Abdallah Gad

Lead Architect at Marjan

Speaker

Abdallah Gad is Lead Architect with Marjan Design Lab (MDL) in Ras Al Khaimah, and has led the design and delivery of RAK Academy Al Hamra, a whole-school campus for around 2,100 learners built around indoor–outdoor learning. Working hand in hand with RAK Academy’s leadership, Abdallah brought in Gensler’s education practice to run visioning workshops with students, teachers, parents and leaders, then guided the project through the appointment of Godwin Austen Johnson, design development and construction. For more than three and a half years, the focus has stayed on a single principle: design the school around the way children learn, and treat it as an incubator for the learners of a fast-moving world. The result pairs a park-first masterplan and clusters scaled for children with close attention to acoustics and neurodivergent learners.