Farès el-Dahdah is a designer, an educator, a scholar and a digital humanist. He received his undergraduate degrees in both fine arts and architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and went on to pursue his graduate studies in urbanism and architectural theory at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where his interests in bridging literary theory and architecture became the subject of his doctoral dissertation and a first manifestation of a lifelong commitment to interdisciplinarity. Following a two decade long professorial track at Rice University's School of Architecture, he was appointed director of the Humanities Research Center (HRC) in 2012, Professor of the Humanities in 2014 and Professor of Art History in 2021. Over the course of his career, el-Dahdah was named Cisneros Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Visiting Fellow at the Canadian Center for Architecture, and was awarded the Arthur W. Wheelwright Fellowship. He has also written extensively on Brazil's modern architecture and has been involved in several collaborative projects with Casa de Lucio Costa and Fundação Oscar Niemeyer, two Brazilian cultural foundations on the boards of which he serves. He is currently leading and co-leading projects in digital humanities, such as imagineRio, levantCarta, and a Temporally Accurate and Interactive Atlas of Lebanon's Coastline. In addition to his academic activities, el-Dahdah has participated in cultural events at museums in Beirut, Paris, Berlin, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, including the curation of exhibitions on a wide range of topics, such as the Lebanese Republic's first constitution and the 50th anniversary of Brazil's capital. His current research interests involve the creation of online geospatial platforms in the areas of digital art history, cultural heritage, public health, social justice, disaster response, and climate change.

Selected Publications:

“Thematic layers for imagineRio: Next Steps?” In e-Perimetron, Vol.20, No.3 (2025); 123-133 [w/ Alida Metcalf and David Heyman]

Conservation Management Plan: Rachid Karami International Fair. Beirut: UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in the Arab States, 2024. [w/ Paul Gaudette, Mazen Haidar, Maya Hmeidan, Pamela Jerome, Jala Makhzoumi, Kyle Normandin, Mousbah Rajab]

“Architecture in Scale: A Discussion with Ana Tostões and Farès el-Dahdah.” In Beyond Ruins: Reimagining Modernism, edited by Raafat Majzoub and Nicolas Fayad. 106-117. Berlin: ArchiTangle, 2024. [w/ Ana Tostões]

“Paisagens Fluidas e Rodoviarismo: Roberto Burle Marx e o Rio de Janeiro.” In O Tempo Completa: Burle Marx, Clássicos e Inéditos, edited by Lauro Cavalcanti, 108-129, Rio de Janeiro: Casa Roberto Marinho, 2022. [w/ Verena Andreatta]

“Fluid Landscapes and Vehicular Mobility.” In Landscape, no. 69 (2022): 98-109. [w/ Verena Andreatta]

“Relocating Brazil’s Capital Inland.” In The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Ed. Guillermo Palacios. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.847

Guia da Arquitetura do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Bazar do Tempo, 2016. [w/ Cláudia Brack, Carlos Eduardo Comas, Cláudia Carvalho, Gustavo Rocha Peixoto, Marcos Moraes de Sá, Maria Helena Salomão, Mozart Vitor Serra]

“Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk.” In Science, Technology & Human Values. Vol. 41, #3 (December 23, 2015): 547-565 [w/ C. Howe, J. Lockrem, H. Appel, E. Hackett, D. Boyer, R. Hall, M. Schneider-Mayerson, A. Pope, A. Gupta, E. Rodwell, A. Ballestero, T. Durbin, E. Long, and C. Mody]

“Teórico, preservacionista e arquiteto: Lucio Costa o ‘antropófago’.” In Sobre a Obra de Lucio Costa, Textos Selecionados, edited by Anna Paula Canez and Samuel Brito, 71-114. Porto Alegre: Editora UniRitter, 2015.

Selected Web Applications:

A Temporally Accurate and Interactive Atlas of Lebanon's Coastline (Inclusive Cloud Innovation Lab, American University of Beirut, 2024). [w/ Hassan Abou Daher, Patrick Daou, Ali Kadah El Habbal] DOI: https://doi.org/10.63014/1000/MFFB1921

levantCarta/Sidon (Inclusive Cloud Innovation Lab, American University of Beirut, 2024). [w/ Patrick Daou, Karim Fadlallah, Axis Maps] URL: https://sidon.levantcarta.org/

AUBinTime (Inclusive Cloud Innovation Lab, American University of Beirut, 2024). [w/ Patrick Daou, Bruno Sousa, Sara Abou Zeid] URL: https://icil.aub.edu.lb/aub-in-time

Israel-Hezbollah Conflict (Inclusive Cloud Innovation Lab, American University of Beirut, 2023). [w/ Patrick Daou] URL: https://icil.aub.edu.lb/israel-hezbollah-conflict/

City of Houston Wastewater Monitoring Dashboard (Spatial Studies Lab, Rice University, 2021). [w/ Katherine Ensor, Ualas Barreto Rohrer, Bruno de Castro Sousa, Uilvim Ettore Gardin Franco, Rebecca Schneider] URL: https://www.hou-wastewater-epi.org/

Highways Waterways (Spatial Studies Lab, Rice University, 2020). [w/ Melissa Kean, Katherine Ensor, Bruno de Castro Sousa, Uilvim Ettore Gardin Franco, Ualas Barreto Rohrer, Wilson Franca, Axis Maps] DOI: 10.25613/C6GC-H163

SARS-CoV-2 in Brazil (Spatial Studies Lab, Rice University, 2020). [w/ Bruno de Castro Sousa, Uilvim Ettore Gardin Franco, Ualas Barreto Rohrer] DOI: 10.25613/545m-6m39

tripoliFair (Spatial Studies Lab, Rice University, 2019). [w/ Bruno de Castro Sousa, Uilvim Ettore Gardin Franco, Ualas Barreto Rohrer] DOI: 10.25613/Q1RF-V469

levantCarta/Beirut (Spatial Studies Lab, Rice University, 2018). [w/ Bruno de Castro Sousa, Uilvim Ettore Gardin Franco, Ualas Barreto Rohrer, Axis Maps] DOI: 10.25613/705K-6V70

pilotPlan (Spatial Studies Lab, Rice University, 2018). [w/ Bruno de Castro Sousa, Uilvim Ettore Gardin Franco, Ualas Barreto Rohrer, Axis Maps] DOI: 10.25613/A041-9T46

instituteRice (Spatial Studies Lab, Rice University, 2017). [w/ Bruno de Castro Sousa, Uilvim Ettore Gardin Franco, Ualas Barreto Rohrer, Melissa Kean, Axis Maps] DOI: 10.25613/ER5E-4860

imagineRio (Spatial Studies Lab, Rice University, 2014). [w/ Alida Metcalf, Axis Maps] DOI: 10.25613/Y1A2-CM40