Adjunct Faculty

BFA from Kansas City Art Institute.

Headshot

Khaled Malas is an architect and art historian.  He is the principal of Sigil, an art/design collective based in New York City, Beirut, and soon in Damascus, that explores the metamorphoses of Arab landscapes marked by historical and contemporary struggles. Sigil’s work has been widely exhibited, most recently at Chicago Architecture Biennial (2023) and the British Museum (2022-2024).  

Khaled’s academic and design research focuses on images and image-making technologies that produce and challenge the potential of places, real and imagined. He is currently completing a PhD in Islamic Art and Architectural History at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. His dissertation explores medieval magico-medicinal bowls that bear a depiction of the Kaaba, the cubical structure in Mecca.

In addition to his research and teaching at The Cooper Union, Khaled teaches at NYU’s Gallatin School and at Pratt Institute’s History of Art and Design Department. His creative practice was the subject of a recent interview, “What We Opt to Do” (Art Papers, Spring 2022: 30–33).  His latest work, The Longest Words: Three Talismans for Conditioning the Air (Yumum, 2024–) is a site-specific installation built into the walls of an early twentieth century house in Beirut.

Khaled holds a post-Professional Master’s Degree in Architecture from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Engineering in Architecture from the American University of Beirut.

He remains committed to hope.

Didi

Frederick Rapp, known as Didi, received his B.Arch. at The Cooper Union. He is a designer from Miami and is based in New York City where he works between means of representation and their influence on fabrication. Didi has worked as a designer for several offices, including Pei Cobb Freed, 10 Design, and LMNOP. 

He has participated in exhibitions in Miami, New York City, Pamplona, Tallinn, and Venice, including Edible, or the Architecture of Metabolism; Everything’s on the Table; MoMA’s Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia; and Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism, 1920–1930. Didi presented The Land is not the Territory for his Benjamin Menschel Fellowship exhibition, which involved researching human interactions in relation to water along coastal areas. His recent thesis project, for which he received the Art Thompson Thesis Fellowship to research and fabricate full-scale models and mock-ups, was presented at the UNC Charlotte Thesis Conference Critical Mass. Didi is currently working on a digestive food cart that will be fabricated for and shown at the Shanghai Urban Space Art Season (SUSAS), which focuses on themes of coexistence and ecological relationships. Didi has taught and assisted with courses at The Cooper Union, The Chapin School, and The Cooper Union’s summer program for architecture. 

Didi's CV is available here.

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