About

Photo by James Berry
--> Karl reMarks is a Middle East political and cultural blog with occasional forays into satire. It is written by Karl Sharro. Karl reMarks has been featured in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, Public Radio International, Al-Jazeera, The Daily Star, and Al Monitor.


Karl is an architect, satirist and commentator on the Middle East. He is a Partner at PLP Architecture in London and co-author of Manifesto: Towards a New Humanism in Architecture which was included in 100 Artists’ Manifestos: from the Futurists to the Stuckists, a survey of 100 influential art manifestos from the last 100 years. He has practised architecture in London and Beirut, and taught for five years at the American University of Beirut.


He has spoken on a range of issues such as art, architecture, urbanism and politics, at MoMA, the Barbican, Internazionale Ferrara, the London School of Economics, Oxford University, Yale, NYUChatham House and many others. He appears regularly on the BBC and other media outlets. He presented his argument for open borders in a TedX talk in London in 2011 and an argument for removing planning constraints and allowing people to build whatever they want in BBC Radio 4 'Four Thought' broadcast. He has also taken part in BBC Radio 3 programmes reviewing the Islamic Art gallery at the Louvre Museum in Paris and The Shard in London.

Karl wrote and presented the ‘simple one-sentence explanation for what caused ISIS’, a short video produced with Channel 4. His idea for a ‘1000 Mile-City’ along the East Mediterranean coast was broadcast on the BBC’s This Week’s World as part of the ‘Think Again’ strand, exploring radical ideas for the future.