Drawing From Experience

From the deserts of Australia and the Middle East to the home that they have made together in the desert Southwest, the tug of sun-soaked land is evident not only in the personal life of Marwan Al-Sayed and Mies Grybaitis but also in their work.

The couple’s 12-year-old firm, Marwan Al-Sayed Architects, has become known for designs that capture the natural solar light and break the boundaries of outdoor and indoor living. One of the firm’s first designs was a residential project entitled “House of Earth and Light.” The award-winning project blended the couple’s talents and sensibilities with heavy, cement and earth desert walls contrasted with an ethereal, luminous fabric and steel roof.  The modern Phoenix home was featured in a national ad campaign for Calvin Klein in 2001 and spawned a business creating custom, handmade cast glass sinks for Mies, whose doors, light fixtures and tables add luminescent color to several of Marwan’s architectural designs.

Marwan was one of three professionals to win an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006. From his Phoenix studio he shares that much of his work is influenced by a passion for travel.

Marwan, who was born in Iraq but was raised in the United States, and Mies, who emigrated from Australia in 1996, bonded over a love of travel. Their lives intersected in this desert town when they met while working on separate projects here in 1996 – Mies on an exhibit of her glass artwork and Marwan supervising the renovation of the Phoenix Art museum for a New York architectural firm. That began a series of trips to Mexico, Greece, Scandinavia, Mies’ home country Australia and Morroco, where they were married in 2004. Travel has been just as integral to their work as to their personal life. 

A building is fundamentally a collector of human dreams, desires and lives.

“When you travel, you’re having direct experiences that you can’t get from a book,” Marwan says. “It gives you a whole range of experiences from which to draw.” His wife agrees, adding that travel “refreshes your mentality. It invigorates you so that you are more inspired and have more ideas.”

Traveling not only teaches them about other countries, but also offers lessons about their adopted hometown. It provides “critical distance to see what is really happening in Phoenix,” Mies explains. “We live in a city where everyone has borrowed everything and what I really strive for is to design authentically for the place. You come back and see what’s real here and see what’s fake as well.”

DESIGN AS A JOURNEY

The 2006 birth of their daughter, Anisa, has temporarily limited their travel plans but Marwan continues his journeys through his designs. His current work includes a desert villa in Dubai as well as a hotel and spa there, a Phoenix home and a 34-room, 31-villa resort in the stark, undeveloped landscape near Monument Valley in Southern Utah which he is designing with two other architects. Once again, sunlight is paramount in this project. Glass panels along entire walls in each room afford the least-intrusive boundary to the sun-seared landscape of red buttes outside. The fort-like shape of the resort ensures that each room has an unobstructed view of the raw landscape. Marwan compares it to being on the deck of a ship with empty sandy desert taking the place of rolling ocean.

Marwan enjoys designing resorts. It reminds him of traveling with his family to hotels “where people from all walks of life came together and intermingled.” Marwan’s family moved to the United States from Iraq when he was just 3-years-old and, because of political turmoil, their plans to return were never realized. But his parents, both educators, led their family on a six-month trip through Europe and the Middle East while Marwan was a teenager.

When we traveled through Europe and North Africa the hotels were social gathering places. There were weddings there and business people, travelers, diplomats. They were from all over and they were crossing and interconnecting there. It was like a marketplace.

A MIX OF OLD AND NEW

It was during that time that he absorbed the traditional buildings of the Arabian and Saharan deserts that now give his unmistakably modern designs an ancient feeling.

“A blend of modern and ancient is more interesting to me because modern by itself has no connection at all to what came before,” he explains. “I try to look for what’s timeless and what we’ve forgotten or left behind and try to resurrect some of that in a modern way.”

For example, he is currently designing a desert villa in Dubai, a project that has used all of Marwan’s cultural intuitiveness. The homeowner “was looking for something modern but that also had a connection to his culture and his religion. He saw me as someone who could bridge that gap.”

Marwan began with a central garden space, which he placed on axis with Mecca, thus integrating an important religious aspect into the design without being as overt as the visible arrows pointing toward Mecca which are often found in hotels in Dubai.

In 2002, Marwan was one of 50 architects invited by a New York art gallery to submit ideas for rebuilding on the site of the World Trade Center tragedy. In that project, he shared his thoughts on the most basic meaning of architecture: “A building is fundamentally a collector of human dreams, desires and lives.”

As a family and as a working partnership, this couple proves that the desert is not always dry and barren, but can be the foundation for a home filled with an abundance of life.