Paul Chiniarah: When Shade Was Summoned to Testify to the Justice of Light

The narrator, an architect who knows that a careless line can turn sunlight into punishment, sets down his ruler and asks the light to testify, then follows the life of Dr. Paul Chiniarah: study in the architecture department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University, work at the Damascus municipality while Ecochard was preparing the city's master plan, postgraduate study in France and the return home. Chiniarah's book on geometric perspective becomes a lesson about an eye that can deceive its owner, and his research on choosing building and cladding materials by their environmental properties leads the narrator to put a façade on trial, where a resident rises to say that he was there in August. The projects follow: a terminal proposal for Damascus that earned an honorable mention, unbuilt workers' housing in Barzeh and an unbuilt central library for Damascus University, a tourist hotel at Maarat Saidnaya, the Engineers' Syndicate offices in Douma, and the International Conferences Complex, whose winning team he shared with Nawras al-Daqer, Raif Muhanna and Ibrahim Hola. Teaching is called his longest-lived project, a table where what is said may return years later in the form of a street. The book ends with the narrator drawing a room, sitting where a person will sit and waiting for noon, so that the light may be beautiful, the shade just, and the human being able to find a place to live between them.