For years the news from Syria has not been good. In January 2011, a national uprising began after a Syrian man set himself alight in imitation of the Tunisian fruit-seller who had sparked the Arab Spring six weeks earlier. In February, protests against police brutality spread to the capital Damascus. Initially peaceful and with limited objectives—prisoner releases, repeal of the emergency law, multiparty elections—the protesters were faced with deadly attacks from Bashar al-Assad’s security forces. Gradually the revolt turned into an armed revolution, which aimed to overthrow the Baathist state. Within two years the country was engulfed in a civil war, infected by jihadis both domestic and foreign.

Syria has experienced every imaginable catastrophe—from chemical attacks to the tentacular spread of Islamic State (IS). According to a recent estimate, 470,000 people have died in the conflict while 10 million are now refugees. In addition, the country’s physical environment has taken a battering. Ancient monuments have been destroyed: IS blew up the Temple of Bel in Palmyra and, during fighting between the government and rebels in Aleppo, the 1,000-year-old minaret of the Umayyad mosque collapsed. Cities have been flattened; homes destroyed.

On 27th February, a shaky ceasefire was agreed between most of the warring parties that has allowed civilians a measure of respite. Geneva III is supposed to lay the groundwork for a permanent settlement—possibly involving the division of the country—but while that prospect is still distant, Syrians are starting to think hard about how, when the time comes, they might rebuild their country. The destruction might be tragic, but it does allow for the possibility of creative reconstruction.

The Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni’s memoir, The Battle for Home, is an intelligent and cool-headed contribution to this new movement. That al-Sabouni managed to write the book at all is something of a miracle. She has lived in Homs, Syria’s third largest city, throughout the war. In that time, she has witnessed the bloody aftermath of bombings from her window, and been forced to dodge mortars and snipers on her way to meeting her PhD supervisor. Even so, her intellectual explorations never faltered. In 2013 she emailed the philosopher Roger Scruton with a list of questions about his 1981 book The Aesthetics of Architecture. Scruton—who in his foreword to her memoir describes her as a “profound thinker”—says they discussed the ways in which buildings and the lived environment reflect a society’s health, and what architects can do to improve the lives of ordinary people.

Homs, like many Syrian cities, was developed with little concern for its inhabitants. In the 1960s, factories and refineries were built in urban areas, transforming the city’s once famously clean air into a dust-filled, noxious nightmare. The historic Old City was either neglected or thoughtlessly repaired: “Random and tasteless additions disgraced it everywhere,” al-Sabouni writes. “Parts of the centuries-old buildings were left crumbling; some stone houses had been removed altogether to be replaced by four or five-storey concrete blocks.” Growing up in the 1990s, al-Sabouni found there were no functional parks, public cultural centres or—apart from the Old Souq—any shared spaces where people of different classes and religions could mingle on neutral territory. Like other young people, she felt “jailed behind the bars of nothingness.”

The poor town planning was not only the result of aesthetic blindness: hubris and greed also played a part. One governor was desperate for Homs to be more like Dubai—described here witheringly as looking “less like a city and more like a shelf of perfume bottles”—and he encouraged shoddy high-rise buildings to sprout all over the city. “It was painful,” al-Sabouni writes, “to witness those pin-like protrusions randomly puncturing the city, like cigarette burn marks on a tortured body.” Her violent simile is deliberate. Al-Sabouni believes you can link Homs’s unhealthy and alienating environment with the hatred that erupted during the revolution. “Architecture offers a mirror to a community,” she argues, “and in that mirror we can see what is wrong and also find hints as to how to put it right.”

As an undergraduate before the war, al-Sabouni’s teachers told her to copy western styles—American homes from Cape Cod or New England, chosen from “random library books” that had little in common with Syrian traditions or ways of living. The city’s Ottoman architecture was regarded as old fashioned and uninteresting. Only once the civil war started did al-Sabouni dig deeper into Homs’s heritage, seeing its ancient buildings as a model for harmonious co-existence. In Old Homs, for example, the mosque of Khalid ibn Walid (an early Muslim general) and the Holy Church of St Mary (the original structure dates from 59AD in what was then called Emesa) are positioned close by one another. The call to prayer and church bells commonly overlapped. Judged on purely aesthetic criteria, says al-Sabouni, there isn’t much to either building. Nevertheless, she adds, they served an important function: “Their coarse textured façades, moderate heights and low wide door welcomed every visitor humbly into their warm and simple interiors, and for that reason they were loved, becoming—in their own way—instruments of reconciliation between communities.” Both have been severely damaged during the war.

“It was painful to witness those pin-like protrusions randomly puncturing the city, like cigarette burn marks on a tortured body”

Though al-Sabouni values traditional Islamic architecture, she has little time for the oriental clichés that dominate modern Arab buildings. Asked by her teachers to design a trade centre in Damascus, she was downgraded for not including any “Islamic” elements—domes, minarets or mashrabiya (an oriel latticework window). These features make up the kitsch language favoured by Arab rulers that has little consideration for their original context. Historically, al-Sabouni says, such notionally Islamic elements were actually “a decorative by-product of the architectural process,” rather than something that carried “a separate goal or loaded agenda.”