This house honors the legacy of a multi-generational home destroyed by a missile on August 8, 2006, at 2:45 p.m. For fifteen years, the family of forty gathered annually at the ruins, evoking the tradition of al-wuquuf ‘ala al-atlal—the classical Arabic practice of ruin gazing—before choosing to build anew. At the core of the design are two fragments salvaged from the rubble: a single terrazzo tile and an olive tree. They are reunited in the new house through a beloved proverb from southern Lebanon, which declares: “Under every stone, a poet; and in the shade of every olive tree, a writer.” This adage, a testament to the enduring creativity of the region despite the devastation wrought by successive empires, organizes the house both in plan and section, folding the act of bowing to memory into its form. Apart from this lasting gesture, a ray of sunlight aligns with both the tree and the tile every year on August 8 at 2:45 p.m., a moment around which the family gathers to share a meal.

Beyond the olive tree and the tile, the house seeks alternative ways to invoke and liberate itself from the memory of its demolished predecessor. Unlike the submissive shadows cast by most physical structures—mere byproducts of a formal logic imposed from elsewhere—the shadows of this house tell their own story, defiantly. Here, the design process begins with the shadows themselves, working backward to shape the form, resurrecting fragments of the lost home through the interplay of light and darkness. This is not a metaphor; it is the conceptual and tectonic logic of the project. From its double-curved arches to the thicknesses of its walls, every element is crafted to weave the lost home into the shadow of the new one, physically and symbolically. Cherished arches, ornaments, doorways, vistas, and even ancestral silhouettes are experienced anew. The work celebrates the necessity of remembering but recognizes, too, that memory and forgetting are intertwined.