This thesis investigates what it means for an abandoned movie theater in Amman, Cinema Al-Khayyam, to take on a second afterlife through interventions in four identified screens: the façade, the interior partition, the movie screen, and the roof. Each screen acts as a site for rethinking how the city can participate in the reclaiming and reimagining of a forgotten artefact. How does the cinema mediate between absence and presence, remembering and forgetting, memory and imagination?

This research investigates Amman’s Cinema al-Khayyam as an abandoned architectural and cultural artifact embedded in its urban context. It explores the cinema’s evolving role from a vibrant social and political gathering space during Amman’s golden era of cinema to its current state of abandonment and decay. The modernist building’s history is situated within a broader discussion of abandoned cultural artifacts as vessels of collective memory whose meanings evolve over time. It asks how such spaces might be reactivated to both recall and propel unique forms of collective experience in the city.

Proposed headquarters for MASNYC connect office and public space through a series of “respite rooms,” drawing on spatial ideas around periphery from Exeter Library and responding to the surrounding fabric of the adjacent Washington Square Park. The building’s circulation weaves solitude and social encounters together, allowing moments of retreat and connection to emerge within a continuous, meandering sequence.

This multigenerational housing proposal reimagines Boston’s Cross Street Parking Lot through a layered system of columns and screens that respond to both domestic and urban scales. Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s The Gorgeous Nothings, the project treats structural elements as compositional tools: local columns act as inhabitable thresholds within units, enabling adaptable circulation and intergenerational living, while a “super” column organizes site-wide movement and spatial hierarchy. A gradient of screens—shifting in material, density, and operability—mediates between the building and city, forming a soft, porous edge that blurs the boundary between housing and city.