Maryam Ibrahim

Email Address

I am a graduating Master of Architecture and Urban Design student with a strong passion for creating spaces that enhance wellbeing, foster community, and respond thoughtfully to the urban context. My approach to design is human-centered, exploring how architecture and urban environments can support everyday life, encourage meaningful social connections, and contribute positively to the city’s social and cultural fabric. I believe that thoughtfully designed spaces have the power to inspire, connect, and improve the quality of life for those who inhabit them.

During my studies, I have developed experience across a variety of project types, including housing, mixed-use developments, and community-focused projects. These experiences have allowed me to combine conceptual and creative design thinking with practical problem-solving, balancing innovation with functionality. I am particularly interested in creating flexible, inclusive, and sustainable environments that can adapt to evolving social, cultural, and environmental needs over time.

In addition to technical design skills, I am passionate about the social and experiential aspects of architecture, investigating how spatial arrangements, circulation, and communal spaces can promote interaction. My work considers the dynamic relationship between buildings and their surrounding urban context, aiming to create environments that are welcoming, resilient, and responsive.

As I graduate, I am eager to contribute to projects that make a positive impact, designing spaces where people feel supported, connected, and inspired. I aim to create architecture that is not only functional and sustainable but also meaningful, vibrant, and socially engaging.

Carewell

A community-focused housing project in Cremorne supporting caregivers and care receivers. It features flexible, accessible apartments and communal spaces around a central core, with adaptive reuse of a warehouse for therapy and recovery, creating an inclusive, connected environment where residents can live, interact, and thrive.

Carewell

Greyline

A Footscray urban project that connects key landmarks through diverse urban forms and a raised bridge. The design treats the area as a site in need of careful interventions, enhancing circulation, activating public spaces, and revitalizing the urban fabric to improve both function and experience.

Generational Wellness

A housing project located in the former VicRoads headquarters in Kew, organized around a central courtyard. It offers apartments for older adults, students, multi-generational families, and small families, fostering an inclusive, intergenerational community.

Water Scape Living

A multi-use development combining wellness, retail, and residential spaces, featuring therapeutic pools, shops, apartments with rooftop gardens, and townhouses with private gardens, creating a sustainable, inclusive, and community-focused urban environment.

Acknowledgement of Country

The School of Design and Architecture respectfully acknowledges the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners and knowledge-keepers of the lands, waters and sky that surround us, where we work, learn, create, communicate and make place. We recognise that sovereignty has never been ceded and this always was and will always be Wurundjeri Country. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who continue to make a better world through design.

We extend our acknowledgement to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, students, alumni, real-life clients, and knowledge keepers, who have contributed to our own education diversity and growth. We will continue to ensure that staff and students respectfully honour ancestral connection to Country and Place in everything that they do.

We are dedicated to the notion of design to make a better world and we acknowledge that making tools, shaping place, sharing stories, making meaning, wayfinding and collaborating have long been and continue to be both central and integral to First Peoples' cultures. We recognize that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ cultural contributions have continued relevance to design practice and commit to: reconciling ancestries of design and contemporary practice as well as pursuing culturally and professionally appropriate ways to engage with a diverse population of colleagues, industries and clients. In a time of treaty-making and voice we understand that there are overlaps between caring for Country and the sustainable production of goods, services, experiences, products and buildings.

Guided by the principles of respect, reconciliation, and reciprocity we undertake to indigenising and decolonising design practice by dismantling colonial structures and challenging biases that have marginalised Indigenous voices and design.

As students of SoDA you will be given opportunities to both engage with and educate yourself in Indigenous creative practices and cultural protocols through a lens of inclusivity, diversity, respect, mutual understanding, inter-cultural dialogue in all aspects of design practice. Indigenous people have been telling stories, making tools, and connecting to Country through visual media, placemaking and place marking for more than 60,000 years and these practices are part of an ongoing, evolving and live tradition.