Night School 2025, Lifelines: Tending to the Ruins
Conversation with Marvi Mazhar, moderated by Ayesha Qaisar

When is a building ever completed?
When does its maintenance become a heritage project?
When does an icon turn to ruin?

Architect Marvi Mazhar joins Night School 2025 to address the critical care of urban fabrics. Drawing from her work in Karachi and beyond, Mazhar champions heritage preservation as a means to sustain a city’s living networks. Architect Ayesha Qaisar will help contextualize Mazhar’s career and highlight strategies for maintaining buildings not just as places to live and work, but as living environments in their own right.

The conversation will span from Karachi to Dubai—port city to port city—charting out the ways architects, neighbours and maintenance crews keep old and new buildings in our midst and in our imagination.

Tending to the Ruins is part of Night School 2025, a month-long program of seminars and public events led by Todd Reisz and dedicated to encounters with urbanism and history in Dubai. More information here.

The event is free and open to all. Please kindly confirm your attendance by registering here.

Marvi Mazhar is an architect and researcher whose practice combines visual culture, spatial advocacy and interventions. She serves on several advisory boards in government and non-profit organisations. In 2021, she completed her masters degree at Goldsmiths, University of London and in 2022 began teaching at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Her present research focuses upon the representation and production of Karachi’s coastal periphery and its ecology. She co-edited Yasmeen Lari: Architecture for the Future (2023, MIT) with Elke Krasny and Angelika Fritz. Mazhar is currently lead architect at thirteen heritage sites in Kyrgyzstan, with a focus on developing infrastructural and management connectivity. She tweets at @marvimazhar.

Ayesha Qaisar is an architect and educator and practices in Dubai and Karachi. Like many who live abroad, she is curious about the notion of home and the material culture used to (re)create it. She feeds this curiosity by trying to understand the city through the stories and experiences of its various inhabitants.

Image credit: Marvi Mazhar