Rasa’el al-‘Imran ila al-Insan (Letters of Architecture to the Human)

This publication is born from necessity. It emerges from the sands of the Naqab, from homes built of concrete and memory, from lives once rooted in tents and now suspended in half-finished rooms and disappearing villages. Over the course of three years—through building, drawing, listening, and writing—Rasa’el al-‘Imran ila al-Insan has evolved into a trilogy of letters written with both words and hands.

Structured around three scales of existence—the home, the agricultural land, and the urban infrastructure—this book weaves personal narrative with architectural reflection. Each chapter unfolds as a series of letters, intimate and political, theoretical and practical. The aim is not only to reflect, but to act: to offer tools for building aesthetics that are possible, grounded, and shared.

In a region where formal architectural practice has often failed its people—either by absence or by unaffordable beauty—this book offers an alternative discourse. It argues for an architecture that can be touched, altered, repaired, and remembered by those who inhabit it. In doing so, it challenges the binaries of formal/informal, beautiful/useful, temporary/permanent, center/periphery.

Drawing from lived experiences in Palestine, especially the unrecognized Bedouin villages of the Naqab, this work speaks to broader global questions: What becomes of the human when their built environment is denied recognition? What does it mean to grow up in the shadow of displacement, and how can we reclaim the narrative of space through building, planting, and speaking?

Rasa’el al-‘Imran ila al-Insan is not merely a book—it is a call. A call to expand the architectural imagination in the Arab world and beyond. A call to return to what we can build with our hands, our minds, our discourse, and our collective memory.