© Rand Abu Al Shar 2025

Rand Abu Al-Sha’r is a Jordanian-Palestinian architect and designer currently based in Amman, Jordan.

She holds a Master of Architecture (MArch) from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), where she was awarded the Dean’s Merit Scholarship and the Zaha Hadid Fellowship. During her time at Harvard, she also served as a teaching fellow in the Department of History of Art and Architecture (HAA). She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies and English from Mount Holyoke College, graduating magna cum laude and receiving the Goldstein Spiro Award for Architecture.

Rand’s work spans architectural design, research, and cultural inquiry. Most recently, she practiced at a Brooklyn-based firm, where she managed the renovation of a high-end aging-in-place residence. Alongside her professional work, she has been researching the afterlives of abandoned movie theaters in Amman, exploring how their readoption might enable new modes of collectivity in the city.

This site highlights recent work and ongoing research.

Feel free to get in touch :randabualshar@gmail.com
01.Between Inventory and Memory:
The Abandoned Cinema
Harvard GSD
MArch Design Thesis
2022
Advisor: Jon Lott
Additional guidance: Lisa-Haber Thompson, Helen Han, Ajay Manthripragada

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?

1/6    Drawing of Cinema al-Khayyam
2/6    Photgoraphs of Existing Conditions
3/6    Photgoraphs of Existing Conditions
3/6 Site Model
4/6    Screen Replacement Sequence in Model
5/6    Model Photographs
6/6    Model Photograph
02.Cultural Artifacts and Collective Memory: The Case of Cinema al-Khayyam
Harvard GSD
Thesis Research
2022
Advisor: Jon Lott

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.

1/9    Title Page
2/9    Table of Contents
3/9   Images from Chapter I., The Cinema / City Nexus
4/9    Images from Chapter I., The Cinema / City Nexus
5/10    Excerpt from Chapter III, Abandoned Cultural Artifacts and Palimpsests
6/10    Excerpt from Chapter III, Abandoned Cultural Artifacts and Palimpsests
7/9   Excerpt from  Chapter IV, Amman: The City and its Cinemas
8/9    Images from Chapter IV, Amman: The City and its Cinemas
9/9    Images from Chapter IV, Amman: The City and its Cinemas
03. Building for the Municipal Art Society of New York (MASNYC)
Harvard GSD
MArch Design Studio
2020Instructor: Grace La

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.

1/4    Section Perspective
2/4    Ground Floor Plan
3/4    First Floor Plan
4/4    Fifth Floor Plan
04. Eco Folly: The Wasp and the Orchid
Harvard GSD
MArch Design Studio + Seminar
2022
Instructors: Grace La + Erika Naginski

A native wildflower walk, a folly, intervenes in the ruins of the Rose Garden at the Crane Estate, reimagining the site as a space where ruin and regeneration coexist. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the wasp and the orchid, the intervention contrasts the garden’s decaying, rigid layout with plantings that respond to local ecology. The path meanders through the site’s terracing and remaining structures, transforming a once-fixed geometry into a layered, evolving experience.

1/3      Model Photograph
2/3    Plan and Section
3/3    Model Photograph
05. A Column-for-a-column, a Screen-for-a-screen
Harvard GSD
MArch Design Studio
2021
Instructor: Jon Lott
Partner: Idael Cárdenas


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.

1/5    Floor Plan
2/5    Enlarged Floor Plan
3/5    Section
4/5    Poem A636/ 636a from Emily Dickinson’s The Gorgeous Nothings
5/5    Rendered View