The Department congratulates MAUS student Joelle Deeb on winning the Dalibor Vesley Prize

Joelle Deeb's work traces the spatial histories of water across the Eastern Mediterranean, organising her research around watershed and its built environment in the 20th Century. She is the founder and director of the Water Commons Archives, a platform for the region's spatial histories around five main rivers, exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 and recipient of the Prince Claus Seed Award. She began her training as an architect in Syria, receiving the Tamayouz Excellence Award, before completing an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies at King's College, Cambridge, as a Cambridge Trust and King's Quantedge Scholar. Under the supervision of Dr. Sofia Nivarti, she graduated with Distinction and was awarded the Dalibor Vesely Prize in 2026.

Her dissertation, "The River and The Museum: The Making of French Mandate Cultural Order in Antakya, 1926–1939," examines the entangled histories of the Antakya Museum, architect Michel Écochard's earliest realised work in 1931, and the Al-Asi river amid competing claims of national identity in French Mandate Syria, prior to the 1939 annexation of the Sanjak of Alexandretta. She is also Editor-in-Chief of Scroope 35, Cambridge's architecture journal.

Dalibor Vesely taught in the Department of Architecture from 1979 to 2004. The Dalibor Vesely Award is given to the post-graduate student of the Department of Architecture whose work best exemplifies the ethos of Dalibor's teaching at Cambridge. Dalibor expresses this ethos in his 'Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation' (MIT, 2004) in terms of "the poetic paradigm...still alive in the creative conditions and possibilities of practical life...[Praxis] belongs to the fundamental constitution of human beings and their situation in the world".