Ziad Jamaleddine

Ziad Jamaleddine is an Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP and co-founder and partner of L.E.FT Architects, based in New York and Beirut. He has been coordinating the Advanced IV Architecture sequence, teaching Advanced Architecture and Urban Design Studios, and seminars in the History & Theory sequence at GSAPP, as well as co-teaching a seminar at the Department of Art History & Archaeology. In addition to Columbia, Jamaleddine has taught design studios and seminars at Cornell University, PennDesign, the Yale School of Architecture, the University of Toronto, and the MIT Aga Khan Program.

Jamaleddine is a practitioner and scholar with a particular research focus on architecture in the Middle East—rigorously interrogating topics such as religious architecture and religiosity in public space, urbanism and infrastructure in relation to water resources and scarcity, and the question of reconstruction in post-war cities. His writings have been published in The Arab City: Architecture and Representation (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016), Places Journal (2020), Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World (2024), and International Journal of Islamic Architecture (2025). His historical research on the architectural typology of the mosque was presented at several cultural venues, including Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016), Milan Triennale (2019), Sharjah Architecture Triennale (2019), and Jeddah Islamic Arts Biennale (2023).

Jamaleddine is the recipient of the 2002 Young Architects Forum Award and the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York (2010). In 2024, he was selected as one of the Nine Arab American Architects You Should Know by the AIA.

Jamaleddine’s architecture firm L.E.FT, in partnership with Makram el Kadi, was a member of Architectural Record’s 2010 Design Vanguard for top firms in the United States, and was selected to the AD100, The Best Designers in the Middle East and North Africa (2025). L.E.FT’s work includes the Beirut Exhibition Center (2011), and Shakib Arslan Mosque, Lebanon (2017), winner of the Interfaith Design (AIA) & Partners of Sacred Places Award in Religious Architecture (2018), and the Al Fozan Award for Mosque Architecture (2022). L.E.FT recently completed the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and Contemplative Practices, Vassar College (2023), winner of the Interfaith Design (AIA) & Partners of Sacred Places Award in Religious Architecture: Adaptive Re-Use (2024), and LOOP Design Awards: Religious & Spiritual (2024).

Jamaleddine holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut and a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He worked for Steven Holl Architects for five years as an assistant project architect of the Simmons Hall dormitory at MIT (winner of an AIA National Design Award in 2003 and an AIA New York award in 2002), and was the project architect for the design and development of the Beirut Marina project in downtown Beirut.