Mohamad Hafez has a mustache that curls like Salvador Dalí’s; a studio in New Haven, Connecticut, lined with buckets of scrap metal, found objects, and fragments of things; and a day job as an architect designing skyscrapers. He is also, depending on the hour, a sculptor, a social critic, a café owner, a bridge builder, and a man who will politely but firmly resist any label you try to press upon him.

“We are complex creatures,” he told me near the end of a conversation conducted on the move, “and even five hours wouldn’t be sufficient.”

He was right. Twenty-six minutes and eight questions into our interview, I had barely scratched the surface.

Hafez was born in Damascus in 1984, raised largely in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and arrived in the United States in 2003 on a single-entry student visa to study architecture at Iowa…