60×60: A Modular Framework for Rebuilding Aleppo After Conflict

What does reconstruction look like when the goal is not to erase a city's wounds but to build around them? In Aleppo, where years of conflict shattered the physical and social fabric of one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities, the answer might begin with something deceptively simple: a 60-centimeter by 60-centimeter concrete block. Repeated, clustered, and arranged through participatory methods, this module becomes a framework for public space, craft workshops, educational wings, and underground memory. It is architecture reduced to its most honest unit, then scaled up to address civic life at its most complex.

60×60 is a project by Eyad Rabadi, published on uni.xyz. The design proposes a new model for post-conflict urban architecture, one rooted in reclaimed materials, modular construction logic, and deep engagement with Aleppo's traditions of souq commerce, filtered light, and communal gathering. Rather than offering a singular monument to recovery, the project distributes its programme across research and educational clusters, a central circular auditorium, and commercial zones that reconnect the city to its craft economy.

Filtered Light and the Memory of Souqs

Walk through Aleppo's historic covered markets and you encounter a specific quality of light: soft, intermittent, carved by perforated roofs and stone arches. 60×60 recreates this condition through a shaded overhead grid designed to support climbing plants. The result is not mere decoration. As vines mature, they produce dappled shadow patterns that soften harsh sunlight, create microclimates within plazas and walkways, and trigger collective memory of the souq experience. The covered corridor shown here, with its perforated metal roof channeling daylight toward the far end, demonstrates how the project translates traditional spatial character into contemporary construction. Adjacent courtyards, where vine trellises cast intricate shadows onto textured concrete walls, extend this logic into open-air gathering spaces.

The integration of greenery is not incidental. It represents renewal and resilience. In a city where so much has been stripped away, the slow growth of plants through a steel armature becomes a visible metaphor for recovery, one that residents can tend and watch change with the seasons.

Construction as Community Act

A worker assembles a branching rebar sculpture under open sky. The image captures something essential about 60×60: construction here is not a black-box process managed by contractors but a participatory method that rebuilds trust alongside walls. The project specifies reclaimed materials and simple construction techniques, deliberately lowering the barrier to community involvement. Gabion walls filled with rubble, steel frames that local fabricators can weld, planting components that residents can install: these are not budget compromises. They are design strategies that restore agency to people who have had theirs stripped away.

The modular street furniture diagram makes this legibility explicit. Each component, from gabion base to timber seat to planting trough, is designed as a discrete element that can be combined in different configurations. The system accommodates varying site conditions and programmatic needs without requiring specialized labour or imported materials. It is a kit of parts for civic space.

Gabion Landscapes and Accessible Ground Planes

The curving gabion seating walls that descend alongside cobblestone pathways reveal how 60×60 handles topography and accessibility. Sections of the project show a deliberate strategy of maintaining most programme at ground level for universal access, while the underground gallery containing memory exhibitions sits below the central auditorium. Above ground, the gabion walls do multiple jobs at once: they retain earth, provide seating with timber bench tops, and create planting pockets that soften the hardscape. The material honesty is striking. Wire cages filled with stone fragments make no attempt to conceal their construction; they celebrate the act of assembly.

In the courtyard view, two figures stand beneath a vine-covered pergola flanked by gabion planter walls. The scene is quiet and ordinary, which is precisely the point. Post-conflict architecture often defaults to the dramatic gesture. Here, the ambition is the everyday: a shaded place to stand, a bench to sit on, a plant growing through a steel frame. The underground memory layer, separated from daily life, allows the surface to be devoted entirely to living, working, and gathering. Remembrance happens below; renewal happens above.

Programme Distributed, Identity Restored

The site plan organizes three primary components: research and educational wings arranged in modular clusters, a central circular auditorium that symbolizes collective voice, and commercial and craft areas that reconnect to the souq tradition. This distribution matters. Rather than concentrating civic functions into a single landmark building, 60×60 spreads them across the site so that movement between zones reproduces the experience of navigating a market town. The circular auditorium becomes a centrepiece not because of its height or material extravagance, but because of its geometry: a form with no hierarchy, where every seat faces the centre.

The underground gallery beneath the auditorium is perhaps the project's most carefully considered move. Memory in post-conflict cities requires sensitivity. By placing exhibitions about lived experiences below grade, the project avoids monumentalizing trauma while still acknowledging its weight. Visitors descend to remember; they ascend to re-enter civic life. The vertical separation is both spatial and psychological.

Why This Project Matters

Post-conflict reconstruction is too often framed as either emergency response or grand vision. 60×60 occupies the productive middle ground. Its module is small enough to be built by hand, its materials are drawn from the rubble of what came before, and its programme is shaped by the social patterns that existed long before the conflict. Eyad Rabadi's project demonstrates that architecture can rebuild trust, stimulate public life, restore traditional craft economies, enable civic participation, and shape safer, more inclusive urban environments, all without relying on imported expertise or monumental form.

In a discipline that often rewards spectacle, 60×60 makes a case for something harder to achieve: quiet, systemic, community-driven repair. The 60-centimeter module is not a limitation but a declaration, that reconstruction begins at the scale of a single block, placed by a neighbour's hands, in a city learning to gather again. As a prototype for post-conflict urbanism, it is meaningful, buildable, and deeply human.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Eyad Rabadi

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Project credits: 60 X 60 by Eyad Rabadi.