Ghassan Alserayhi

Ghassan Alserayhi is a first-year PhD student in Architecture, in the History, Theory, and Criticism (HTC) track, whose research explores digital materiality and representation as cultural histories. Particularly, he investigates how digital world-making operates culturally—how data, algorithms, and image construction act as agentive materials that co-produce architectural meaning. Moving beyond the digital/non-digital binary, he examines temporal dynamics, interpretive ambiguity, representational instrumentality, object-situatedness, and data-mining to question authorship, ethics, and the shifting status of “the real” across hybrid physical–digital environments. Using an archaeological method and drawing on philosophical perspectives of materiality and ontology, he traces layered episodes within broader social narratives—rather than linear genealogies—through which digital practices acquire cultural and architectural significance. His work distinguishes digital world-making from fabrication to foreground cultural meaning, conservation, and the unstable notions of permanence and impermanence. Central to his approach are interpretive indeterminacy and the ethics of data-driven design. Ultimately, his research theorizes hybrid landscapes where physical and synthetic ecologies meet, offering new ways to understand architecture’s role in shaping cultural and material realities.