In the summers of my childhood in Lebanon, we would sleep on the rooftop under the open sky. It was a gift of the season, when the weather turned warm and steady, and rain was no longer expected. I remember the thrill of carrying our bedding up the stairs, the way the night air felt different on our skin, and how the stars seemed impossibly close. We’d lie there, wrapped in our blankets, the rooftops around us quiet, and everything above stretching wide and infinite.
That feeling often returns to me when I step through spaces shaped by arches. There is something about moving through those repeating curves that feels like walking inside memory—like rings inside a tree trunk, each arch a marker of time passed and self transformed. The quiet rhythm of the stones, their measured distances, hold both presence and passage.
Architecture, in its way, frames our lives. Gates and thresholds shape our sense of movement and belonging. I often wonder when it began—when humans chose to enclose space, to divide the outside from the in. And what we might have left behind in that decision. That rooftop freedom still feels different to my body than any indoor room ever has. Sleeping without a ceiling above was like returning to something ancient, something we weren’t supposed to forget.
And yet, here we are—passing through arches, building spaces to hold us, walking hallways that curve like time. Maybe every once in a while, we need to step outside again, look up, and remember what it was like to sleep under the stars.
