LESS IS... exhibition by Leen Katrib, the 2021–​22 Harry der Boghosian Fellow at Syracuse University School of Architecture. Image by Shengxuan (Hector) Yu/Courtesy of Leen Katrib.

Archinect's Fellow Fellows series showcases individuals who are currently in, or have recently finished, an architecture fellowship. During our conversations, we discuss their architectural journey, areas of research, and their overall experience as academic fellows.

For our latest interview, we connected with Leen Katrib, the 2021–22 Harry der Boghosian Fellow at Syracuse University School of Architecture. Katrib shares her fellowship experience, her passion for uncovering the forgotten histories and influence of marginalized communities in architecture, the studio she taught, and details about her fellowship exhibition titled LESS IS...

Can you share with us your academic journey and interests?

My academic journey and interests are partly shaped by my upbringing. I grew up as an immigrant in two extremely different environments — Sharjah/Dubai and then Appalachia. Though seemingly opposite or unrelated, both contexts share commonalities in how practices in the built environment can strategically erase histories and marginalize communities. I’ve always been curious about how subtle processes of ‘othering’ materialize in the built environment and how to subversively amend the role of architectural design in spaces that have been deemed subaltern.

During my undergraduate studies at USC and graduate studies at Princeton, some of my most formative experiences came through research travel grants that challenged me to define an interdisciplinary research agenda that wasn’t necessarily present in the architectural curriculum. Through these independent opportunities, I worked in the context of Parisian suburbs that were home to migrants from North Africa, abandoned developments in the Chinese countryside, and a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. Though spanning geographies and cultures, they were thematically connected in how processes in architecture, planning, and historiography can be wielded to create a “formula of erasure” while simultaneously severing the connection between such practices and their strategies of othering. It is precisely those processes that I am interested in extracting and subverting to create something anew.

I’ve always been curious about how subtle processes of ‘othering’ materialize in the built environment and how to subversively amend the role of architectural design in spaces that have been deemed subaltern.

Such opportunities gave me the space to experiment with alternative modes of research to define a design practice that aligns with my values. This included field observations; recording interviews with people that inhabited the spaces I was researching to understand cultural practices and specificities; reaching out to individuals in government sectors to request meetings; writing; scavenging the archives; sneaking into spaces I wasn’t supposed to enter (then being chased after).

What fellowship were you in, and what motivated you to apply?

I was the 2021–22 Harry der Boghosian Fellow at Syracuse University School of Architecture. Prior to the fellowship, I was practicing for several years at design offices in New York City, including Marvel, LTL Architects, OMA, and Peter Marino. At the end of 2018, while at LTL Architects, I had the opportunity to work on a university residence hall and an academic hub that was part of a larger campus development plan at Carnegie Mellon University. While working on that project, I was also reading in my downtime about the history of campus development in the U.S. It was then that I came across a news article about household debris and building material fragments being excavated by a maintenance crew from the basement of Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall a few months prior. The uncovering of the debris was a pivotal moment in that it propelled the demolished structure, the Mecca Flats, that existed on the site before Crown Hall from mythology to recorded history. Multiple historians had written about Mecca Flats in the years prior, but the material discovery certainly gave this history a more visible platform to challenge the ways in which we talk about, teach, and publish the history of Crown Hall and the larger campus expansion, which Mies designed when he became head of the School of Architecture. Reading about the history of Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)’s campus expansion in the broader context of other postwar and ongoing campus developments in the U.S., I was curious about common threads — of architectural and urban strategies, policies, networks of alliances, language, and strategies of myth-making — that connected this typology across the American landscape.

Fast forward to 2020, the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were a time of questioning whether the path I was on was the right fit. I was lucky to work on a range of exciting built and unbuilt projects while living in NYC, but the work and day-to-day operations never quite aligned with the issues I wanted to tackle, and the often-demanding schedule left only the very late hours of the night to do my own research/work. Once I decided to put together a fellowship proposal to explore the topic further as a design research project, things started coming together quickly. When I spoke with Dean Michael Speaks during my interview for the Boghosian Fellowship, Syracuse Architecture was gearing up for an upcoming year of tackling a similar thematic through Visiting Critic Studios and lectures, so I knew it would be the right fit and the right home to launch the research.

...during the fellowship year, I wanted to uncover comprehensive, untold histories of university campus expansions in the United States from 1950 to the present day. Simultaneously, I wanted to deconstruct the myths surrounding Mies’s proposal for IIT’s modernist campus expansion.

