A peek into photography of informal settlements architecture: Damascus

My colleague Tarif Ajjoub was kind to share a photo book called Informality Archigraphy Damascus. It’s a ?collection of photos from informal settlements in ?Damascus, the Capital of Syria, a city known to be inhabited since about 11 thousand years ago. One of the themes the contributors and authors explore in the photos is “scarcity”: not only of materials but of social representation. For me, the collection brings out individual creativity in the design of homes in informal settlements.

For example, one of the images shows four adjacent wall textures designed from the same brick type and color. The textures transform an otherwise monolithic and mundane collection of buildings into distinct small apartment blocks with character.

The other is how households create space for plants. Climbers run from wall to wall, held by poles and sometimes on wooden rooftop trellises. Then there is the beautiful cascade of plants from a rooftop running down the whole side of a building. I will never forget the old bathtub, repurposed for flowers and grass.

?A first-floor balcony front is entirely made from rectangular flower pots that were once large food tin cans. Tin cans with their painting fully intact are interspaced with rusted brown ones, making for an easy-on-the-eye pattern that is disrupted by an arrangement of different flowers in each pot. Nice.

I am glad and thankful to have learned what “Archigraphy” means (the photography of architecture ) from this informality collection.?#informalsettlements #urbandesign #archigraphy