Architect, designer, and educator Layal Merhi is part of a growing generation of practitioners working at the intersection of research, representation, and urban inquiry. With an academic trajectory spanning Beirut, London, and Boston, her work explores how architecture can uncover the layered histories, ecologies, and narratives embedded within cities.
Most recently, Merhi completed a Master of Design Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (2023), where her research focused on ecological imaginaries and the political materiality of urban landscapes. Prior to Harvard, she earned a RIBA-accredited Master of Architecture from The Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, following her Bachelor of Architecture at Lebanese American University.
Central to Merhi’s recent work is Aamha (قمحة), a design-research project developed during her graduate studies at Harvard and exhibited at the GSD in 2023. The project examines the complex relationship between infrastructure, ecology, and memory within the city of Beirut.
Drawing on archival research, cartographic analysis, fieldwork, and experimental representation techniques, Aamha investigates what Merhi describes as the city’s “phantom ecologies” latent environmental and spatial conditions that emerge from layers of political and infrastructural history. The project takes as its starting point the unexpected growth of wheat across parts of Beirut following the 2020 Beirut port explosion, when grain stored in the city’s silos was scattered across surrounding neighborhoods.
As Merhi reflects, “Beirut does not forget. It carries everything often beyond what its spaces can hold. Aamha engages this excess: what leaks, what lingers, what resists settling.”
Rather than framing this phenomenon solely as a symbol of resilience, her research examines the broader implications of these emergent ecologies within the urban landscape. Through drawings, publications, and installation-based representations, Aamha proposes new ways of reading cities where infrastructure, environment, and collective memory intersect to shape spatial narratives.
She further explains, “Aamha is less a publication than a structure for assembly. It builds on a long history of speaking under pressure, while shifting authorship outward so the archive remains open, continuously rewritten.”
Presented as both installation and research publication, the project situates Beirut within a wider international discourse on architecture’s role in documenting and interpreting urban transformation. By combining design research with experimental modes of representation, Merhi’s work positions architecture as both analytical tool and cultural medium.
Alongside her research, Merhi maintains an active teaching practice across several academic institutions. Her pedagogy emphasizes narrative drawing, analytical representation, and hybrid digital-analogue workflows, encouraging students to approach architectural design as a critical mode of inquiry.
As she notes, “What appears as absence in Beirut is rarely empty. It often marks something displaced, suppressed, or rendered invisible. Aamha stays with these conditions, rather than attempting to resolve them.”
In parallel with her academic work, Merhi co-founded OFFSH, a design and research studio operating across architecture, research, and socially engaged practice. The studio’s projects range from speculative urban studies to community-driven initiatives, including the Karam Park playscape developed for displaced Syrian and Turkish children along the Turkish–Syrian border.
Across her practice whether in the classroom, the studio, or the research environment Merhi continues to investigate how architecture can engage critically with the social, political, and ecological conditions shaping contemporary cities. Through projects like Aamha, her work demonstrates how architecture can extend beyond traditional design boundaries to function as research, storytelling, and public engagement.