Amelia Therese Tayeh

Architecture is nothing without altruism -- a fact Amelia Therese Tayeh knows well and the reason why she holds three degrees from RWU that allow her to realise this vision.

For her graduate thesis project, she harnessed the power of design to highlight the plight of millions of Syrians forced to flee their homes by the war in her project called “Until We Return.”

Tents showed the cramped eight-person shelters refugees have to live in. The word “refugee” is stencilled on them in four languages. Posterboards with statistics about the refugee crisis, as well as stories from survivors and photos, surround them.

Such projects do not just reflect RWU’s humanitarian streak, but their experiential nature too.

“The RWU Architecture programme has several opportunities to learn hands-on. My favourite was taking a studio where the students were given the opportunity to travel out of the country to visit different sites,” she says. “I was selected to be part of the travelling studio twice during my time at RWU where I visited Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and Zurich, Switzerland.”