[interim] is an architecture studio created by Nora Akawi and Eduardo Rega Calvo to facilitate and record collaborative projects, including interdisciplinary research and design work, the production of events, exhibitions, and publications, and experiments in radical pedagogy in architecture and spatial justice. It operates from New York City, Palestine, and the Canary Islands.
Nora Akawi
nora.akawi@cooper.edu
Nora Akawi is a Palestinian architect and curator living and working in New York. She is the co-founder of the interdisciplinary research and design studio [interim], and is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at The Cooper Union. Her work focuses on bordering and ruination as the architectural project of settler colonialism, and on practices of land- and life-protection in anti-colonial movements in Palestine, the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, and the Canary Islands. Her research and curatorial projects draw from border studies, political geography, and archive theory and nearly always involve collaborative multi-media productions, including film, sound, and performance.
At The Cooper Union, Nora teaches Undergraduate and Graduate Thesis studios and courses on critical research methods in architecture, on carceral geographies, borderlands and extraterritories, and on anti-colonial archival practices. Prior to joining The Cooper Union in 2019, Nora taught at Columbia University’s GSAPP where she was director of Studio-X Amman, and where she founded the Janet Abu-Lughod Library and Seminar.
Most recently, she co-produced the collaborative multimedia exhibition Antum Al-Ṣaūt; Wa Naḥnu Ṣadāh (You Are The Voice; We Are It’s Echo) at the Graham Foundation for the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2024). Past curatorial work include Pluriversal and Bewildered, an architecture lecture series at The Cooper Union (2021); Al Majhoola Min Al-Ard (this earth’s unknown, or, she who has been vanished from the earth) for the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans (2019); Sarāb a festival of experimental site-specific electronic music and dance performance from Arab worlds in the Wadi Rum desert (2019); and the exhibition Friday Sermon at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018). In 2023, Nora served on the International Jury of the Venice Architecture Biennial titled The Laboratory of the Future, curated by Lesley Lokko.
She co-edited the books Friday Sermon and Architecture and Representation: The Arab City, and until recently, has served on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed Journal of Architecture Education. She is the co-theme editor of 79:2 Palestine, originally conceived as the Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of Architectural Education. Following its censorship by the ACSA, the forthcoming volume will be published through an alternative platform and publisher.