NIGHTRISE

Nightrise confronts imperial and capitalist regimes of illumination by reclaiming night as a primary site for architectural and political inquiry.

Through writing and building as entwined practices, Nightrise studies how communities facing violence and dispossession mobilize darkness to forge worlds beyond the grip of oppression and pollution. To understand these worlds is to recognize the night as a cumulative site of cultural production, where history and intelligence gather through the creative labor of those who, under systems of surveillance and extraction, have stretched it into a malleable space, with its very own mandates and measures, not just a time. After all, viewing the night solely as a suspension of daylight ignores its potential to incubate forms of life and thought that thrive precisely because they operate outside the frameworks of illumination and visibility. Through these pursuits of life, Nightrise aims to foreground a new practice of darkness, a new alliance with the night, one that molts architecture’s colonial imprints by confronting the discipline from its shadows.

Mohamad Nahleh is Assistant Professor of architecture at The Ohio State University. His research and practice engage the fields of environmental history, cultural anthropology, and postcolonial literature in expanding the role and imagination of the night in architecture. Nahleh holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut and a Master of Science in Architecture Studies from MIT.