Hi,
I am an architecture student from Germany and would like to share my last semester\’s urban design project with you. It was a group work focusing on the revitalization of a city quarter in the UNESCO-listed Old Town of Damascus, Syria. We proposed up-to-date housing in the traditional courtyard houses and a new cultural center on what has been urban wasteland for centuries.

| check out the project here (urban) and here (housing). |

How do you feel about it? Is a new construction for culture and leisure in this context full of religious history thinkable? How about multi-family housing around a common courtyard in an islamic country?

After all, what is the most sustainable solution for this decaying but beautiful quarter – in all aspects of sustainability? What would have been your approach?

People

• Mustafa Ali, an artist living in the old city of Damascus.
• Meyar Al Roumi, a film producer
• Hekmat Chatta, a Damascene architect, one of the founders of batata group, well concerned about what is happening in the old town of Damascus.
• Ali Kaaf, a Syrian artist living in Berlin.
• Samer Kozah, an artist from old Damascus with a new vision of it.
• Friederike Stolleis, a German ethnologue with her dissertation “Öffentliches Leben in privaten Räumen – Muslimische Frauen in Damaskus“
• Stefan Weber, a specialist for Damascus in so many ways.

Books & Magazines

• Ross Burns with all his publications like “Damascus – a History” and “The Monuments of Syria“
• “Auf der Suche nach dem Orient” the February magazine of DU, a swiss cultural journal

Post autor: Leonie (Germany)

If you want to share your projects with our readers, contact us.