Date of Submission
Spring 5-12-2026
Degree Type
Dissertation/Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Architecture
Department
Architecture
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Ameen Farooq
Abstract
Over 110 million people have been forcibly displaced worldwide, confronting architecture with a challenge that extends beyond shelter toward the preservation of cultural continuity, history, and human dignity. This thesis investigates how architecture can function as a living framework for cultural memory rather than a static monument, an active system rather than a filed afterthought.
Palestinians represent one of the longest-standing displaced populations, enduring generations of exile since 1948. Despite fragmentation and loss of homeland, Palestinian identity has persisted through embodied cultural practices: embroidery, music, storytelling, and communal ritual. Cultural memory, this thesis argues, is not preserved through objects alone, but through participation, repetition, and shared experience. Architecture is history itself, a testament that cannot be wholly erased.
Enduring Identity proposes a Peace and Cultural Center in Amman, Jordan, a city serving as both refuge and cultural threshold. Conceived as a living archive, the center sustains culture through making, teaching, performing, and dialogue. Spaces for craft workshops, storytelling courts, performance terraces, and communal gathering transform intangible heritage into spatial experience, allowing memory to evolve without fossilization.
Structured around five objectives, Preserve Memory, Activate Culture, Foster Dialogue, Educate Future Generations, and Living Archive, the project establishes a transferable framework applicable to displaced communities worldwide. By positioning architecture as both archive and stage, the thesis reframes exile as a site of cultural production rather than erasure.
Architecture alone may be bricks and mortar, but the memory it holds is monumental.