What’s the focus of your fellowship research? What did you produce, teach, or exhibit?

On a broader level, part of my work focuses on overlooked materiality and its potential to uncover past and present practices in the built environment — architecture, preservation, urban planning, and historiography — that have marginalized communities and erased their histories. More specifically, during my fellowship year, I wanted to uncover comprehensive, untold histories of university campus expansions in the United States from 1950 to the present day. Simultaneously, I wanted to deconstruct the myths surrounding Mies’s proposal for IIT’s modernist campus expansion. Mies’s IIT not only shaped discursive and pedagogical agendas in architecture but also arguably influenced and commenced a pattern of postwar campus expansions into primarily Black and immigrant neighborhoods that were demolished. In some cases, expansions were led by Mies’s former students.

In the Fall of 2021, I developed and taught a seminar, titled “Excavating the University Campus,” where we researched multiple case studies of postwar and ongoing university campus expansions, including Mies’s IIT, through a series of “excavation exercises” that were grounded in interdisciplinary readings that unpack the role of overlooked materiality on architectural historiography. Ultimately, students produced a series of multimedia storytelling short films using the layers of visual, auditory, and textual materials collected and produced during the research phase.

In Spring 2022, I developed and taught a Visiting Critic Studio, titled “Counter-Mies,” which challenged students to design a counter-historical archive within Crown Hall. I also taught an exhibition design seminar titled “Debris: Myths, Minutes, and Materials,” where students experimented with representational strategies, built prototypes for various components of the exhibition, and produced tentative maps of a chronologically and geographically organized compilation of universities whose campus expansions arguably adopt strategies from Mies’s IIT.

One of the outputs I really enjoyed working on was a virtual symposium I organized and co-moderated with Dean Speaks on April 8, 2022. The symposium, titled “Debris, Constellations, and Counter-Histories,” brought together a cross-disciplinary panel of scholars whose work grapples with overlooked detritus through a constellational mode of representing, and thereby actualizing, history in the present. The panel included Azra Akšamija (Director and Associate Professor of Architecture, MIT), Gaston Gordillo (Professor of Anthropology, University of British Columbia), Sylvia Lavin (Professor, Princeton University), Jorge Otero-Pailos (Director and Professor of Historic Preservation, Columbia University GSAPP), and Salvage Art Institute (Elka Krajewska and Matthew Wagstaffe). The symposium offered an intellectual grounding for some of the issues I was grappling with in my research — mainly how to deconstruct “official” historical narratives to reconstruct counter-histories by salvaging, analyzing, clustering, superimposing, or juxtaposing typically insignificant or overlooked detritus to retell one possible permutation of history among infinite potential assemblages.

The exhibition [LESS IS...] is a subversive archival project that re-examines Mies’s design for IIT’s postwar campus expansion into Bronzeville [...] The installation challenges that legacy by inviting visitors to peek into the material record that was literally, figuratively, and necessarily suppressed in casting the myth of a tabula rasa enacted by an 'apolitical' architect intent on creating an 'apolitical' architecture in the name of progress.

I concluded the fellowship with a culminating exhibition titled LESS IS…The exhibition is a subversive archival project that re-examines Mies’s design for IIT’s postwar campus expansion into Bronzeville. The vast range of scholarship on Mies’s legacy in America rarely diverges from a discussion about form and architectural ideology and into the bureaucratic, racial, and social realities underpinning the work. The installation challenges that legacy by inviting visitors to peek into the material record that was literally, figuratively, and necessarily suppressed in casting the myth of a tabula rasa enacted by an “apolitical” architect intent on creating an “apolitical” architecture in the name of progress.

The design of the installation departs from Mies’s famous 1941 aerial photomontage of the postwar campus expansion proposal. The original aerial photomontage shows a photograph of a physical model of the campus raised on a white plinth and superimposed onto a 1938 aerial photograph of Bronzeville, which disconnects the viewer from the densely-layered reality on the ground and the black subjects in the soon-to-be-wiped out slums. In the installation, the photomontage is deconstructed to literally detach Mies’s physical model from the historic aerial — now printed as a vinyl carpet — to prompt visitors to question what historical layers had to be flattened by the Miesian photomontage. A scan of Mies’s physical model is raised above eye level and reframed as a lightbox that diffuses light onto the material record underneath. The only way visitors can register Mies’s model of the campus proposal is by looking up into a suspended mirror that reflects the three-dimensional master plan. In raising Mies’s model above eye level, the installation shifts the visitors’ gaze from the myth adopted as official history — as exemplified by the tabula rasa of the Miesian physical model — and into the suppressed material records that can contribute to a counter-historiography on Miesian modernism and the IIT campus.

