Index
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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
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