Hashim Sarkis will leave his post as dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) at the end of June 2027, concluding a 12‑year tenure. During that time he launched several academic centers, expanded student support, and oversaw the move into the renovated Met Warehouse building. The adaptive‑reuse project turned a century‑old brick warehouse into a glass‑filled, skylit hub that houses multi‑height studios, modular classrooms, public galleries and a café, enabling interdisciplinary teaching, research and campus‑wide events.\ \ From 2016 to 2018 Sarkis led the “One Community = One Campus” planning effort, shaping MIT’s campus into a contiguous urban space and adding sustainable infrastructure and new buildings, including the Met Warehouse itself. Starting in fall 2027 SA+P will offer full tuition support for multi‑year graduate programs, reflecting his belief that education is a right for every student.\ \ Under his leadership the school’s interdisciplinary portfolio grew: a 2016 gift from the Leventhal family expanded the Center for Advanced Urbanism and renamed it for Norman B. Leventhal; the same year a design minor was introduced, and in 2018 the Bachelor of Science in Art and Design was relaunched. The 2020 Mobility Initiative brought together transportation, technology, planning and policy researchers; the 2022 Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) was founded with support from the Morningside Foundation; and in 2024 the MIT‑LUMA Lab was launched with LUMA Foundation backing to address climate‑related challenges. In 2023 SA+P partnered with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing to create the MIT‑HPI AI and Creativity Hub, fostering design‑AI collaborations.\ \ The Met Warehouse transformation stands as Sarkis’s signature achievement. Originally a storage facility, the building was reimagined by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with large glass panels, skylights and flexible interiors, creating a model of sustainable adaptive reuse that aligns with MIT’s design ethos.\ \ Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Sarkis earned a BFA from RISD (1987) and an MA (1989) and PhD (1995) in architecture from Harvard, where his doctoral work intersected political philosophy with architects such as Roberto Unger, Hilary Putnam and John Rawls. He taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (1998‑2015), published extensively—including the 2003 monograph Circa 1958: Lebanon in the Pictures and Plans of Constantinos Doxiadis—and founded HashimSarkis Studios, known for projects like the Byblos Town Hall and the Fishermen’s Housing in Tyre, the latter cited in the Phaidon Atlas of 21st‑Century World Architecture.\ \ During his upcoming 2027‑28 sabbatical Sarkis will work on projects in Venice, Egypt and Armenia, and will return to MIT as a professor and head of the MIT‑LUMA Lab.\ \ Sarkis’s tenure blended seriousness with a “quirky” MIT‑style humor: he judged the 2016 “Crossing the Charles” watercraft competition and organized a costumed procession into the Met Warehouse that echoed MIT’s historic charter boat. He describes the Met Warehouse visioning process as “inspiring,” emphasizing the need for a common framework that allowed faculty to project forward. The building, he argues, embodies MIT’s distinctive model of conducting research and education simultaneously.\ \ Amid current educational challenges, Sarkis remained committed to advancing architecture and planning through interdisciplinary innovation, optimism, and the belief that design’s transformative power can still drive progress.\ \ Review