New South—Meriem Chabani
Part of the MIT Fall 2026 Architecture Lecture Series.
Presented with The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
Communion
It is embarrassing to believe. It is terrifying to care. What happens when we dare anyway?
Sacred practices are often confined to religion, yet they can also be read as technologies of togetherness, ways of gathering bodies, knowledge, and memory into forms of collective action that outlast the institutions built to contain them.
Drawing on recent work by NEW SOUTH, this lecture explores how rituals, communal practices, and sacred spaces may shape architecture. From shared acts of making and gathering to spaces shaped by migration, displacement, and diasporic memory, these projects ask how architecture can support forms of solidarity that aren't always visible or formally recognized. Ritual here is also a spatial claim, a way of reoccupying ground for those pushed to the margins, relegated out of the mainstream, and denied formal recognition.
The lecture will explore how rituals rooted in care for land and its resources may offer a different model for building — one grounded in reciprocity rather than extraction. Architecture becomes less an object that organizes people than a framework through which people organize themselves. We may yet belong. We may yet forge futures not built on depletion
Algerian born, Paris based Meriem Chabani is the founder and Principal of NEW SOUTH, an award-winning architecture, urban planning and anthropology practice that puts the margin at the center. Her work on civic spaces, memory and belonging includes includes the Taungdwingyi cultural center in Myanmar, the Globe Aroma refugee art center in Brussels, and the upcoming Mosque Zero in Paris. She is currently a finalist for the National Slavery Museum in Amsterdam. As an educator, Chabani has taught and lectured extensively. She has notably served as Aga Khan Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard GSD (USA), and currently teaches at Ecole Paris Malaquais (FR). Her work has regularly been distinguished and showcased at a number of international architecture Biennials, including Venice, Istanbul, Oslo and Lagos. In 2020 Chabani won the Europe 40 under 40 award from The European Centre for Architecture and The Chicago Athenaeum. In 2023, she is one of the emerging women architects for AMC. In 2025, Le Monde names her one of the leading voices in culture in France.
This lecture will be held in person in the Sidara Auditorium (W41- 1216) and streamed online on YouTube. Lectures are free and open to the public. Registration is required.
