In this series of interviews, we meet the shortlisted candidates for the 2026 Women in Architecture and Construction Award. These women have made outstanding contributions to architecture and the built environment across the Near East and North Africa. The award features two categories: Rising Star and Woman of Outstanding Achievement.
Jomana Baddad is an architect, urban designer & heritage conservation specialist with 15+ years of experience across MENA and internationally.
At Turath, where she serves as Head of Design and Design Director, she leads some of the most significant heritage and urban design projects in the Arab world.
She managed the As-Salt UNESCO World Heritage Site Nomination File, a milestone for Jordan’s cultural patrimony.
In this interview, Jomana Baddad discusses her professional background and leadership at Turath, exploring her approach to reimagining heritage, sustainable design, and projects such as the ADOC Modern Heritage Site Redevelopment and Jarash Eco-Hub. She also reflects on leading teams and redefining leadership within the profession.
Tell us about your background, and what led you from robotic earthen construction research at ETH Zürich to leading at Turath in Amman.
Ask me about my background, and I’ll answer with my foreground. I do Anti-disciplinary Design, Research and Making that moves across times, materials, scales and ways of knowing.
Behind it if you wish lie Architecture, Urban Design & Digital Fabrication by training, and Heritage Conservation and sites & structures Reuse by practice.
I often find myself a tensioned creature, my heritage hand draws me backwards urging me to learn, understand what came before, my digital hand pulls me forward, urging me to anticipate futures and imagine possibilities not yet realised. Caught between the two, I have no now, only the work of making one!
After years of working on large-scale developments and Urban Design studies in New York, I joined Turath in Amman in 2018, hoping to shape public space. Heritage seduced me instead: treasures not to be frozen, but allowed to breathe and evolve.
I begin to question our building envelopes, the way we design, construction system & market. How do we remake the past precise without making it static?
At ETH Zürich, I asked how machines/robots might collaborate with natural & inherited materials & methods i.e. Earth as you mentioned to unlock their potential.
I have been pushing that frontier ever since. The turning point was not discovering something new, but realising how much of the future lay hidden in the past.
A while after, I rejoined Turath again, with more tools and perspectives leading the design practice in Heritage contexts and expanding on the area of ReUse, Interpretation & Regeneration of Sites & Structures in the Arab Region and this is now expanding to complex sites-natural or industrial.
What are the visions, goals or principles of your practice? How do projects like ADOC Modern Heritage Site Redevelopment or Jarash Eco-Hub reflect them?
Every so often, I find myself orbiting a word. Lately, it has been “Generosity”. Our practice reaches beyond business as usual: it cultivates growth, and it revives what has been left behind.
That is why I hold design and leadership to the same principles: shared knowledge and ownership, intellectual honesty, the courage to experiment, and a commitment to something larger than ourselves or the project goals “Common good.”
Architecture is how we register our legacy, which become a race among nations for cultural prominence recently. With nearly half of humanity now living in cities, architecture has also become our new geography, whether we accept it or not. That makes our responsibility profound and we need to keep asking, are we just?
For me, design begins in dialogues, learns through experimentation & new tools, listens to context and research, and refuses to be contained by disciplinary boundaries. It takes architects, scientists and countless other disciplines working together to achieve a project.
My role in light of this has evolved to convene: to bring teams and disciplines to the same table, share what each one knows, and turn many skills into one answer.
The ADOC Modern Heritage Site Redevelopment treats heritage not as a record to be archived but as a living framework, to be studied, reinterpreted and continued for today.
Its ribbed concrete and timber shade are not relics; they are arguments still in progress. Metabolic Site with Rich History and Across Nations Renaissance History.
Many associated Values, makes the project critical and requires a collective study in every design discipline from Site Planning to Interior Interventions to Building Envelopes, consolidaitons and additions all under Heritage Conservation evolving principles.
The Jarash Eco-Hub reimagines a rural site with an industrial legacy as a catalyst for ecological and socio-economic renewal.
