elements.
Akšamija holds master’s degrees in architecture from Graz Institute of Technology and Princeton University, and a PhD in history, theory, and criticism in architecture from MIT. She is an associate professor in the MIT Department of Architecture, where she directs the Art, Culture and Technology program.
She has received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the Art Award of the City of Graz, and an honorary doctorate from the Montserrat College of Art.
More information
- Design To Live details refugees’ ingenuity in creating life in camps, National Public Radio
- MIT’s Azra Akšamija: Rebuilding Cultures Through Art, Design, and Community, SciTechDaily
- Show Highlights the Return of the Loom, The New York Times