Burhan Tayara: The Man Who Taught Stone to See

The journey of Burhan Tayara begins in Homs, where the houses were older than his footsteps and the future had no door, and widens through Ain Shams, Texas and the Catholic University of America before he returns to Syria with knowledge growing restless in his suitcase. An architect narrator follows him into the classrooms of Aleppo and Damascus, where every student carries a folded city and every question opens another fold, and into practice with Arab Planners and Architects. He pauses at the Faculty of Architecture in Damascus, a place built for those who will learn to build places, and at a marine research center on the coast of Latakia, where in his imagination the sea comes close to the building to contemplate itself. Teaching carries on in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and the narrator looks for the teacher's mark in small decisions made years later: a window moved to let light through, an entrance widened, a tree left standing. After his death a former student opens a window in a new design, and the book closes by saluting the hand that crossed from paper into stone and from stone into the human being, leaving a question about how to build places where people can hold their heads high.