About
Madeeha Merchant is a Pakistani American architect and systems engineer based in New York — a practitioner, researcher, and advocate building institutions out of care. She co-founded DOT | Design of Territories, a New York and Paris studio, and serves as Executive Director of the Urban Justice League — a think tank at the intersection of data, ethics, and justice. She holds a B.Eng. in Systems Engineering and an M.Arch. from Columbia, and trained under Pritzker Laureate Renzo Piano in Paris and at SOM, New York.
As an Associate Research Scholar and Tow Fellow there, she taught at GSAPP and turned conflict data into spatial evidence. At DOT, she is designing the School of Sustainability, a climate school under construction in Karachi; at the Urban Justice League, 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 sat on 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.
