This is the first book to critically and visually explore the incidental and improvised approaches that have created spaces of protection from conflict and displacement, using case studies from Iraq and its diaspora that also resonate in a wider, global, context.

Written by an Iraqi architect, who has lived through wars and conflict, the book focuses on three different spheres of spatial practice – the domestic, the city and the fringes. This approach offers a rounded analysis of spatial creativity as a result of the traumatic events that have impacted the region, from the 2003 invasion up until the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic and the peak of its political turmoil.

In the face of the many injustices suffered by the Iraqi people, there has also been a wealth of creativity and imagination in the ingenuity of their design and adaptability to change. Rupturing Architecture combines textual analysis and interviews with Iraqi citizens with illustrative maps drawings and photographs, providing an architectural and spatial practice view from the Global South that is rarely seen or written about to show how the incidental improvised architecture of traumatic events could influence and shape a new design and spatial practice of humanitarian structures of living and protection.