The building site
Here, the time of building
There are two building sites, not one: the one that raises the house, led by established masters, and the school's own, which opens afterwards and never closes again.
The house is not raised with ṣāniʿ. It is raised so that there may be ṣāniʿ.
THE HOUSE ITSELF
Who raises the house
The fondouk that shelters the house is an old building, raised by established masters, under works supervision and according to the procedures a listed building requires. The ṣāniʿ do not intervene there.
Heritage prudence would be reason enough; a simpler one is added to it. the ṣāniʿ are also the residents, and as long as the house is a building site, there is nowhere to lodge them.
Here, the time of building; the programme of the house is read elsewhere. The house →
DURING THE WORKS
The first intake trains in the medina
That period is not lost to them. During the works, the first intake trains in the masters' workshops in the medina, according to the usage that has always governed apprenticeship in this city — each sleeping at his own family's.
It enters the house when the house is finished, and enters it already half formed.
AFTER THE OPENING
The school's building site
Once the house is open, the school's own building site opens in turn and never closes again. It advances in the order in which the ṣāniʿ become able to measure themselves against it.
First come the outbuildings — stores, terraces, service rooms, linen room — then the garden with its channels, its basins, its trellises and its enclosing wall: works modest enough for a mistake to be repaired, and real enough for it to count.
Then come certain parts of Al-Munya, the adjoining house, each campaign remaining led by the school's ateliers under the direction of a master.
Last, and for a long time, come the houses of the derb that the house raises one by one in order to settle craftsmen in them. Al-Warsha →
THE SIGNATURE
What is signed can be called to account
Every finished work bears, discreetly and outside the field of the composition, the formula ʿamal (عمل), the name of the hand that executed it and the year. Where A ṢĀNIʿ worked under a master's direction, both names appear.
The usage is no vanity: if, thirty years later, a joint gives way, it will be known which atelier is to answer for it. The corporations abided by this deferred responsibility, and it is for that, not for honour, that the craftsman has always consented to sign.
THE RHYTHM
One atelier, then growth
The house does not open with every corporation. It opens with a single atelier — leather, iron and wood — and the number of men it can house. The reserved wing, or the adjoining volume, comes when the masters and the resources are there. The door towards the Munya remains untouchable.
WHAT REMAINS
When the building site falls silent
The wall stops waiting. The work remains. The man who led it carries away a malaka, not the house. One does not carry away the Riad.
Al-Warsha →·Al-Athar →·The house →·Organisation of the spaces →
الرِّياضُ لِأَهْلِهِ، لَا أَهْلُهُ لِلرِّياضِ
“The riad is for its own, not its own for the riad.”