Mamoun Al-Wareh: He Sets a Ruler upon Paper, and a City Rises

An architect narrator reads the life of Mamoun Al-Wareh slowly, the way foundations beneath a city are read, starting from his birth in Damascus and a window he imagines the city placing in his eyes for what stands, and another for what could exist. He follows him from the architecture department at Damascus University and the offices of Abd al-Rauf al-Kasm and Talal Akili to postgraduate study in Sheffield, then home again to the construction documents of the opera house, housing for Damascus airport workers designed with Charles Kassab, the demolished Floral Exhibition grounds at Kewan, and a winning proposal for the entrance to Damascus on the airport road. Further projects pass like a moving map of the country: a hotel in Daraa, a residential city for the Banias refinery workers, the Arab Cultural Center in Damascus, a teachers' village in Latakia, the entrance to the Ain al-Fijeh water tunnel and the Syrian embassy in Riyadh. Later chapters turn to the teacher and dean, the consulting units he founded and his books on functional programs and spatial relationships. The narrator ends by addressing him directly: a teacher's influence crosses the boundaries where buildings end, so that a line placed on paper becomes, years later, a place for someone's life.