Chantal El Hayek

Chantal El Hayek is an architect and an architectural and urban historian with over a decade of experience teaching history, theory, and design studios. 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 engage with the past and seek to promote human freedom and emotional wellbeing, cultivate harmony between natural and built environments, incorporate aesthetics, and synthesize ideas from diverse global traditions, both Western and non-Western.

Her current book project, The Société Française des Urbanistes and the Invention of Urbanism, is the first study on the SFU, an interwar, Paris-based group of architects and theorists engaged in a global urban reform campaign across the colonial Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, as well as Europe and the Americas. The book challenges the common assumption that early 20^th-century urbanism was primarily a positivist technical science concerned with social control and the regulation of matters such as hygiene, infrastructure, and zoning. Instead, it reveals that the SFU 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.

She has articles published in Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and Extraurban Studies and Critical Historiography as Method: Essays in Honor of Nasser Rabbat (Brill, 2028). Some of her ongoing projects include articles on Henri Prost and the conservation of Rabat; Marcel Poëte and the spiritualist foundations of urbanism; Beirut’s Place de l’Étoile and the crafting of colonial neoclassicism; traditionalism, nationalism, and the evolution of the souks in Kuwait (1960–today); architectural historiography and the changing ethos of modernism at the Kuwait National Museum; grid planning and Enlightenment principles in the development of New York City and Washington, D.C. in the long 18^th century; Jacques Gréber’s 1930s regionalist plan for the expansion of Marseille; and Henri Prost’s “mission to resurrect ancient Rome” with Istanbul’s Archaeological Park.

Prof. El Hayek’s work has been supported by fellowships from the MIT School of Architecture + Planning, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) France, the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT, and the Graduate School at Princeton University.

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

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

M.Arch., Princeton University

B.Arch., Lebanese American University