Rula is a Palestinian-American architectural designer and urbanist based in Chicago. She holds a M.Arch from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.Eng in Architecture from Birzeit University in Palestine. As a graduate student, she was awarded the Pritzker Graduate Fellowship and the first prize of the national Gensler Diversity Scholarship. Her graduate thesis, Present Futures, won the Chicago-based Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Architecture, was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal, published in MAS Context, and featured in The Funambulist.
Rula’s practice lies at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Her work leverages investigative and narrative tools to engage wider geopolitical and socio-economic contexts in the built environment. From the scale of the building to the territory, she is interested in exploring the spatial manifestation of existing power structures.