Mohammed H. Alkhabbaz

Mohammed H. Alkhabbaz is an educator, researcher, architect, and architectural historian with training in Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Mohammed writes about modern architecture and urbanism. His research focuses on American architects who have practiced in the Middle East. Through this lens he examines a range of topics including the following: technology and energy, climate and environment, Post-Petroleum architectural design, the Global History of Architecture, and Islamic Architecture. Mohammed is an active participant in the preservation of the urban and architectural tradition of modernism, which recently led him to establish and chair DocoMomo, Saudi Arabia.

Mohammed was an integral member of the team that established Prometheus, the Journal of the PhD Program at the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He was the inaugural editor and contributor to the first issue of the journal, which received the Douglas Haskell Award. At IIT he organized a successful workshop entitled Petroleum Modernism: Architecture and Identity in the Gulf that brought a diverse group of scholars together to better understand the architecture of the gulf by analyzing the role played by the petroleum industry; taking into consideration its technologies and global economics.

Prior to arriving to the Detroit metro area, Mohammed was an Assistant Professor of Architecture at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia. He has also taught courses at Lawrence Technological University, Michigan State University, and the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He also worked as a research assistant at IIT and at Archnet.org at MIT.

He holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, a Master of Science in Architectural Studies from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a PhD in Architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He has been the recipient of research grants from The Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) and the Canadian Center of Architecture (CCA).