Spanning all scales, the design brings together regenerative landscapes, rural building typologies in contemporary encounters, and comforting spaces that celebrate the in-between translating a broader vision into a feasible, grounded reality.
At its heart, the project seeks to restore the bond between people and a place they had stopped seeing. In the end, our principle is to intervene honestly: to understand before transforming, to experiment without losing what matters, and to make spaces generous enough to give back more than they take.
This project glued together an extraordinary young design talents that I think of as a reward to my experience as a design leader.
You’ve said good design is about what can be “reimagined without betrayal.” Can you expand on this?
To give context to the sentence, I tend to design in contexts that already carry a story, embedded in their fabric, setting, and accumulated events.
And I ask myself those questions on regular basis. Before architecture competes to transform it into something new, it owes a debt to what already exists without biases: i.e. to the people who inhabit a place, the nature that sustains it, and the materials and histories that have shaped it.
First transformation tool is paying attention: keeping what deserves to be kept, mending what has been disturbed, and building with what is “at hand”. Its worth mentioning the humility to recognise that not everything needs replacing or reinventing to become relevant. This can be frustrating for designers sometimes, because the right thing sometimes is to do nothing.
To reimagine without betrayal is to also ask: Are we being truthful to the place authenticity, or merely using it as a backdrop for our own ideas?
Authenticity, then, is not something we can simply claim; it must be critically examined. What do we choose to preserve, what do we privilege, and whose references shape our judgement? To allow a place to evolve is to carry its defining qualities forward, not merely reproduce its appearance or freeze it in time.
Necessity may demand change; the challenge is to distinguish what can be transformed from what must not be erased. Ultimately, we must ask: What are we designing for? What makes a place significant, to whom, and is that significance meaningful enough to justify the choices we make?
As the world trends toward the extraordinary, I find myself drawn to the quiet “Significance” of the “Ordinary”.
What are some of the challenges you’ve faced leading big teams on projects of this scale, and how have you overcome them?
Building the team was the first challenge: bringing together the right mix of expertise and personalities, and finding the balance between guidance and autonomy. At times, more micromanagement than I would have liked.
In a mid-sized practice, the scale of the projects can grow faster than the team itself. You learn to stretch without diluting the quality of the work. The projects Im leading often span masterplanning, landscape, conservation, architecture, and interiors all together.
The focus/challenge is to maintain the larger vision while attending to the smallest details, without allowing any one discipline to dominate at the expense of the whole.
Leading is also about distributing missions. People produce their best work when they feel trusted and genuinely involved. Every voice on the team matters, make room for it, and you will be surprised by what it brings!
This is where what I call organic or intuitive management comes in. Roles and responsibilities are not always fixed; they evolve through observation and experiments.
Reflecting on my recent role, I had to navigate both the design-principal and project-manager roles, while gradually discovering where each colleague can contribute to support me. The structure to remain responsive and open to revision. This can be messy sometimes, but we learn as we try.
Feedback is central to this process. I believe in keeping it frequent, direct, and organic not formal reviews, but an ongoing conversation that helps decisions emerge earlier, improves their quality, and reduces abortive work.
Another challenge is nurturing the people behind the work (the reward), even when the pace of projects leaves little room to breathe.
I’m still learning to balance individual needs with collective growth & project priorities. I’m also still learning to deliver without relying on extra hours and sheer will.
Perhaps leadership is not only making things work, but knowing when enough is enough—and ensuring people don’t always have to give more.
You’ve said your generation of Arab women designers is “not waiting to be invited to the table… we are building it, and building it well.” Can you expand on what that actually looks like in practice?
What I mean is that we initiate, experiment, fail, learn, and begin again. This is not a claim of superiority, but a statement of agency and this shift is noticeable in the Arab World nowadays. We design, make, lead, think, theorise, and build institutions and practices of our own.
Our contribution lies in bringing different perspectives, sensibilities, and ways of thinking to the collective production of architecture. Not because women are a homogeneous group, but because simply the field becomes richer when more different voices shape it.
