This issue is dedicated to modern architecture in the Middle East, and pairing with the Ninth Docomomo International Conference hosted in Turkey, is indeed of special significance. The issue introduces a set of unexpected encounters involving a fresh new outlook on what Westerners construed or fantasized as "orientalism."
Facing the Western world from the Eastern edges of the Mediterranean Sea, these encounters are meant to shed light on another history that is conscious of its millenary relevance and uniqueness; a history of the whole that reiterates itself in the smallest parts, material and immaterial, in stones, in golden fragments, in blue-greenish screens, in distant songs, in its melancholy. But beyond the impressions and notions conveyed by each of these parts is the wish to present a historical account of the efforts carried out by ancient communities to become modern societies, interpreting their founding premises and the present tensions that enduringly strain them.