MIT Architecture

Huma was honored for her work with the MIT Graduate Student Council. She served as the chair of the Housing and Community Affairs Committee, worked to expand graduate students' paid parental leave; served as a Graduate Student Representative on the Student & Affiliate Health Insurance Advisory Committee and assisted in keeping health insurance co-payments for graduate students and premiums for their children affordable. Huma is currently completing her dissertation, "The State Between Dwelling and Building: Sarifa Settlements and the Formation of Modern Iraq," which investigates "the architectural, political, and environmental history of Baghdad’s informal built environment, often improperly designated as sarifa settlements, and the rural migrants residing there from the 1930s to the 1960s."

The Strano Lab at MIT and the KVA Matx design team, led by Professor Sheila Kennedy, present Plant Properties at the 2019 Design Triennial as an ongoing experiment that is part of the Nanobionic Plant Project at MIT. The goal of this project is to produce ambient lighting with living plants growing in their wild and natural states. The plants are not genetically altered in any way, and the nanobionic techniques are biocompatible and could be applied to any existing plant, bush or tree.

Organized by Professor Nasser Rabbat and Postdoctoral Fellow Deen Sharp, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, this symposium seeks to address the following questions: How does violence and conflict not only destroy but constitute, design, and organize built environments and infrastructures? How do we understand the urbanization of warfare in relation to urban theory and reconstruction practices? Finally, participants will be asked to consider the recent warfare in the Middle East, with a special focus on Aleppo, in relation to the built environment and the extent to which reconstruction processes can be weaponized.

“It is the aim of this School to do what it can, in its day and generation, to insure that the Architecture of the future shall be worthy of the future," wrote architect and founding Professor William Robert Ware in his Outline of a Course of Architectural Instruction.