Alaily-Mattar, Nadia

Bio Sketch

Nadia Alaily-Mattar is a researcher and lecturer at the Chair of Urban Development, Technische Universität München (TUM), and senior research fellow at Université Grenoble Alpes. Trained as an architect (American University of Beirut) with a PhD in Planning Studies (UCL) and an MSc from LSE, her research focuses on star architecture, the interplay of architecture and media, and architecture's role in urban transformation, often using quantitative digital methods.

Key Works

• "Visuality peaks, function lasts" (2025, with Baptist, Legner, Arvanitakis & Thierstein) — the empirical Instagram study of iconic architecture.
• "The performance of exceptional public buildings on social media — The case of Depot Boijmans" (2023) — earlier social-media study.
• About Star Architecture (ed. with Ponzini & Thierstein) — collected research on star architecture in European cities.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Iconic Architecture
• Star Architecture
• Instagrammability

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Alaily-Mattar's empirical work is a key quantitative complement to Geoffrey's spectacle & iconic architecture and semiotics & representation areas: it supplies data on how iconic architecture actually circulates on Instagram, testing the image-centrality claims of Sklair and Jencks against observed patterns of (rising-and-fading versus sustained) attention.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Visuality Peaks, Function Lasts
• Building the Picture: The Story of Architectural Photography
• Iconic Buildings in the Making of City Identity: The Role of Aspirational Identity Artefacts