W. Maye Tamma

W. Maye Tamma asks how politics is built into the home. Her research interests lie in the relationship between architecture, power, and agency in late modernism, when human settlements became a global domain of expertise. She came to the PhD in Architecture at Yale through practice, working within development and humanitarian institutions, from UN programs in Damascus to the World Bank in Washington. There she grew attuned to the material histories embedded in the governance of housing. Maye is now tracing the genealogies of housing and domesticity: how the house was imagined and for whom, how those imaginaries hardened into norms that traveled, and what forms of domestic life they presumed and foreclosed. She is equally drawn to the experiments in dwelling that took shape at the margins of the state and the market, reading them as evidence of what was once thinkable. Alongside the doctorate, she is building Rē, a studio that spans research, art, and design, using fiction and conceptual worldbuilding to surface what has been left out of the possible. Where the archive recovers what was excluded, Rē sketches what might emerge as the given is unraveled. She trained as an architect in Syria, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and later completed a second master’s at the School of International Service, American University, in Washington, DC. Besides English, she works in Arabic and French.

Research Area Keywords
housing and domesticity, experiments in dwelling, transnational history, late modernism