Master jury

Meisa Batayneh is the Founder and Principal architect of maisam architects & engineers, which was established in 1986 with offices in Amman and Abu Dhabi.  Ms. Batayneh got her degree in architecture from the University of Texas at Arlington. Over her long and distinguished career, Ms. Batayneh has led multi-disciplinary teams on large-scale international and regional projects in the USA, Pakistan, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE.  In addition to her passion for applying creativity, design, and innovation to enhance the built environment, she is actively engaged in social initiatives through national and international commissions and boards.

Ms. Batayneh was selected as a member of Amman Commission, which was entrusted with developing the greater Amman Masterplan.  She is a founding member of the Jordan Green Building Council and the Middle East Leadership Association. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees at the King Abdullah II Center for Excellence.  She was the first president of Jordan’s Business and Professional Women’s Association and served as a jury member on the Women in Business Cartier Awards.  She was recognized as the Leading Arab Woman Architect by the Federation of Arab Architects and Engineers.

Maisam’s work has won numerous global awards, including the ArchitzerA+ Popular Choice Award in 2015, LEAF Award in 2014 (for “A Gateway to Petra”), and multiple Arabian Property Awards.  Maisam’s work was also shortlisted for the World Architectural Festival (WAF) for the “Aqaba Bus Terminal” in 2009, “A Gateway to Petra” in 2012 and the “Petra Museum” in 2015. Maisam won the World Architecture Festival’s Future Projects for “School in a Park” in 2019.

Ms. Batayneh joined the Board of the LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction in January 2020.  She served as a member of the regional jury for Middle East Africa and is a Jury member of the Global LafargeHolcim Awards.  Ms. Batayneh served on the Master Jury for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2019.

Elizabeth Diller is a founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), a design studio whose practice spans the fields of architecture, urban design, installation art, multi-media performance, digital media, and print. The studio is responsible for the transformation of the High Line in New York – once disused railroad infrastructure and now a 1.5 mile-long public park. The studio is currently engaged in two  other projects in New York: The Shed, a cultural space that physically transforms to support artists’ most ambitious ideas; and the renovation and expansion of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).Recent projects include the 35-acre Zaryadye Park in Moscow; the Museum of Image & Sound in Rio de Janeiro; The Broad, a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley; the Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center at Columbia University in New York; and the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts at Brown University. Most recently, the studio was also selected to design: Adelaide Contemporary, a new gallery and public sculpture park in South Australia; the London Centre for Music, a permanent home for the London Symphony Orchestra; and a new Collection and Research Centre for the V&A in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Ms. Diller received the first MacArthur Foundation Fellowship awarded in the field of architecture along with her partner Ricardo Scofidio. In 2017, her studio received the Wall Street Journal Magazine’s Architecture Innovator of the Year Award and received the 2018 American Federation of the Arts Cultural Leadership Award. She has also featured (twice) in Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People”. Ms. Diller is also a professor of architecture at Princeton University.

Elizabeth Diller studied at the Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York City.

Mona Fawaz is Professor in Urban Studies and Planning and the coordinator of graduate programmes in Urban Planning, Policy and Design at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She is also director of the Social Justice and the City research programme at the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy at AUB. The research programme, which focuses on making Lebanon’s cities more inclusive, aims to formulate an agenda for research, mobilisation and policy advocacy between scholars, policymakers and activists.Ms. Fawaz’s own scholarly interests include methods to make cities more inclusive. Her research spans urban history and historiography, social and spatial justice, informality and the law, property and space, as well as planning practice, theory and pedagogy.

Professor Fawaz was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University and an affiliated fellow in the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies. She served as a member of the Affordable Housing Institute MENA Research Advisory Board and a member of the scientific committee of the Order of Engineers and Architects in Lebanon in 2017/18.

She is the author of over 40 scholarly articles, book sections and reports in Arabic, French and English, and has edited several collections of essays. In addition, Ms. Fawaz is intimately involved in Beirut’s ongoing transformations, publishing in the local press and advocating for upgrading informal settlements, protecting the urban commons, improving liveability, adopting inclusive planning standards, and defending the right to the city.

After earning a bachelor of architecture at the American University of Beirut, Professor Fawaz completed a Masters in City Planning and a PhD in City Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ali M. Malkawi, is a professor at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. He teaches architectural technology and computation and conducts research in the areas of computational simulation, building performance evaluation, and design decision support. He is founding director of the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities and Co- Area Head Master of Design for Energy and Environments. He was also the founder and director of the T.C. Chan Center for Building Simulation and Energy Studies, a global consortium dedicated to research, new knowledge, analytical tools, processes, simulation techniques, technologies and programmes of continuing education.

He has consulted on a number of large projects, including airports, “super” towers, industrial factories, and commercial and residential projects. He has provided governments with strategic guidance on building energy-related topics and has led efforts to develop the first performance-based sustainability rating system in the Middle East. He is the lead author or co-author of over 100 scientific papers and of two books on computationally driven design and simulation. Malkawi was recently honoured with the Jordan Star of Science by Jordan’s King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein.

Previously he has taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a professor of architecture and the chairperson of the graduate group in architecture.

Professor Malkawi received his BS in architectural engineering and environmental design from Jordan University of Science and Technology, his MArch from the University of Colorado, and his PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology in architectural technology/artificial intelligence.