Faculty of Law at the University of Aleppo

Architect: MHD Samir Moudarres
Year: 1963
City: Aleppo, Syria
Building use: Educational
Status: built
Team:

The Faculty of Law building at the University of Aleppo was designed via an architectural competition in which Syrian Architect Samir Al-Moudarres (born 1936) won first place.01 It was designed between 1960 and 1963, but the faculty itself was established under Decree No. 18 of 1961. However, admission was halted by Decree No. 134 of 1967, resulting in the building being occupied by the Faculty of Literature. The Faculty of Law reopened in 1981, and classes began in the same building at the start of the academic year 1981/1982, continuing to this day.

The faculty building is located to the west of the city, atop a hill on the eastern side of the University campus and west of its main entrance. It has a total built area of 10,000 square meters.02

01  حمد سمير المدرس، “مشروع بناء كلية الحقوق بمدينة حلب،” المهندس العربي، تشرين الأول 1963، 34.   [MHD Samir Al-Moudarres, “Faculty of Law of Aleppo Building Project,” The Arab Engineer, October 1963, 34.]

02  [Ibid.]  

The building aligns with the University administration building to its north, which in turn aligns with the Faculty of Medicine to its east. The former was designed by Architect Ahmed Adnan Ikhlasi, and Moudarres designed the latter in collaboration with Ikhlasi. Together, these buildings create an urban composition that envelops a plaza.

The building is made up of two units:

The first unit contains the lecture halls and is a narrow, long, and arched building that runs parallel to the natural contours of the site. It features a sloped front garden that descends towards the university’s main entrance to the northeast. This unit consists of three floors, with the ground floor situated at the level of the lower auditoriums in the second unit. Due to the sloped ground of the site, more than half of this floor was left open in the form of a covered courtyard, overlooking the city and supported by columns.

The second unit contains the auditoriums. It has a crescent shape on the façade with exposed structural frames and is partially encircled by the first unit. This composition, with the second, monolithic unit placed against the long and modular first unit, provides contrast in the facade. The two units are separate and only connected by a wide hall.


The first floor of the first unit contains the administration suite and lecture halls, separated by a wide hall. It also contains the Dean’s office, meeting rooms, and the library with the reading hall attached to it. All rooms overlook the southwest while the corridors opposite them overlook the front garden. The upper auditoriums in the second unit are on the same level as the first floor of the first unit, and they are connected to the lower auditoriums through a wide staircase in the middle of the hall that bridges the two units. To accommodate the large number of students, the auditoriums feature wide entrances that facilitate quick entry and exit.

Overall, the faculty buildings had relatively simple shapes; The main faculty building’s arc or semicircle was selected because of the site’s natural topography, which was taken into account early in the design process.03

03  [Ibid.]

The end result succeeded in avoiding architectural conformity, eliminating the need for long corridors in plans, and providing panoramic views, as the curvature allowed students positioned on one end of the building to have a clear view of the rest of it as well as views of the city beyond the faculty garden.

Control of natural light in the lecture halls was achieved by installing vertical shaders on windows, while professors’ rooms were shaded with balconies. The auditoriums, on the other hand, were lit indirectly; the upper auditoriums were illuminated with skylights, and the lower auditoriums through side openings equipped with vertical shaders.

As for cladding, the external walls were plastered with white cement and hammered to give the appearance of carved stone.

The structure of the building was a reinforced concrete skeleton, and the ceilings of the lecture halls and administration departments were made of hidden beams and hollow blocks that were 41 centimeters wide. As for the auditoriums, a reinforced concrete frame structure was used, with each frame consisting of 11 members fixed together. The Hardy Cross method was used to calculate the moments in the structure and stresses were analyzed by unscrewing the frame parts at the inflection points and performing a static balance for each piece separately. The building was divided into eight structural sections, with the length of each section varying between 25 and 35 meters to meet architectural considerations.

Following the natural contours of the land minimized excavation and filling operations on the rocky site, reducing the total project cost, which amounted to approximately one million and seven hundred thousand Syrian pounds (approx. 420,000 dollars).04

04  [Ibid.]

01  حمد سمير المدرس، “مشروع بناء كلية الحقوق بمدينة حلب،” المهندس العربي، تشرين الأول 1963، 34.   [MHD Samir Al-Moudarres, “Faculty of Law of Aleppo Building Project,” The Arab Engineer, October 1963, 34.]

02  [Ibid.]  

03  [Ibid.]

04  [Ibid.]

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