Mohammad al-Asad

Mohammad al-Asad is an architect, urbanist, and an architectural and urban historian.

He taught at Harvard, Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Jordan, the German Jordanian University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was the Alan K & Leonarda Laing Distinguished Visiting Professor. He was also an adjunct professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. In addition, he has been involved in teaching Open Massive Online Courses (MOOC) in both Arabic and English on architecture and urbanism for the Edraak Platform of the Queen Rania Foundation for Education and Development, and for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture Education Program.

He has published extensively in both Arabic and English on architecture and urbanism. He is the author of Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism in the Middle East (University Press of Florida, 2012). He also co-edited (with Rahul Mehrotra) Shaping Cities: Emerging Models of Planning Practice (Hatje Cantz, 2016), and edited Workplaces: The Transformation of Places of Production: Industrial Buildings in the Islamic World (Bilgi University Press, 2010). In addition, he is a contributor to the 21st edition of Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture (Routledge, 2019), the first edition of which had appeared in 1896.

Mohammad al-Asad has appeared in documentary films including Islamic Art: Mirror of the Invisible World (2012) and The Architecture of the Mosque of the Prophet (2023), and he also led the production of films including Arab Women in Architecture (2014).

He is a member of the board of directors of the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts (part of the Royal Society for Fine Arts). He also had served as the Coordinator of the International Academic & Curatorial Committee for the Discover Islamic Art project of the Museum with No Frontiers, and was a member of the Amman Commission, which served as an advisory body for the Mayor of Amman.

He was a project reviewer for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (1989-2007), and he has been a member of the Award’s Steering Committee for its 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019 cycles.

He studied architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and history of architecture at Harvard University before taking on post-doctoral research positions at Harvard and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.