MatterBetter – international contest

Result : 3rd Place & honorable mention.

– MEMORY

The proposal aims to accompany the Syrian people’s essential grieving process on the path of a healthy recovery. By establishing new foundations that embrace the country’s chaotic past while engaging in innovative mixed urban typologies, the project installs the memory process as the backbone of the new city. In a bruised but recovering Syria, scars of past battles shall not be erased. The ruins are considered as the privileged support for the new city. Wherever possible, ruins will be stabilized in order to coexist with the new structural frame superimposed to them, so as to be preserved as a memorial of the tragic war.

– OPEN-SOURCE

An architecture, conceived as flexible, modular and appropriated for all, will offer the possibility for the syrians to rebuild the cities by themselves. Nationnally disseminated, each ravaged city becomes an awaiting bud, where the accumulation and combination of simple elements forms complex, multiple and susceptible entities.

– AGRICULTURE

The ancient “Fertile Crescent” is today ironically threatened by the end of its food self-sufficiency. In this context, urban agriculture becomes a promising alternative for sustainability of the farming future of Syria. By implementing growing areas to the habitation modules, every Syrian becomes a part-time farmer, at the center of a network of commodities exchanges within a district, enhancing the interdependence of those new urban communities. Agriculture and urban wastelands will grow side by side: nature and life gradually resuming their rights over those deadly symbols, letting sanctified ruins stand as the quiet witnesses of Syria’s rebirth.

more info here : http://matterbetter.com/