We were asked for strategic proposals to rebuild the Old City of Aleppo. The lack of information makes it difficult to define accurately the relations between the project and the pre-existence. Using tools like Google Earth, therefore, may result into a Haussman-esque exercise which would weaken local, topographic and human diversities. Furthermore, the project shouldn’t be burdened with a prescribed mission to provide identity, nor pretending to romanticize the ruins of the conflict, or attaching new symbolic values to them.

The first investigations address issues like daily rituals as a generating tool for Architecture, the detection of spatial patterns and sequencies in the most active spots of the city or the way verticality is perceived in Aleppo.

As density is understood as an inevitable consequence of the ‘hyperurban’, a vertical growth strategy is outlined in order to lengthen and raise the existing urban fabric: mixed-use towers which structure inherits the limits of the plot it is erected in.

This structure is fueled in two ways:

*The stairs, on the one hand, circle and pierce the building, becoming one additional street of the Old City.

*The band, on the other hand, is composed by programmatic modules which parasite, complement, permeate, deny or even work autonomously in respect to its adjacent spaces. The shower, for example, is the intimate device par excellence which becomes a blurry intermediary between community and domesticity. It creates a conflict which inhabitants get the duty of managing: between preserving the intimacy boundaries of the family habitat or reaching a climatic comfort state inside the building.