Chantal El Hayek

Chantal El Hayek is an architect and an architectural and urban historian. Her research connects modern architecture and urbanism to broader ideas about time, history, geography, society, and human consciousness, as developed by philosophers and social thinkers. She explores how these design practices seek to promote human freedom and emotional wellbeing, engage with the past, cultivate harmony between natural and built environments, incorporate aesthetics, and integrate Western and non-Western ideas. Her current book project, The Société Française des Urbanistes and the Invention of Urbanism, is the first study on the SFU. It reveals that this interwar Paris-based group of architects and theorists—engaged in a global urban reform campaign—coined the term urbanisme and established the field, grounding it in anti-positivist concepts of time, free will, and human geography advanced by thinkers such as Henri Bergson and Paul Vidal de la Blache.

Ph.D., History and Theory of Architecture, MIT

S.M.Arch.S., AKPIA, MIT

M.Arch., Princeton University

B.Arch., Lebanese American University