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
Apartment Complex
ARCH 3016
Design Studio 1V
Fall 2024
Instructed by
Katherine Wright
Site
Charlestion Historic District, South Carolina
Distinctions
Niles Bolton Prize of Excellence, 2024
AIA Student Design Award, 2025
Pending Publication
Porous Housing: Reimagining Urban Domesticity Through Thresholds
Rather than defaulting to corridor apartments or privatized interior blocks, the project assembles a network of elevated housing clusters interlinked by open-air circulation and a gradation of shared spaces. Each unit is paired with its own outdoor extension—balcony, porch, or terrace—positioned not as an accessory, but as essential domestic infrastructure. These components form a connective tissue across the site, fostering adjacency without erasure of privacy, and creating opportunities for cross-household proximity across age, household size, and mode of living.
Inspired by works such as John Peponis’ Space Syntax, the design privileges spatial relationships—access, visibility, and overlap—over static form or density metrics. Public and semi-public spaces are embedded within the project’s vertical and horizontal framework, producing an urban morphology that allows for individual retreat while enabling sustained interaction at multiple scales. In this way, the proposal challenges the spatial and cultural assumptions of conventional housing models, and instead posits a dwelling environment shaped by porosity, configurational intent, and contextual responsiveness.
Porous Housing: Reimagining Urban Domesticity Through Thresholds
Research Paper, Drafted Conclusion
In collaboration with Katherine Wright
If architecture, at its best, attends to life before it is lived — to the rhythms, bodies, movements, encounters that will inhabit space — then housing must be judged not only on its floor plans or cost-efficiency, but on its capacity to sustain living as a relational practice. Thresholds, as we have defined them, are not marginal additives that can be sacrificed: they are spatial arteries. They carry potential for connection, for inclusion, for a healthy community. They blur the once-rigid boundaries of zones, edges, overlaps, and designations. They return agency to those who actually inhabit these dwellings and allow those who seek broader definitions of connection and place to pursue them organically.
To reimagine multifamily housing as infrastructure for well-being requires, first, a shift in design ethics and normative expectations: toward elasticity, adaptability, and openness in spatial sequencing; toward porous boundaries that enable a gradation of exchange rather than isolation. Its implementation must permeate every scale of the proposal's facets — from the operators within a single unit that shape spatial opportunities for connection within a family, to the way that unit relates to a smaller cluster of adjacent units, to how those clusters facilitate encounters among diverse residents (from single occupants to multigenerational households, from younger families to older adults, across ethnicity, gender, and occupation). It must also consider how these subcommunities articulate a broader sense of collective identity — how outdoor spaces nurture this emergence, and how the gradation and calibration of communal environments generate forms of belonging that exceed the reductive divide between "public" and "private."
To enact this spatial ethic, however, demands more than design ingenuity; it requires a transformation in the very structures that underwrite the built world. The relational logics articulated at the unit and cluster scales must carry through into the institutional and economic systems that determine what may be constructed and how it may endure. Policy must move past the numerical shorthand of units per acre toward a finer-grain vocabulary capable of apprehending spatial richness — the proximities, thresholds, and shared infrastructures through which communal life might take shape. Likewise, developmental practice must shift its orientation from short-term returns to privilege long-term social and ecological well-being. In the same vein, the financial and governance structures that underwrite housing must begin to accommodate reciprocity rather than singular ownership. This shift gestures toward forms of shared responsibility and long-term stewardship, where the spaces residents hold in common can evolve with them—expanding, contracting, or reconfiguring as lives change and new forms of inhabitation emerge. Architectural education must also undoubtedly reform to teach the ideals of housing in this way, as the education of the future is the crux of change.
The speculative proposal laid out here — while grounded in a site, tradition, and method — is best read not as a final design but as a provocation: a call to re-value what housing could be. As such, the question is not merely "what happens on this 1.15-acre site in Charleston," but "what might city-housing become if we treat thresholds as essential infrastructure — and design accordingly."
To realize this potential, it demands a collective commitment from architects, planners, residents, policymakers, and researchers. Together, they might build housing that does more than shelter: housing that nurtures health, sociality, belonging, resilience, and dignity. In that sense, the project is not for a moment — it is for practice. And that practice begins with a reimagining of what we mean by "home."