Nizar Al-Farra: When Damascus Summoned an Architect to Defend Its Memory

Knowing that a city can be erased while its buildings still stand, the narrator reads the life of Nizar Al-Farra as Damascus turning the pages of its own case, from a childhood in the city to study in Paris at the Institute of Urbanism, the École du Louvre and the École Spéciale d'Architecture. Back home he teaches design and theory and heads the architecture department, and the book moves through his works: the Al-Sufaraa and Al-Khaiam cinemas, where strangers breathe together at the final scene, the market and handicrafts pavilion of the Damascus International Fair, later demolished, and a terminal for buses and cars whose design won its competition and remained on paper. His studies of Damascus in the Middle Ages and of preserving Old Damascus turn knowledge into a defense of the city, and his research on tall buildings follows the shadow down to the window it will reach. Among his built works are Al-Shami Hospital, where a corridor easy for the healthy may be long for a frightened heart, and the Faculty of Education at Damascus University, beside the House of Research for Studies and Construction and a long list of hotels, markets and competition entries. After his death the drawings remain, and the book closes by placing his name at the ruler's edge, so that before extending a new line we remember how many lives pass beneath it.