“Perhaps authorities should turn to those who are better versed in the matters of construction. In cities dense with people and buildings, inhabitants contend even for space and air, above and below, seeking to benefit from every exposed surface of a structure, and this can often bring disputes to neighboring or shared walls… All this remains concealed from those unversed in the craft, and is discerned only by those skilled in construction, who read its signs through the arches, bindings, centers of timber, and the inclination or uprightness of the walls.”

-Ibn Khaldun

What does it mean to build in times of precarity?

To respond is not only to repair what has been broken, but to attend to the conditions that made such fragility possible. What we face today is not a single collapse, but a long unraveling, an accumulation of harm across decades of colonial reordering, wars, displacement, environmental exhaustion, and the daily negotiations of life under unstable ground.

In such hours, architectural practice exceeds design and construction. It becomes a way to take stock of what remains and what has been lost; to decide what can be done and what must be refused; to regain the capacity to inhabit, to build, and to imagine within a fragile material and social reality.

This conversation between Khaled Al-Bashir and Wesam Al Asali unfolds alongside the exhibition In That Same Hour, where Al Asali presents Cultures of Making: Archives of Scarcity in Craft and Architecture. The work forms part of his extended research, which looks for alternative archives from within the social fabric itself, archives able to speak to lived conditions, and seeks to spark new energies for building and imagining on shifting ground.

The talk will be held in Arabic. To register, please complete the form here.