The People's Palace: An Architectural Epic of Mountain, Power and Memory

Before there was a palace there was a mountain, Mount Mezzeh beside Qasioun, and below it Damascus with its minarets, domes, markets and gardens. The book reads the choice of that site as a visual statement, and from the height watches the city turn into forms, lines and points. It follows the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange into the story, a man who lived through his country's destruction and reconstruction and confronted the memory of Hiroshima, and asks what question Damascus put to him. Chapter by chapter the narrator questions the mountain that carries everything, the deliberate mass of a building that wants to be seen, its structure, its marble, its halls and its windows, and the relationship between palace and city. The book ends with the palace still on the mountain, a monumental page in the history of modern Syrian architecture begun by Tange and completed by construction, politics and time.