Nezar AlSayyad

Dr. Nezar AlSayyad is an architect, a planner, an urban designer and an urban historian. He is a Professor of Architecture and Planning at the university of California at Berkeley were he serves as the Associate Dean for the College of Environmental Design and Chair of the University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Berkeley.  Professionally, AlSayyad has an active practice in the Middle East and the US and is the Principal in XXA-Office of Xross-Cultural Architecture, an urban design and architectural firm with several award-winning credits in its portfolio.

AlSayyad holds a B.S. in Architectural Engineering and Diploma in Town Planning from Cairo University, an M.S. in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Architectural History from UC Berkeley.  He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards.  Among them are those received from the NEA, SSCR, and the Getty and Graham Foundations. His awards include the Bahrain Gold Medal for his contribution to the study of Islamic Architecture, the Pioneer American Society Best Book Award fro his work on Tradition, and the American Institute of Architects Education Honors for his teaching at Berkeley.  He served and still does on the boards of directors and editorial committees of several associations and journals including the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, among many others.  Indeed in the 1988, AlSayyad co-founded the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE), an interdisciplinary scholar society with members today from more than a 70 countries concerned with the study of tradition in the built environment.  Today, he still serves as the Associations President and is Editor of its peer reviewed and highly acclaimed journal Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review.

AlSayyad is the author co-author or editor of many books, to mention a few Dwellings, Settlements and Tradition (1989); Cities & Caliphs (1992); Forms of Dominance (1993); Consuming Tradition (2000); Hybrid Urbanism (2001); Muslim Europe/Euro Islam (2002) which has been translated and published in four languages, Urban Informality (2004), The End of Tradition (2004), Making Cairo Medieval (2005) and Cinematic Urbanism (2006). Additionally, he has written, co-produced and co-directed two NEA- funded public television programs, “Virtual Cairo” and “At Home With Mother Earth.”  AlSayyad is also a poet, with one anthology published in English. He is currently working on two new books Traditions: the real, the hyper and the virtual in the Built Environment to be published by Routledge and Cairo: Stories of a City to be published by Harvard University Press, both in 2009.