Birzeit University alumna Arwa Qalawa achieves first place in Chicago architecture competition

Birzeit University alumna Arwa Qalawa received the Benn-Johnck Student Award for her entry “The Incarceration of a City: Floating Structures of the ‘In-between’” at the Chicago Award in Architecture competition. Sponsored by the American Institute of Architects Chicago, the award is granted to projects that achieve first place at the state level of Illinois. The project also achieved first place in the Tectura Architecture Awards.

Qalawa explained: “My project dissects the layers of Israeli colonial oppression in Gaza, considers the temporality of architecture in light of the continuous destruction and speculates on new forms of subversive/enabling architecture. The project challenges deliberately constrained settings and proposes an infrastructure that becomes a self-sustaining machine, prolonging life activities and resistance in three terrestrial layers: the aboveground, the underground and the ‘in-between.’”

Qalawa graduated from Birzeit University’s architectural engineering bachelor’s program with distinction and received her master’s in architecture from the NAAB-accredited architecture program offered by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During her master’s studies, she received the AIA Medal for Academic Excellence for her outstanding performance.

Qalawa currently works as a part-time lecturer at the Department of Architectural Engineering at Birzeit University.