"An architectural memoir about the devastating civil war raging in Syria for the past six years, The Battle for Home argues passionately for architecture's pivotal role in shaping social realities. Marwa al-Sabouni, a young and ambitious architect still defiantly living in her severely destroyed city of Homs with her husband and two children, uses her own autobiography and architectural sensibility to tell a selective history of her native city, and of Syria more generally, down to the excruciating present. The book is divided into six chapters, each cast as a battle with one of several facets of what is in the end the same enemy: predatory change motivated by greed, bad taste, and misguided Modernism. That detrimental change--which left huge swaths of economic inequality, urban underdevelopment, and ethical privation--directly contributed to the breakdown of Syrian society. Al-Sabouni's ink sketches in freestyle both illustrate her arguments and subtly push them further. For instance, she uses thick lines in depicting an urban redevelopment proposed by the authorities after the destruction of Baba Amr, which emphasizes the brutality of the intervention. Her own clever project for the same reconstruction, inspired by an organicist reading of traditional architecture, is rendered with various thicknesses that enhance its spatial complexity. A softer touch is reserved for the historical and vernacular examples that al-Sabouni favors.

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