The Prime Ministry Building in Damascus: An Architectural Epic of Architecture and Decision

Some buildings are inhabited by people and some by decisions, and the Prime Ministry Building in Damascus belongs to the architecture of administration, where the state sits before its papers, reads, debates and decides. The book asks what form an invisible authority should take, open or fortified, simple or monumental, then questions the serious stone of the façade and the entrance where an employee, an official and a visitor first meet the institution. Corridors become the arteries along which a file travels from office to office and returns with a signature, a note or a new question. In the smallest room of the state the narrator finds a desk, a telephone and files whose papers can change many lives, and the council chamber, the paper and the window each give their testimony. The book ends with Damascus answering that every decision should be made for the human being, and the building warning never to make stone greater than the person it was built for.