Wherever you stand,
be the soul of that place.
ليكن الجمالُ الذي نحبّه هو ما نفعله
Let the beauty we love
be what we do.
Atlanta, 2025
Produced as a comprehensive collection of undergraduate architectural work at Georgia Tech, this artifact investigates material sequencing through vellum, layered transparency, and calibrated visual organization. Serving as the most current iteration of the portfolio, it consolidates research, design methods, and representational studies developed across the program. Completed in December 2025, it received the Portfolio Award of Excellence for its divergence from conventional formats, its ranging content, and its meticulous assemblage.
Nour Khalifa
Contact:
(404) 747 5174
Recent projects—Thresholds of Matter, Urban Roots Matrix, and Commonscape—engage themes of ecology, material intelligence, and the social dimensions of design. Urban Roots Matrix, recipient of the Georgia Tech Architecture Capstone Prize, reimagines civic space through networks of localized food production and adaptive infrastructural systems. Commonscape, awarded the AIA Georgia Student Design Award and the Niles Bolton Prize of Excellence, extends these inquiries toward shared landscapes of access and repair. Thresholds of Matter examines emerging relationships between automation and architecture, exploring how new technologies may reshape craft, authorship, and spatial agency.
Current research includes two papers in development and a project documenting how individuals describe place and placelessness within the home—tracing how memory distorts, reconstructs, and gives form to belonging.
Beyond studio and research work, the role of founding creative director for Sandbox—a student-led publication and platform for critical dialogue in architecture—has supported the cultivation of collaborative discourse. Additional contributions include helping establish Georgia Tech Creatives, an interdisciplinary collective for artistic collaboration. Writing and visual work extend across drawing, text, and discursive engagement, approaching architecture as both an investigative practice and a framework for shared thinking.
Class of 2026
B.S Architecture
Gold Scholar
Dean’s List
Barcelona Study Abroad
May 24’ - July 24’
Atlanta Girls School Class of 2022
High School
Salutatorian
Governor’s Honors Program
May 21’ - July 21’
Berry College
Social Studies Concentration
Georgia Institute of Technology
May 25’ - August 25’
Teaching introductory architecture concepts + techniques; leading a studio section and curriculum
Architectural Intern ASD SKY
Atlanta, Georgia
May 23’ - August 23’
Refining design concepts and diagrams; Revit; Site maps
Creative Director, Founding Member, Contributor
October 24’ - Present
Design and brand a student-led architetcural publication, amplifying emerging and established voices in discourse. Thematic inquiries chosen each semester. Navigated the complexities of founnding a new publication.
Georgia Tech Creatives
Creative Director, Founding Member
December 22’ - May 25’
Spearhead vision and brand identity for the largest organized creative presence on campus, expanding its influence across Atlanta. Develop innovative marketing strategies and design impactful visual materials. Mantain high creative standards while mentoring the executive board.
Arab Student Organization
Vice President
Georgia Institute of Technology
August 23’ - May 25’
Advance the goal of building a community for Arab-identifying student on campus by organizing social events.
Georgia Tech School of Architecture, December 25’
NextGen Cohort: AIA Women in Leadership Conference
American Institute of Architects, November 25’
Capstone Prize
Most Exemplary Architecture
Georgia Institute of Technology, April 25’
AIA Student Design Award
American Institute of Architects, April 25’
Exemplary Housing Schema, Niles Bolton Studio
Niles Bolton Associates, Georgia Tech School of Architecture, December 24’
Third-Year Portfolio Award
Georgia Tech School of Architecture, December 24’
Second-Year Portfolio Award
Georgia Tech School of Architecture, December 23’
Porous Housing: Reimagining Urban Domesticity Through Thresholds
In collaboration with Katherine Wright
ARCC, Pending Publication, 2025
Cross-Scalar Strategies for Re-Localized Food Production and Urban Metabolism
In collaboration with Adara Naui
ARCC, Pending Publication, 2025
Last Updated 24.10.31
Sandbox, 2025
Issue 01: Drafts on
Place and Placlessness
Introduction
This study examines how dwellings persist once our occupation of them ends and how their recollection through memory reshapes and redefines the architecture of everyday life. Central to this inquiry is the afterlife of domestic space—a working category that describes the various ways former dwellings continue to inhabit consciousness long after their material presence has receded. Its boundaries remain intentionally open, broad enough to hold diverse forms of experience while still allowing patterns to emerge. It encompasses the persistence, alteration, or erosion of memories, as well as the affective charge that may intensify or dissipate over time.
Toward a Regenerative Research Methodology
As a new research methodology, this malleable system offers limitless potential. Utilizing the rawest form of recollection - spoken word - and regarding it as data is regenerative by nature. The words can be read and re-read, each time with new meanings, contexts, connotations, and lenses. Its strength materializes from a scaffolding of themes that emerge only after one conducts the interviews, allowing surprises and contradictions to manifest themselves rather than be filtered out before they ever exist. Its coupling with automation through theme tagging, sorting, and interpreting text snippets provides for this to become a replicable process in the field of architectural research, theory, or whatever else. It is the ambition of this project’s trajectory to continue developing the means by which automation can be optimized and expedited, as well as how it might merge with human intuition and hand.
Memory as Fragmented Terrain
Across the interviews, what resurfaced was rarely a single, unified narrative. Instead, each account arrived as an entanglement of positive and difficult associations that resisted clear division. Memories re-emerged in layers: sensory flashes, spatial habits, emotional ruptures, and small architectural details that carried disproportionate weight. The process of listening revealed how challenging it is to categorize these recollections definitively. Every spoken word seemed to gesture toward something unspoken—a subtext, an atmosphere, an image that existed only in the mind of the narrator. What appears on the surface of a story is only a fraction of its depth.
It is within this complexity that the value of a systematic yet open-ended method becomes evident. The fluidity of memory demanded a structure that could hold contradictions without collapsing them—one that accepts that attachment and unease can coexist, that belonging and estrangement can imprint themselves with equal force. The body of work that follows attempts to articulate a way of engaging with the instability of remembered space, acknowledging its partial, shifting, and sometimes incompatible layers. It welcomes its many contractions in both its framings of place and the degree to which memory alters it. What persists long after we leave a dwelling is not a single truth but a constellation of impressions—held in the body, in language, and in the shifting architectures of memory itself.
As human beings, we remember selectively; memories congeal and recenter, expanding into a definition of our existence that we hold as true. The time that accrues between a former dwelling and its present recall produces a rift—sometimes of accuracy, sometimes of sharpness—but not one that follows a predictable trajectory. Memories do not simply fade; they stratify. They become hierarchical. And when tethered to the physical manifestations of a place, the significance of that place subtly determines what maintains retained and what falls away.
Given the nature of the topic of domestic space, we must acknowledge its hypersensitivity and potentially immense sway over a person’s development. These environments often occupy a peculiar register: intensely private, sometimes even sacred, yet outwardly unremarkable to those who pass by. Each carries layers of experience that remain largely invisible to the next inhabitant, who inherits only the shell, unaware of the rituals, conflicts, routines, and emotional climates that once animated it.
The smallest spatial habits may bind a person to a place, and that place to the person’s future demeanors and disposition. In this sense, domestic space mediates relationships as much as it shelters them. A home can draw someone inward with a feeling of insideness and belonging, or it can sharpen the experience of outsideness—producing distance, vigilance, or withdrawal. Both conditions, though opposite in tone, can root themselves just as deeply in memory. A dwelling need not be comforting to be unforgettable; estrangement leaves its own vivid architecture.