Undergraduate Architecture student Saddqa Bahidrah (BArch ’27) was named a 2026 National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) Future Faces Fellow. His fellowship included a summer internship at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM).
To quote his cover letter for the fellowship, “The drums were pounding, and people were dancing. I was standing on the street in Baltimore at my first NOMA conference, surrounded by architects and architecture students of all backgrounds. In that moment, I realized that NOMA was unlike any organization I had been a part of. It was, without a doubt, a family. This was a community I wanted to actively contribute to.” Every day since then it has proved true–the support is invaluable. It was an incredible experience meeting people from across the organization, including people from the NYCOBA chapter and SOM; Morgan Frederick, Raschard Sampson, Natalia Orellana, Kola Ofoman, Adede Amenya and Lauren Moore, to name a few. Being in this environment also has brought him closer to wanting to pursue licensure, especially with the support of NOMA.
When he came to Pratt, Bahidrah says he was happily overwhelmed with what felt like an unreal utopia. He was studying in New York City, the campus was beautiful, and the program was challenging in the greatest way.
Very quickly, the utopia faded and the discomfort of being in a new city thousands of miles away from his family and everything he had known settled in. Looking back now, the experience of feeling uncomfortable for almost two years is what pushed him to the places that he is now.
It’s a common saying to “get out of your comfort zone,” but in practice what does it truly mean to be uncomfortable and continue to move forward? Is it the all-nighters? Is it the uncertainty of the future, or the inordinately high expectations you set for yourself? It’s challenging to put into words, but these great challenges have proven to reap great rewards.
This past semester, Bahidrah worked on a multifamily affordable housing project in Overtown, Miami. This gave him exposure to a site that has faced racial and systemic adversity. Half of the semester was spent researching and understanding not only the site as it stands today. His class studied the fractured history of Overtown and the people affected by the building of a highway that ultimately separated them from the rest of Miami. Only a couple hundred feet away was downtown; displaying a luxurious and prosperous image in comparison to the site in Overtown. His professor, Gary Bates, was integral in the development of his proposed design for the brief where Bahidrah integrated housing, agriculture, a fresh food market, and a culinary incubator. The first line of the syllabus clearly and astutely stated “This is NOT a housing studio.” Bates told the truth– it wasn’t about housing. It was about living, as he put it.
The era of multifamily residential architecture that we live in now has made it abundantly clear that it pays no mind to how one lives, how one truly interacts with others in their life and instead has diluted each person’s unique situation into a one-size-fits-all apartment. For Bahidrah’s project, he designed a neighborhood as a village typology with four different types of housing modules only four stories high to maintain a human connection to the ground. The 70-bedroom neighborhood met the required density his class was assigned, but focused its efforts on the life that happened outside the bedroom. Rooftops with agriculture, a micro-farm, greenhouse, and a culinary incubator supported the economic sustainability of the neighborhood, giving way for a local workforce. A weekly market space that could be transformed for events supported the social sustainability of the community. The integration of mass timber and prefabrication as the main construction technique supported the technical sustainability of the buildings, reducing both operational and embodied carbon on site.
He has come to believe that no one will teach you how to design. It isn’t mastering Rhino and Revit or knowing how to sketch and building models – these are all forms of representation. Designing is thinking; the narratives that you build and the layers of research that inform one’s ultimate design decisions. Gary Bates, among others in Bahidrah’s life, taught him a new way to think, which allowed him to approach design differently while still being informed by his past experiences. Learn to think, especially in the era of AI that society lives in now. Thinking is our greatest asset as humans.
A lot of what Bahidrah has learned has come from the people he has met during his time at SOM, rather than through a program or software. From Yifan Luo, he learned to think intuitively and not restrict himself to a ‘required’ workflow. From Piotr Jankowski, he learned to be self-critical of his own work; to redline his drawings and renders before presenting them, because rushing to a ‘final’ presentation creates a tunnel vision where even the most obvious mistakes are missed. From Andy Rah, he learned to assess the ultimate goal of a design or visualization and achieve it through his unique skillset—whether using the Adobe Suite, Rhino, or V-Ray. These three, among many others he met, helped him grow immensely in the short time he was able to contribute to a firm like SOM.
During the internship, SOM had an internal internship competition called The Big Build, where his intern cohort split into teams and developed a concept for a tower in the Meatpacking District. Working with a team as multidisciplinary as his proved to be extremely helpful in creating an environment where he learned from each other’s disciplines and put forward a comprehensive project.
Bahidrah is grateful for all the people that he learned from and the experiences that shaped their knowledge.
