In Sync

The brief emerged from a recognition that conventional planning frameworks struggle to read the layered urban fabric of post-crisis cities. Streets in Old Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs carry rebuilds atop rebuilds — heritage, displacement, and reconstruction occupying the same plan, often within a single block.

Source material was gathered between site visits and remote work: archival surveys, oral testimony from returning residents and conservation officers, and field documentation made over successive trips. The intention was to map not only the built environment but the rhythms of daily use — markets that reopened before walls were rebuilt, courtyards lent across families, informal repairs that anticipated formal repairs by years.

Reading the site this way reframed what the project could be. Rather than treating intervention as authorship, the work began from continuity: what is already here, and what does it need to keep going?

Drawings, photographs, and conversations were treated as equivalent — each a way of asking the same question from a different angle. The methodology drew on visual ethnography and on standard architectural site analysis: measured surveys, sectional studies, material inventories, and a slow accumulation of interviews.

Where conventional briefs ask what should be built, the work here asked what is already there, and what does it need. That reordering shifted the proposals from object-led to fabric-led — from single buildings to systems of small repairs.

Tools included AutoCAD and Rhinoceros for drawing, V-Ray for atmospheric studies, and a 35mm camera for documentation. Field notebooks and recorded conversations carried the rest. The workflow assumed that no single representation could carry the argument alone.

The proposals — drawn at multiple scales — favoured incremental, reversible interventions that respect existing tenure, social networks, and the rhythms of daily life. Where heritage value was clearest, interventions held back. Where infrastructure was failing, proposals worked through repair rather than replacement.

What emerged is less a single design and more a kit of strategies the community could pick up and adapt — drawn at a resolution closer to a handbook than a master plan. The outputs include measured drawings, a typological catalogue, a short documentary, and a written report.

Several proposals are now under discussion with local stakeholders; others have been archived as reference for future work in the region. The project remains open — additions and corrections from residents and collaborators are expected and welcomed.