Building Within The Incompleteness

Incomplete or abandoned structures have become a widespread phenomenon in the city of Damascus and its countryside due to current local and global crises. Many highly valuable areas that had been planned to be built as commercial buildings have become long-term incomplete structures, and most of their investors/owners and stakeholders have gone bankrupt, moved outside the country, or even passed away. As of yet, no legislation has been passed regarding this kind of built environment, which makes taking action to determine the fate of those structures challenging.

That is where this project comes in, to redefine the presence of these structures and reuse them, keeping environmental sustainability in mind. 

This project aims to reconsider the state of incompleteness and reframe it as an opportunity, to take full advantage of these dead structures, and explore potential urban typologies that can rapidly respond to the contextual demands and meet the needs of the local community within the current Syrian post-war reconstruction movement, by adopting small-scale insertions and applying dry-construction methods at a time when resources to realize new projects in the middle of the city do not exist.

The unfinished structure this project focuses on is located in Kafar Sousah, Damascus. It consists of four stories of a reinforced concrete-based structural frame with a total height of 25m, in addition to a 4-story basement. Initially, the construction began in 2009 and was interrupted until it eventually stopped in 2012 due to the national financial and political instability that Syria was facing. The incomplete structure was originally meant to be a mixed-use building consisting of a 5-star hotel and a shopping mall close to the two already established shopping malls within a range of less than 1 km, all located in a high-class residential area, affecting the surrounding property’s tangible and intangible values significantly.

The reuse and the transformation of this structure are defined by a sequence of dry and small interventions proposed for each floorplan individually rather than finishing the original plans. 

Starting from the ground floor, which has a total area of 9500m2. Due to the current state of construction where no facades were installed and the direct relationship with the surroundings, the ground floor is publicly accessible from all sides and serves as a public space, optimizing street-level engagement with the structure. This level mostly operates as a food market that gathers the continuous emerging mobile food vendors that are informally scattered throughout the city, plus a public outdoor cinema.

The 1st and 2nd floors have a total area of 4800m2 each and are dedicated to the business incubator, where a series of small-scale inflatable units are injected between the existing structural columns. The units are made out of ETFE, a highly recyclable material, with an appropriate ceiling height, enough to create a semi-open environment where users can also enjoy the vast, incredible panoramic views outside the building.

The 3rd floor mainly operates as a rooftop restaurant for its splendid aesthetic, western orientation, and spacious indoor and outdoor areas overlooking the city, with part of the area dedicated to technical equipment to serve the building.

The 1st basement functions as an auxiliary space related to the business incubator above, with a proper environment for product fabrication, connected to an exhibition that can also be directly accessible to the public from the ground floor, whereas the other three lower basements are dedicated to parking lots.