Professor AlSayyad is Associate Dean for International Programs in the College of Environmental Design; Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies; Director of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE); and editor of Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review (TDSR). As a scholar, he has authored and edited several books on housing, identity, tradition urbanism, urban design, urban history, urban informality, tourism and virtuality. He has also produced and directed two public television video documentaries: “Virtual Cairo” and “At Home with Mother Earth.” Among his numerous grants are those received from the U.S. Department of Education, NEA Design Arts Program, Getty Grant Program, and the Graham Foundation. Awards include the Beit AlQuran Medal, Bahrain, the Pioneer American Society Book Award, and the American Institute of Architects Education Honors. Professionally active as both an architect and planner in the United States and Egypt, he is Principal of XXA-Office of Xross-Xultural Architecture. His projects include houses and apartment buildings in Egypt, California, and Saudi Arabia, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley, and award-winning competition entries such as Hadaik Towers, Cairo; and the National Library of Manuscripts, Cairo. PHILOSOPHY As an architect, planner, and urban historian, I believe that architecture cannot simply be about self-expression. Instead I see its mission as the attempt to capture the culture of the place within a framework of poetic sensitivity and political position. As a designer, I believe in architecture as the art of narrative, or good story telling. It is my conviction that architectural projects should be conceived as sound arguments. As a historian of urban form, I also believe that buildings and their surrounding contexts often communicate these embedded propositions and assumptions.