The Golden Crack

Description: Post-war Housing Project in Aleppo, Syria
Year: May, 2016
Team: Hania Halabi, Abed Kittaneh, Alessandra Gola

Syrians have been living in and among ruins since 2011. The arising chaotic situation has thus provoked an urgent enquiry into feasible reconstruction methods. Whereas the materiality of ruins dominated the reconstruction discourse, less attention has been given to the emotional, social and economic status of the war victims, and the need for urban and architectural solutions that are responsive to the subject of Trauma. 

Believing in trauma as emotive ruins, we base our urban and architectural proposal the simple idea of rebirth.

We revert perspective of destruction, looking at it as a potential for rebirth, transforming the urban wounds into traces for developing a rhizomatic city, which reinterprets the structure and vocabulary of Middle Eastern cities including Ahwash (clusters) and Haras (neighborhoods). 

The project is situated in Aleppo, in the groove created by the bombing that destroyed the urban tissues from the Crown Plaza hotel and the main mosque.

Three tactics lead the project:

Urban: appropriating the existing (post-war) topography, including the new terrain features such as rubbles and craters produced by bombing.
Landscape: reusing the concrete rubbles for producing gabion walls and pre-fabricated concrete panels. 
Architecture: the use of modular units, constructed from pre-fabricated concrete panels, columns and steel ‘U’ and ‘T’ beams.

These actions are incorporated to make the reconstruction process architecturally smart, socially sensitive and economically feasible.