Yet equality requires honesty. Building a practice or leading an institution is demanding for anyone, but women often carry additional burdens, particularly around the physical and emotional realities of bringing new lives into the world. To speak of equality without acknowledging these differences is to overlook an important part of the picture.
Ultimately, building the table means creating the conditions for more voices to contribute, and making the table better for everyone who gathers around it!
What are you working on now?
I’m currently weaving together several threads that have long fascinated me.
Earthen Lattices, the first wall demonstrator in the Levantine context – recently exhibited at Amman Design Week – is evolving into an ongoing applied research project: developing a low-tech digital fabrication process rooted in local materials, tools, and making practices.
The upcoming phase will test larger building components while refining digital scripts, fabrication process and testing more materials for more robustness and adaptability.
At Turath, my team and I have completed a trio of interventions at King Hussein Business Park Complex in Amman, rethinking wayfinding, public space activation, and pedestrian accessibility through reversible, leasable structures that can eventually give the landscape back to a park.
We are also advancing a major modern heritage large scale project in Abu Dhabi toward construction.
Meanwhile, I’m preparing a Tech-Talk for Makers Collective 2026 in Amman, an opportunity to exchange ideas with emerging thinkers. I am also planning a solo excursion to Asia themed under “Design of the World”.
Across these projects, I’m gradually bringing all-scales design, fabrication, heritage, and experimental practice into closer conversation.
Something new is taking shape on the horizon, and the coming months promise plenty of experimentation, learning, and a new beginning to be announced.
You’ve spoken about a certain kind of person in this profession — often a woman, often unnamed — who keeps a practice running but rarely appears in the credits, someone you call ‘the true engine of a practice.’ What’s the one piece of advice you’d give her directly, if she were starting out today?
I hesitate to offer advice to someone I feel I have so much to learn from. Perhaps my first responsibility is not to advise, but to bring attention to these figures, recognise them, and understand what allows them to keep giving. Every practice has an engine, sometimes an individual, sometimes a collective.
Across my sixteen years in practice, I have been fortunate to encounter colleagues whose generosity of spirit, thought, and production has shaped not only the work, but my belief in it. For me many have been women, though this generosity knows no gender.
I have a fighter’s instinct, sometimes an exhausting one! When I see a situation that obscures people’s contributions, I try to make it fairer, clearer, and more generous with credit and responsibility. By time, I am shifting towards stoicism. Yet I remain humble about what recognition means to each person.
If we insist to give an advise, at first glance it seems simple: make the invisible visible, give credit, share power, and replenish the spirit.
By visibility, I don’t mean spotlight, but having a voice in consequential decisions, the confidence to negotiate, the courage to communicate, and the agency to shape the direction of a practice.
Nature offers a nuance to this: some plants flourish in the shade. Forcing them out of it can do more harm than good. Perhaps the point is not to ensure the shade is a choice, not a condition imposed on them—and that, wherever they grow, their presence has the power to shape the garden.
Motivation flourishes when people feel their contribution matters, their judgement is trusted even if they make mistakes, and their generosity is met with reciprocity rather than taken for granted.
People need more than recognition; they need room to grow, autonomy to act, and the sense that they are cared for beyond what they can give. Never mistake generosity for an endless resource.
To each of these people, women and men alike, thank you for keeping the work—and the rest of us—going!
Meet the Shortlist series is a compilation of interviews with those who have been shortlisted for our awards. Saliha Benmessaoud is on the shortlist for the Women in Architecture and Construction Award, which recognises women who have made outstanding contributions to architecture and the built environment across the Near East and North Africa.
Meet the Shortlist: Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Dr Hiba Alkhalaf, Meisa Batayneh, Nuha Dandis, Ronak Roshan Gilvaei, Saliha Benmessaoud, Salima Naji, Salwa and Selma Mikoü, and Dr Zahra Hussain.
Tamayouz Excellence Award is sponsored by 99 Properties Development, Coventry University, Dewan Architects + Engineers, the Mohamed Makiya Foundation, Bonair Ltd, Aji Group, and Round City Magazine.