Salma Samar Damluji

She was elected Member of the Académie d’Architecture in Paris in 2017, and awarded the Académie d’Architecture's Restoration Award (silver medal) in 2015. In 2012 she received The Global Award for Sustainable Architecture in 2012, from the Cité d'architecture & du Patrimoine and the Locus Foundation.

In 2014, Damluji was the first woman architect invited to give the Leçon Inaugurale at the École de Chaillot in Paris, the tenth in the series. This was published in The Other Architecture: Geometry, Earth and the Vernacular, (Paris, 2015) and formed an overview of her work and research.

In 2013, she was appointed to the Mu‘allim Awad Binaldin Chair for Professor of Architecture in the Islamic World, at the American University of Beirut. Damluji was senior tutor at the Architectural Association (AA) Graduate School and at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London (UK). She has several titles published on earth and vernacular architecture of the Arab region. Her publications include Hassan Fathy: Earth & Utopia (2018), The Architecture of Yemen (2007) and The Architecture of Oman (1998).  A new edition of The Architecture of Yemen and its Reconstruction will be published in 2020. She has curated several exhibitions on her work in London (at the RCA and RIBA), in Paris, Venice and in Madrid.

Daw‘an Mud Brick Architecture Foundation was established in 2007-8 by Salma Samar Damluji and her colleagues in Yemen, Dr Abdullah BaGhumyan and Architect Ali Ba Saad. The foundation sets up projects and seeks funding to design and construct with Hadrami builders using earth materials and techniques of Yemeni architecture.

Damluji's involvement with the architecture of Yemen began after a working visit for the UNESCWA in 1981. Her projects there include, ‘Aynat Mosque: Masjid al Faqih (2008-11), Masna‘at ‘Urah, Daw‘an (2008-12), Husn Qarn Majid, Daw‘an (2012-14), ‘Umar Ba Wazir Mosque, Wadi Sah (2008-10) and more recently (2017-19) the post-war rehabilitation of the Shibam Gateway, and the reconstruction of al-Habib Hamad bin Salih Dome’ Bin Isma‘il Domes, Shaklanza Mosque in Shihr and Shaykh Ya‘qub Dome in Mukalla These projects were funded by the Prince Claus Fund of the Netherlands and the Cultural Protection Fund of the British Council, United Kingdom.

Salma Samar Damluji (born in Beirut in 1954), is an Iraqi British architect, professor and author. She graduated from the AA School of Architecture in 1977 and from the Royal College of Art in London in 1987, where she did her doctorate. She worked with the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy in Cairo, in 1975-6 and in 1984–5. She was appointed architectural advisor to the UAE minister Shaykh Sultan Bin Zayed Al Nahyan in 2001–2004 on The Shaykh Zayed Grand Mosque project and other projects in Abu Dhabi. In 2008, she established with colleagues in Yemen, the Daw'an Mud Brick Architecture Foundation in Hadramut (Yemen) and has been working there on earth construction and rehabilitation projects.