Rami Kanafani is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. His doctoral research examines postwar architectural practices in the US that turned the planet as a whole into an object of representation and design. He investigates various institutional and individual attempts to foster a planetary culture within closed ecological systems that forged new relationships between humans, nonhumans, and the environment. Alongside an interest in the rise of environmentalism and its intersection with cybernetics, he also explores the relationship between the Anthropocene, posthumanism and architectural history.
RECENT ARTICLES
Kanafani, Rami. “Spiritualizing the Two Cultures, c. 1978.” LA+ issue 22 Environment (Forthcoming Fall 2025)
Kanafani, Rami. “The Climatron’s Air: Buckminster Fuller’s Domes of Metaphysical Control.” Perspectives in Architecture and Urbanism, peer-reviewed (December 2024)
Kanafani, Rami. “Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism: Museum of Modern Art, New York.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 83.2 (June 2024)
CONFERENCES AND PRESENTATIONS
Kanafani, Rami. “At the Frontier of Consciousness: The Lindisfarne Association and its New Age Politics” Society of Architectural Historians, Atlanta (Spring 2025) Panel: Secular Modernity as a Racial Colonial Construct, Chairs: Maria Gonzalez Pendas, Patricio del Real
Kanafani, Rami. “New Age Environmentalism: The Lindisfarne Association at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine” Temple Hoyne Buell Dissertation Colloquium, Columbia University (Spring 2025), Chair: Reinhold Martin
Kanafani, Rami. “The Climatron’s Air: Buckminster Fuller’s Domes of Metaphysical Control” European Architecture History Network Athens, (Summer 2024), Chairs: Didem Ekici, Stamatina Kousidi
“A New Alchemy for the Whole Planet: Arks, Islands, and Planetary Salvation,” at The Third Ecology, EAHN Reykjavik, and The Ambasz Institute at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Fall 2023.
“The Green Line’s Organisms: Human-Plant Relations in War-Torn Beirut,” DocTalks x MoMA, Fall 2022.
Co-organizer of Precarity Conference, Department of Architecture, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Spring 2022.
Education
M.Arch II, Princeton University, 2019
B.Arch, American University of Beirut, 2013
Awards
Will M. Mehlhorn Scholarship, Department of Architecture, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2022
