Madeeha Merchant

Madeeha Merchant is a Pakistani American architect and systems engineer, based in New York City. She is a practitioner, researcher, and advocate — building institutions out of care. Madeeha co-founded DOT | Design of Territories, an architecture studio in New York and Paris, and serves as Executive Director of the Urban Justice League — a research think tank at the intersection of data, ethics, and justice. She holds a B.Eng. in Systems Engineering and an M.Arch. from Columbia University. She trained under Pritzker Laureate Renzo Piano, in Paris and later worked at SOM, New York.

As an Associate Research Scholar and Tow Fellow at Columbia, she taught at GSAPP, turned conflict data into spatial evidence, and visualized the brain's neural pathways for a permanent public exhibit: The Synapse. It is where architecture and neuroscience first converged — where space is not only something built, but something the mind actively constructs. That inquiry continues in her research on Cognitive AI: In the Absence of Perfect Knowledge — on intuition, affect, and what remains beyond the reach of algorithms when decisions must be made under uncertainty.

At DOT, Madeeha is designing the School of Sustainability, a climate school under construction in Karachi. At the Urban Justice League, she is building Fragile Frontlines — a forensic atlas of loss and damage in the Third Pole, exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. She has presented at the UN, COP, NASA, MIT Media Lab, and UNESCO, and participated in design juries at Princeton, Columbia, and Cornell.

Outside the studio, she trains for K2. Alpinism has taught her what no studio has: the body knows the environment before the mind names it. That gap — between somatic knowledge and conscious architecture — is where her work lives.