The Genie of Architecture

It began, as all enchantments do, with travel.
At the end of September 2025, we received an invitation to cover Cersaie, the international porcelain exhibition in Bologna. For anyone working in architecture, it was more than an event; it was a pilgrimage to the heart of Italian craftsmanship. But before Bologna, there was Florence.

There is no better prelude to a design fair than walking through the city that gave birth to the Renaissance. Florence is not history; it is history breathing. Every arch, every shadow, every marble façade tells you that beauty was once considered a civic duty.

During my tour, I realized I needed a guide. So I called one of the golf-cart tourism services and met a young man named Ramez Jalal, a Tunisian guide with a voice that could narrate a football match. His enthusiasm turned the tour into a kind of architectural commentary. As he described the Duomo, the Uffizi, and the Ponte Vecchio, his rhythm made it sound like a match between time and stone. It was as if I were listening to architecture narrated by Issam Chaouali himself.

For two hours, Florence became a living broadcast.
I returned to the hotel exhausted yet filled with wonder.

The next day, I took the train to Bologna. I wanted rest before the exhibition began. But that night, something strange happened. As I drifted between exhaustion and sleep, a voice echoed near my ear, gentle but distinct. It said a single word:
“Architettura.”
In Italian, it means architecture.

I opened my eyes, half awake. Was it a dream? A whisper? A hallucination from fatigue?
Whatever it was, I felt something stirring. I turned over, closed my eyes again, and the voice returned — calm, clear, insistent.

I realized then that this was not madness, but memory. It was the voice of the thing that drives us to do what we do.
It was the Genie of Architecture.

The genie does not live in lamps or myths. It lives in our persistence, our hunger to share, our conversations with readers we have never met.
It is the invisible audience that whispers when we are too tired to write.
It is the reminder that our craft is not just construction, but connection.

At ArchUp, we have always written as if someone unseen were listening — not only our human readers but anyone out there who cares about form, space, and spirit.
If the internet has become our desert, then every article is a call into the dunes, hoping for an echo.

That night in Bologna, I understood the voice for what it was: not a haunting, but a calling.
A call to continue writing, to continue seeing, to continue believing that architecture deserves passion as much as precision.

We do not write for algorithms, though they read us.
We write for those who still believe in proportion, shadow, and grace.
We write for those who understand that the real foundation of design is not material but emotion.

Perhaps that is what the genie meant when it said Architettura.
It was not a voice from another world, but a reminder from within this one.

The work must go on — not for numbers, not for fame, but for the invisible thread that binds the architect to the audience, the writer to the world, and the dream to its design.