Re-Coding Post War Syria: Mud Brick, Timber Frames and a Rooftop That Waits to Be Built

What do you build in a city where whole blocks have become rubble? The instinctive answer is something large, fast and new. This proposal goes the other way. It reaches back to the oldest building material in the region, the mud brick, and asks whether a wall made by hand can return a sense of belonging that bombardment took away. The result is modest in footprint and deliberately unfinished at the top: a pair of buildings that leave room for the people who return to keep adding to them.

Re-Coding Post War Syria, designed by Sara Krzysztyniak, is set in Syria and describes itself as a reinterpretation of the ancient mud house used as a tool for cultural revival. The project received the People's Choice Award at Echo of Civilization.

Two White Volumes Facing Each Other Across a Grey Street

From above, the proposal reads as two pale objects set into a field of grey, featureless blocks. One sits on the larger plot and wraps around an internal courtyard; the other, narrower and taller, stands across the street like a companion. Both are crowned with timber pergolas trailing vines, and a thin strip of planting runs between them. The contrast is blunt and intentional: everything around the site is rendered as anonymous mass, while the two buildings carry texture, shade and growth.

The functional diagrams floating beside the aerial view make the logic explicit. Program is stacked as coloured blocks, floor by floor, with communication, educational, recreational and supplementary uses assigned to specific bays. One building leans toward children and learning; the other gathers a café, bathing and quieter rooms around its courtyard. It is a clear, legible plan, and that clarity is both its strength and the point the jury chose to push on.

A Brick Wall Left Deliberately Broken

The most arresting moment is at street level, where the white plaster gives way to exposed brick with a ragged, stepped edge. The wall looks like a fragment that survived, and the new construction appears to grow from it rather than replace it. Arched windows punctuate the plaster above, a perforated brick screen filters light across the upper wall, and a timber pergola projects over a terrace of café tables. The building stages its own history: ruin at the base, renewal above.

Not every reviewer was convinced that the earth gesture goes deep enough. Baerbel Mueller, who judged the competition, saw value in the proposal's civic ambition while questioning how fully the material carries the architecture, and raised the issue of scale for a neighbourhood like Zamalka:

The project is thought through, but lacks a bit of character - mud/earth elements are incorporated more on a decorative level than on architectural scale. This proposal would be a nice contribution to activate communal life in Zamalka. It might be too small to create a real impact on the whole of Zamalka and would need to be thought as one of several centres of this kind.Baerbel Mueller, Associate Professor / Mag.arch / Head / Owner, [applied] Foreign Affairs, University of Applied Arts Vienna ; nav_s baerbel mueller, Austria

The Courtyard as a Cool Room Open to the Sky

Inside the larger building, the traditional courtyard returns as its organising void. A shallow plunge pool sits at its base, flanked by tall plastered walls with narrow arched openings. Above, a bridge of perforated brick spans the space, letting air and dappled light pass through, while the broken brick wall reappears along one side, its profile stepping down toward the water. The section drawings pair this with a climatic argument: thick walls holding heat and releasing it slowly, water and greenery cooling the enclosed air.

This is where the reinterpretation of the mud house feels most convincing. The courtyard is not a picturesque reference; it is the device that makes the building habitable through a hot summer, and it gives the bathing and meditation spaces a calm centre that the street outside cannot offer.

Timber Frames That Invite the Next Storey

On the roofs, the pergolas do more than shade. They extend the structural grid upward as open timber frames, a gesture drawn from building traditions where upper floors are framed in wood above a masonry base, and where an unfinished top is left for later generations to close in. Vines climb the posts, sunlight falls in bars across pale paving, and arched facades across the street frame the view. Today these are gardens and walkways; tomorrow, the proposal suggests, they could become rooms.

That idea of growth is precisely what Gregorio Lubroth, who judged the competition, wanted to see pushed further. His comment challenges the project to loosen the very grid that makes its expansion legible:

While the clarity of a structural grid can provide a seeming certainty it also tends to limit. I wonder what would happen if you take your material palette, combined with the potential for future expansion, plus a more fluid and dynamic idea of communal spaces, one that is not regimented by 'program' and ignore the confines of the 3dimensional grid. A modular system does not have to be based on a single standardized structural bay. Perhaps the operations are smaller and more idiosyncratic...Gregorio Lubroth, Principal, TZOU LUBROTH ARCHITEKTEN, Austria

Play and Memory Behind Tall Windows on the Ruins

The interiors are where the social program becomes tangible. A children's room is shaped by timber arches that double as a climbing wall and a slide, with a ball pit, low wooden tables and soft seating. Its tall windows look straight onto ruined buildings, an unflinching choice: the children play in full view of what happened, inside a space that insists on care and warmth. Elsewhere, a gallery corridor lined with rough brick hangs photographs of historic architecture on slender steel frames, light raking down toward a single dark door.

Together these rooms name the project's real client: a community that needs places to meet, to raise its children and to remember. The architecture is quiet so that those activities can be loud.

Why This Project Matters

Re-Coding Post War Syria argues that reconstruction can begin with familiar materials and familiar spatial types rather than imported solutions. The courtyard, the brick wall and the timber frame are things local hands already know how to build, and the proposal treats that knowledge as a resource for rebuilding social life, not only shelter. The broken wall at its base turns damage into a starting line instead of something to be erased.

The jury's critiques sharpen the lesson. If earth is to carry cultural revival, it has to work at the scale of the architecture, not only the surface; if growth is the promise, the system that allows it may need to be smaller, looser and more open to improvisation than a single repeated bay. Read alongside those comments, the project becomes a useful prototype: one centre among the several a neighbourhood would need, and a clear invitation to imagine what the next, less regimented version might look like.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: Sara Krzysztyniak

Competition and award

People's Choice Award, Echo of Civilization

Jury

Baerbel Mueller, Associate Professor / Mag.arch / Head / Owner, [applied] Foreign Affairs, University of Applied Arts Vienna ; nav_s baerbel mueller, AustriaGregorio Lubroth, Principal, TZOU LUBROTH ARCHITEKTEN, Austria

Location

Syria

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