Nightrise liberates night architecture from light design, revealing the night not as absence, but as a site of cultural and political production. The book delves into the nightly worlds of farmers and herders in southern Lebanon, whose agrarian practices have transformed in the aftermath of a decades-long occupation. The work allows for an understanding of the night as a site of intervention, one actively being built and deconstructed in southern Lebanon’s Jabal 'Amil and elsewhere. It reads Jabal 'Amil as an area deeply connected to both Lebanese and global history, with darkness being a shared human experience worldwide, yet one that allows for specific cultural expressions. These are not comforting accounts, but expressions of how darkness, even under the full force of surveillance and militarization, remains a generative force for epistemic practices that insist on worldmaking beyond domination. Rather than confining these struggles within fixed national boundaries, Nightrise casts them as emergent solidarities that wield a global reading of the contemporary night, offering architecture an alternative to the project of imperial and capitalist illumination.

Mohamad Nahleh is an assistant professor of architecture at The Ohio State University. His interests include postcolonial literature, urban theory, Arab history and mythology, and Islamic cosmology. His writing has been published in several journals and magazines, including Places, Thresholds, the Journal of Architectural Education, and The Funambulist. Nahleh is also a practicing architect in Lebanon. He holds a bachelor’s of architecture from the American University of Beirut and a master’s of science in architecture studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also taught for several years.