Book Review by Gioia C. Sawaya; Chemaly’s book offers a different attempt to reading war ruins in a Lebanese urban context. It suggests another perception of an architectural space, with the need for a built environment that encourages empathy with the user. He defines this space as a verb (an affording action) rather than a noun. The introduction of the book helps to locate the author’s main aim and frame his discourse.
By introducing the term “self-scape”, Chemaly sets forth a set of dimensions (or parameters) that are adopted in the book as “tools of analysis”. Those parameters are specifically space, time, and matter.
To begin with, the author’s arguments throughout the book stem out from different definitions, the first being the notion of architectural time. Chemaly adopted the concept of time as posited by the German philosopher Schopenhauer. To him, time should not be perceived in a linear or classical way. This perception of time is in fact very similar to the differentiation of time previously developed by Henri Bergson1.
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