Description
Yama Karim serves as a senior leader on many of Studio Libeskind’s most complex and large-scale international projects. His work spans master planning, high-rise design, and cultural institutions, including the redevelopment of the former fairgrounds in Milan (CityLife), the World Trade Center master plan in New York, and the Reflections and Corals residential developments in Singapore. He is currently leading the design and development of several major projects, including the Sekyra Towers in Prague, the Baccarat Hotel in Dubai, and the Albert Einstein Archives in Israel.
Yama brings deep expertise in navigating complex design challenges across diverse global contexts, coordinating multidisciplinary teams, and advancing projects from concept through realization. His work is characterized by a strong integration of architectural vision, technical rigor, and urban sensitivity.
Before joining Studio Libeskind’s New York office in 2003, Yama collaborated with Daniel Libeskind in Berlin in the late 1990s. He previously worked as a senior designer at Polshek Partnership (now Ennead Architects), contributing to projects such as the Brown Fine Arts Center at Smith College and the Monica A. and Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Visual Arts Center at Sarah Lawrence College. He also worked at Reiser + Umemoto (RUR) in New York, where he was part of the team for the Kaohsiung Port Terminal in Taiwan.
Yama has taught full-time at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich and served as a visiting professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He holds a Master of Architecture from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Design from the University of California, Berkeley. He lectures widely on architecture, urban design, and sustainability, and is fluent in English and Farsi.