Learning from Aleppo : Aleppo, 36°11'52"N 37°09'37"E

Syria has always been a crossroads, a stratification and contamination of cultures, stories and religions. Aleppo, specifically, is a city that has been able to overcome numerous catastrophes over time, and rebuild on the signs and fragments of old traces. Learning from Aleppo is an invitation to capture the design guidelines of the building texture and the natural vocation of the site in order to give voice to new building. The urban texture does not “forget” its past: it retains traces of its various stages of expansion, destruction, and transformation. Learning from Aleppo: relying on the ability of urban tissues to integrate and erase the pre-existing features, and to measure (with urban typologies and forms) what has remained and changed within the Hellenistic, Islamic, and modern city. Even measuring the transformation of the natural elements of the soil in anthropic structures, tells: a calcareous outcrop of strong symbolic character that has been remodelled over time. Through the “strip” designed by the Citadel’s tell (and by the souq and mosque system, madrase, khan), it is possible to have the city grow along the east-west historical axis, the Decumano, in the voids left by the war.