© 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
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