Raif Muhanna: The Man Who Made the Earth's Weight a Roof for Hope

A stone wants to fall, another receives it, and between them the arch is born: in that reconciliation between gravity and shelter an architect narrator reads the life of Raif Muhanna. The book follows him from a childhood in Basir, looking at stone and not yet knowing they have an appointment, to architectural studies in Cairo and a doctorate in France, and back to Damascus University, where the teacher's task is to make students see the person missing from their drawings. At its center is the Stone Building System in As-Suwayda, recognized by the Aga Khan Award: schools for Syria's Ministry of Education built of local basalt, stone arches and vaults, where a schoolbag rests beneath a vault and old stone carries a new lesson. The narrator keeps the names of Raif, Rafi and Ziad Muhanna together, since an arch cannot stand on a stone that erases its neighbor, then pauses at Raif's vaulted house in Basir and at his writings on architectural theory and urban sociology, which ask what a neighborhood loses when it loses its square. After his death, the book imagines a child arriving late to school and running beneath the vault, unaware of the names of those who calculated its balance.