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About
Between Inventory and Memory: The Abandoned Cinema
Cultural Artifacts and Collective Memory: The Case of Cinema al-Khayyam
Building for the Municipal Art Society of New York (MASNYC)
Eco Folly: The Wasp and the Orchid
A Column-for-a-column, a Screen-for-a-screen
   © 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?

1/7    Drawing of Cinema al-Khayyam
2/7    Photgoraphs of Existing Conditions
3/7    Photgoraphs of Existing Conditions
4/7    Site Model5/
 5/7    Screen Replacement Sequence in Model6/77
 6/7   Model Photographs
7/7    Model Photograph