“All for the Best”

Zahra Safaverdi - Schidlowski Emerging Faculty Fellow, Kent State University

Zahra Safaverdi is an architecture practitioner and educator whose work explores methods of re-visualizing history in relation to the contemporary discourse, its spatial and material potential and its effect on architecture at large.

She is the founder of "The Living Room", director of MASKS and editor of its journal: an initiative that constructs a framework for young practitioners, theorists, and historians in design and its intersecting disciplines to foster pedagogical experimentation. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Luis Obispo, Cambridge, Madrid and Locarno. In parallel with her speculative projects, Zahra has been involved with the practice of architecture, working with wide range of clients from intimate scale of single family housing and non-profit organizations to broader scale of institutional buildings and ,most recently, Google’s campus in Cambridge. 

Zahra received her Bachelor of Architecture, magna cum laude, from CalPoly San Luis Obispo and her Master of Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. She is the recipient of Harvard’s James Templeton Kelley thesis prize, Cal Poly’s thesis prize, AIA design award and president’s medal. Zahra has been a Schidlowski fellow and Harvard’s Irving innovation fellow where her teaching and research constructed integration between design studio pedagogy, materiality and methodical representation.