Lecturer
Greene Building, 304

518-276-4060

Master of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania; Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Walaid Sehwail is a designer and educator, he received his M.Arch from the University of Pennsylvania where he was awarded the Dales Travel Fellowship and the Faculty Prize design award, and earned his BS in Architectural Studies from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has professional experience in award winning architecture offices including Norman Kelley, Young & Ayata, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. His work has been exhibited at the A+D Museum in LA, Design Museum of Chicago and the Dock 6 Collective, and has work published in Off-Ramp online journal and Antagonismos Architecture Magazine

His interests lie in exploring architecture as a cultural practice through methods of digital visualization, the tension between the physical and augmented reality and gaming. Experiments include altering the aesthetic qualities of familiar objects through formal and material investigations, changing the states in which they are perceived. His projects invite a range of new aesthetic qualities to these objects, such as clumsiness, fuzziness, and crudeness. Most recently, his work has expanded into virtual and digital architecture practices, focusing on using architecture in the realm of digital assets. This expansion aims to communicate architectural ideas to contemporary adjacent disciplines like web, app and game design where aesthetics of “new retro” and “old futurism” are of particular interest to the work. His projects include visual oscillation between high and low fidelity versions of digital designed objects, as well as experimentations of translating physical objects into digital versions to explore digital depth and physical flatness. The digitized assets have utilized augmented reality and social network apps to broaden the reach of design products across multiple scales, locations, demographics and to overlay digital and physical objects together. Interest in producing digital assets continues his interest in the defamiliarization of objects into alternate states and aesthetics.