Women in Design 2019 - 22

22

Aliya Khan
Vice President, Global Design Strategies
Marriott International

Recreation, the Moxy NYC Downtown,
designed by Stonehill Taylor

Photos by DRAGONFLY IMAGE PARTNERS and SPENCER KOHN

It was the circa-1980s fashion magazines she flipped through that likely
led Aliya Khan to believe a career as a plastic surgeon was in the cards-
that is until dissecting a frog in biology class became imminent. "I laugh
at it, but even when I was thinking of medicine, I wanted to ultimately
create and shape something interesting," she says. That's certainly what
she does now as vice president of global design strategies at Marriott
International, where she defines and positions the AC, Element, Moxy,
and Aloft brands.
Khan's father was a roving engineer for Exxon, so her childhood was
spent in Hong Kong, Houston, and Singapore before settling down at the
age of 10 in her parents' native Pakistan. She started architecture school
there before transferring to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York where,
in 1994, she was the only woman in her semester-long architecture studio.
Back in Pakistan, she worked in the residential and commercial spheres,
but she found it hard to walk away from her projects: "How do you design
this thing, dream about how people are going to live or work in it, and
then let others finish it?"
Women in Design 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Women in Design 2019
