Basem Mer'i Barghouthi: When Architecture Becomes Memory and Stone Becomes Testimony

Basem Mer'i Barghouthi is addressed here by an architect who never met him and reached him through a shared teacher, Dr. Ma'moun al-Fahham, his companion in the early days, so that the book becomes a tribute from one architect to another and a friendship that began in memory before any meeting. It starts in Damascus, his earliest teacher, whose alleys, courtyards and jasmine taught that a window is an agreement between interior and world, then follows him to America, where the name of Charles Moore entered his path in Illinois, and on to work with Evans Woollen in Indianapolis, Devicon in Finland and Tractebel Al Khaleej in the Gulf. Back in Damascus he faces the question of how to build a modern city without imitating or demolishing the past, and in Kafr Souseh the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Council of Ministers bring ablaq stone, mashrabiyas and arches together with glass and steel, projects whose names reached the context of the Aga Khan Award. The chapters then move to the Engineers' Club in Dimas, where a building learns to whisper, to his presence among the Syrian expertise around the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, and to the towers of Marota City, Nirbin and Al Jawhara, asking how to rise without forgetting human scale. The book ends with teaching as an invisible architecture that migrates from teacher to student, and with the reason we build at all: people refuse to pass without leaving a trace, and memory needs a place.