Gibbs College Architecture professor and director of the Center for Middle Eastern Architecture and Culture, Dr. Khosrow Bozorgi, is publishing a new book, Medieval Courtyard Design Converging Urban Morphologies from Europe to the Middle East. It will be released by Routledge on December 30, 2025.
This groundbreaking edited collection examines courtyard architecture across Paris, Florence, Siena, Granada, and Yazd to reveal how the deliberate creation of emptiness—the "bounded void"—functions as architecture's primary generative principle. Moving beyond conventional object-based analysis, the book demonstrates that architecture's essence lies not in built form but in calibrated absence. In addition to four chapters written by Bozorgi, who also edited the volume, contributors include Gianluca Belli, Fabio Babbrielli, Michele Pellegrini, Juan Manuel Barrios Rozúa, and Peter Soppelsa.
Through rigorous comparative analysis, readers will discover how courtyards operate as environmental mediators, social organizers, and cosmological instruments across diverse cultures. The studies reveals striking morphological convergences that emerge through parallel evolution rather than stylistic diffusion. Drawing on spatial cognition research, urban morphology, and phenomenological analysis, the book establishes void-focused methodology as a new theoretical framework. This paradigm shift from analyzing solid to void transforms our understanding of both historical and contemporary spatial practice, uncovering universal principles that transcend geographic and temporal boundaries.
It is essential for architectural theorists questioning disciplinary orthodoxies, historians seeking alternatives to period-style categorization, and researchers investigating architecture's cognitive dimensions. The work provides both radical historiographical revision and practical insights for contemporary designers engaging with density, sustainability, and social space.
Learn more and pre-order Dr. Bozorgi’s book on www.routledge.com.
Associate Professors Lee Fithian, Ph.D., and Elizabeth Pober have published a chapter in the recently released New Perspectives in Indoor Air Quality, published by Elsevier. Their contribution, titled “Chapter 16 – Architecture and the Challenges of Indoor Air Quality,” examines the relationship between architecture and indoor air quality.
Dr. Ladan Mozaffarian, Assistant Professor of Regional and City Planning, has been selected to serve as Co-Chair of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Planners of Color Interest Group (POCIG) for the 2025–2027 term.
The Gibbs College of Architecture is proud to recognize Tahsin Tabassum, a recent graduate of the college’s Master of Regional and City Planning program and current doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, for receiving the prestigious 2024–2025 American Planning Association (APA) Outstanding Student Award.
