Dr. Magda Mostafa is currently an Associate Professor of Design at the Department of Architectural Engineering, Cairo University where she’s been teaching various courses since 1996. She is also an Associate Professor at the Construction and Architectural Engineering as well as the Performing and Visual Arts Departments at the American University in Cairo, where she helped develop their new program in Architectural Engineering, which was launched in 2007.



She was born and raised in Canada, and later came to Egypt to reside where she received her B.Sc, Msc. and PhD in architecture from Cairo University. Her doctoral dissertation studied architectural design for children with special needs and sensory dysfunctions, with a focus on autism. She’s published various papers and articles on the subject in the National Autistic Society’s Communication magazine, ArchNet-IJAR and Open House International. She is currently working as a special needs design consultant for government and private sector projects in Egypt, the Gulf and Europe, as an associate at the Cairo based architectural firm Progressive Architects. In 2004, in association with Progressive Architects, she completed designing the Advance school for children with autism in Qattemeya, Cairo, which was presented at the World Congress on Autism in Capetown, 2006, and is the first building to be designed based on her “sensory design” theory. For her contribution to special needs she was nominated for the 2005 UNESCO Prize for Research and Training in Special Needs Education for Children. To ensure her research extends beyond the realm of academia and reaches those most in need of it, she also conducts design workshops and seminars for parents and teachers of children with autism through various NGO’s, charity organizations and the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood in Cairo.



She is currently authoring, on commission by the architect, a biographical/ architectural review of the life-work of Aga Khan award-winning architect Abdelhalim Ibrahim Abdelhalim, with whom she has worked closely throughout the years.



She has also published in the field of Architectural Education including her award winning paper “Thinking Outside the Box- Addressing and Enhancing Visual/Spatial and Active Learning Skills in Architectural Education”, which was granted the International Award for Excellence in the Design Field in 2008. She presented this paper and conducted a plenary session at the Design Principles and Practice Conference, held in Berlin in February 2009.



In addition Magda is an active member of the Union of International Architects and is part of their working group on Architectural Education and Validation, where she has contributed to the development of guidelines for Architectural Research as well as Learning Methods in Architectural Education. She is also active in their Architectural Competitions commission and in 2008 she was successfully nominated as President of the UIA’s International Student Competition Jury. She also sat as the UIA Representative to the Jury for the Lebanese Ministry of Culture’s “House of Arts and Culture” Design Competition, prepared by GAIA-Heritage, held in Beirut in 2009.

0 buildings

No posting