Join us at Riverside Gallery on March 5, from 6:00–8:00 PM, to celebrate the launch of this faculty research exhibition exploring architecture shaped by mobility, precarity, and resilience. Featuring work by Professors Robert Jan van Pelt and Anwar Jaber, the exhibition examines how temporary structures and institutions under occupation reveal urgent ethical and political questions.
Provisional Lives: The Portable Barrack Hut and a University under Occupation
March 5 - June 25, 2026
Faculty research lies at the core of a university’s mission: it generates new knowledge and keeps teaching intellectually alive by demonstrating how questions are framed, evidence assembled, and arguments built through spatial, material, and archival inquiry.
At the Waterloo School of Architecture, this role is particularly vital, where design, history, technology, and theory meet in the study of buildings as both physical artifacts and political instruments. This exhibition brings together two complementary research trajectories centred on the idea of the provisional: Professor Robert Jan van Pelt’s long historical study of portable emergency barracks, conceived as standardized temporary structures designed for mobility and planned impermanence; and Professor Anwar Jaber’s investigation of Birzeit University, a campus built for continuity yet developed incrementally under the provisional, unstable conditions of military occupation.
Together, the exhibition maps a spectrum from architecture intended not to last to institutions determined to endure without certainty, showing how architectural research clarifies urgent ethical and political questions.