Taking its cues from the very spatial, ordering, and representational tools that govern Mies’s master plan — the 24-square-unit grid and flattening — layers of overlooked materials are collected, produced, analyzed, and organized along a 24-square-inch grid that occupies three levels under the raised Miesian model. Seemingly disparate historical materials — which include digitized archival documents that are heavily annotated, analytical drawings, metrics, and drawing projections — are printed on layers of 24-square-inch polycarbonate panels that are clustered, adjoined, juxtaposed, and superimposed into 24 thematic “drawing compartments” that open up the official history of the campus for examination.

How has this fellowship advanced or become a platform for your academic and professional career?

The Boghosian Fellowship provides you the platform and generous resources to spend an intensive year of focused research, teaching, and defining an alternative mode of practice on inquiries that matter to you — or that you argue should matter more in the discipline. It truly felt like a rare luxury and privilege to have the time and space to do that uninterrupted. The year-long fellowship was also my first full-time academic position and, in many ways, served as a crash course on how to define, unravel, redefine, implement, and continuously tweak a research agenda while creating a feedback loop between pedagogy and practice.

What’s something you wish you knew before diving into this fellowship?

The one thing I wish I knew — or at least considered in earnest — before diving into the year-long fellowship was how immensely beneficial it is to postpone the culminating exhibition to the following Fall semester instead of the Spring. Doing so would have freed me to use the Spring semester as a time of further experimentation and prototyping rather than having a structured “to-do list” to conclude the fellowship on time and have a buffer in the summer before moving on to the next thing. Ironically, my culminating exhibition was ultimately postponed to the following Fall semester, albeit for entirely different and unforeseen circumstances.

When teaching your studio, what’s a question you wish more students asked you?

“Can I challenge the constraints you defined for the project in XYZ ways because of XYZ reasons?” after which, they would proceed to present something that challenges the constraints in a critical way and for an intelligent reason. In short: critical thinking.

What’s your favorite memory during your fellowship experience?

So many. I really cherished the weekly meetings with Dean Michael Speaks to talk about my research, teaching, and future steps. His inspiring leadership and the mentorship he provides to the fellows truly sets the Boghosian Fellowship apart from other teaching fellowships. Some of my favorite memories were also the times I spent surrounded by a really wonderful group of friends and colleagues I admire. We had an especially fun group with a diverse set of characters that started forming in the Fall semester, and it felt like something special was brewing.

What are your future plans/next steps once you complete your fellowship?

Soon after my fellowship exhibition opened in September 2022, I traveled to New Hampshire to spend six weeks at MacDowell on a paper that contextualizes the research and exhibition within broader disciplinary issues. MacDowell was the most inspiring and peaceful environment to reflect on the work after an intense year.

This spring, I moved to Lexington, KY, to join the faculty at the University of Kentucky School of Architecture as an Assistant Professor. I’m excited to continue developing the work I started during my Boghosian Fellowship, fully knowing (and hoping) that it will be shaped, unraveled, challenged, and re-shaped again in ways I didn’t foresee, but that will push me to be more critical. I’m also excited to be back in — or at least in close proximity to — Appalachia to explore the contested histories of the region and its very construct. Through various projects, I’m also questioning how to define and sustain an alternative mode of practice.

Archinect's Take 5 with Leen Katrib

What’s something you want to remind your future self not to forget?

“Things happen for reasons you will only understand in hindsight” — it’s true!

What’s the most played song on your work playlist? OR What music do you listen to when working?

Baby Queen and New Gold by Gorillaz will probably top my Spotify Wrapped this year.

Favorite book you’ve read in the past 3 years (can be non-architectural)?

Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights brought a lot of joy.

What’s your go-to “work outfit”?

Anything colorful

Coffee or tea?

100% Cwaffee

What’s an overrated architecture term?

“architecture” itself

Favorite architecture word/term?

“waffle”

If you didn’t pursue architecture, what career/industry would you be working in?

It’s a toss-up between anthropology and running my own coffee shop with a small farm of chickens and baby goats.

*Are you a current fellow? We'd love to hear from you. Reach out for a chance to participate in Archinect's Fellow Fellows series.