“…no recorded event has occurred in the world, but Damascus was in existence to receive the news of it. Go back as far as you will into the vague past, there was always a Damascus. To Damascus years are only moments, decades are only flitting trifles of time. She measures time not by days, months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise and prosper and crumble to ruin. She is a type of immortality. She saw Greece rise and flourish two thousand years and die. In her old age she saw Rome built, she saw it overshadow the world with its power; she saw it perish…. She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies” Mark Twain, 'The Innocents Abroad' 1867
We arrived in Damascus, a city of some 2.5 million people, on a cool spring night in 2009 via Air France, one of the few regular carriers into the city and a reminder of that country’s historical relationship with the Islamic edges of the Mediterranean. Unaware of the topography of the city, in darkness I stared in awe at the myriad dots of lights in the northern sky. Only revealed in daylight as a thousand dwellings clinging to the steep slope of the Jebel Qassioun Mountain range which forms the northern rim of the geological bowl that is Damascus. To the south the Jebel Druze and the Golan Heights beyond. To the west the snowcapped mountains of the Anti-Lebanon range and the pass through to Beirut.
Every urban condition is here in layers of space and time. Ottoman, alongside French Colonial and mid-20th century modernism alongside French and Soviet prefabricated housing systems from the 1970’s. Damascus is essential for anyone attempting an analysis of the human urban condition – the citizen’s relationship with their city. As Mark Twain describes the longest occupied city in history, it exhibits the scars, few of the areas of destruction satisfactorily restored with any eye to materials or historical accuracy. Yet that is not its purpose. Damascus is a city of history not in history. It functions as a support organism. Its fabric is messy, often ignored. If one looks at it with a UNESCO heritage eye, a problem of overwhelming proportion.
We visited the “new” School of Architecture at the University of Damascus, an early 1980s building in the style of Gropius’ and The Architects Collaborative work in Cyprus, a deeply sculpted building in plain shuttered concrete. The Bauhaus still has a strong influence in teaching here. All students working with drawing boards, pens and tracing paper. The Professor I talked to trained in Paris and Marseilles; inspecting Le Corbusier’s’ Unite on many occasions as it rose out the ground. In conversation his concern was reserved for the undocumented and thus unknown number of ancient structures still being reclaimed by the eastern desert.
Students and staff at the university were both curious and generous towards us- these strangers from a strange land. On several occasions offering to share food with us. A snapshot of a wider community from which we only encountered friendliness, good-will and assistance.
In a week we could only catch a glimpse of Syrian society, but they appeared to be getting by, or presented an illusion of such, as you might anticipate in a nation’s capital. Although I did photograph well organised bread queues where everyone seemed to get their share, and I didn’t see money changing hands. The Professor of Architecture expressed some surprise at our choice of hotel informing us that it was usually full of Iranian diplomats. Indeed, large black cars with flags daily arrived and left. Across the city centre, US Senator John Kerry had stayed in another hotel two weeks before our visit. Damascus had a refugee problem long before then. It was home to the largest Palestinian refugee community in the middle east. I assume it still is. The significant army presence no different from many cities across the globe.
Yet underlying all the apparent deterioration I glimpsed sight of something almost intangible yet ineluctable– perhaps in among it all was a paradigm for future sustainable living. The layering of the city is legible. Its ages exposed like rings of a tree trunk simply because nothing is removed. The past an asset banked for the unknown future. The longevity of every single piece stretched in form across time. A city based on the utility of necessity, not of desire. As a life support system where a fragile eco-system acts as a thin membrane giving a minimum of support to the maximum amount of people. Threadbare. As the Dickensian World of Nicodemus Boffin in Our Mutual Friend who made his fortune from dust- everything useful. Everyone clinging on, like the houses on Jebel Qassioun. A persistence and tenacity that I found overwhelmingly positive and life affirming.
Nothing is discarded – a long-collapsed French Colonial Terrace two blocks away from the 15-storey concrete megalith which, on the edge of the ancient Citadel, dominates the city’s skyline – the concrete frame of a 1970’s banking headquarters on a long-abandoned construction site. Yet both abide-awaiting re-use. Perhaps, not in our lifetime. Both existing as a paradigm for the Damascene view of the city. Just off Straight Street a two-man tailors shop no wider than the treadle sewing machine they shared, offered made-to-measure.
On the edge of the Souk spare parts shops and suppliers of spare parts for spare parts - parts for cooking equipment to the forefront. If they did not stock it someone could make it. A bazaar of possibilities.
The profusion of bread shops in the old city – stone bunkers with queuing rails, as if the entrance to a fourth division football ground, suggests everyone gets a basic provision-sufficiency or not. Yet the everyday innovation of literally hundreds of 300mm unleavened discs cooling on grids or on car bonnets- carts or bikes before packing by long suffering customers was mysterious.
There is a sense of a working city here but one on a fragile edge of functionality where anything might tip the balance into chaos. This is a city whose essence is not its relationship to historical perfection nor an architectural aspic but its functionality as a living breathing organism. The closest to the idea of a city that understands the secrets of old age, of survival. Damascus has of necessity developed and adapted its own Darwinian Urban Genetic Code – It’s future is assured just not a future that an old Europe would grasp- yet. Maybe one day it will, of necessity, require unravelling.
Comments