Back to the Land

In his landmark work, A Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander spells out a vision for the future of architecture. In it, he states, there is a DNA to all buildings that can be identified and recreated in a new form by simply following their mathematical dimensions. Tareq Qaddumi, a Palestinian architect based in Dubai, inspired by this theory, took a stately mansion in the centre of Jordan’s one-time capital and resurrected it in a modern form.   He measured the geometrics of the original Beit Abu Jaber, the one-time residence of the merchant Abu Jaber family, who lived in As-Salt, north of Amman. The now dusty brown three-layered structure is noted for its adherence to classical geometry, known as the Golden Square, complete with protruding Greco pillars. Using this formula and with painstaking precision, Qaddumi then constructed a new house based on the same formula amongst the wheat fields of Beit Ziraa, an area to the south of the city. ‘Beit Abu Jaber looked complex and I didn’t know where it was from. It was on a hill, it negotiated a building on its side and opened up to a vista on the square,’ Qaddumi remembers.   The architect’s creation is a three-bedroom seasonal residence named Villa Beit Ziraa, a summerhouse for his parents and thus serves the same purpose as the Beit Abu Jaber house did a hundred years ago. ‘It is a similar idea to Albrecht Dürer’s etchings where he would draw a fish, shift the dimensions, stretch and pull the same fish and make a barracuda. It is just the same elements but you can make an enormous amount of permutations,’ explains Qaddumi, referring to the German romantic painter noted for his developments in the way Renaissance artists composed objects through geometrical calculations.   With its fair-faced reinforced concrete exterior and entrenched underpinnings there is a new sense of purpose to this building. It is not just a radical shift from its prototype in As-Salt but also a move away from contemporary Jordanian architecture, where concrete is ubiquitously donned with a stone façade.   Even when Qaddumi’s parents opted for this design for their new summer home, the architect says they still needed a little gentle persuasion and a few visits from their son to explain the idea fully. ‘An architect has to stretch someone’s views on the utilitarian function of a house and make a connection between them and the world. It becomes an edifice to how people see them,’ Qaddumi explains. ‘When we finally built it, there happened to be a farmer going by in his tractor who asked what kind of factory was going to be built,’ he laughs.   Two straight processions of diametrically aligned trees face the property and connect it to the terrain with mathematical precision, reminiscent of the eco-system itself. These groupings also align with the two main points of view of the home, so that from either terrace the user faces a strict formation of olive trees. Qaddumi explains it also works in negotiating the alignments of buildings and trees.   As such, the topography of the area also played on the look of the house, anchoring the structure into the ground on one side for harmony with the environment, while raising other sections for residents to appreciate the views of the surrounding farms and pastures.   Qaddumi reasons about this decision saying; ‘there are two ways to look at architecture and nature. One is the voyeur tradition where you build your little Italian villa and from your balcony you appreciate the view of the surrounding nature. The other is the one where the house folds out of the landscape and becomes more interactive. I don’t know if my parents are either of these, but my dad, being Palestinian, loves gardening.’   He adds, ‘There is a dichotomy between wanting to be there and not. The house is entrenched in some parts where you walk in and you are kind of dug in a little into the ground, and on the other side it kind of floats above it.’   Qaddumi’s embracing of nature is evident inside the building too, as a cool northwesterly breeze sweeps through the rooms from a duct at the base of the house. It filters across a pool of water outside, losing energy, causing the air to cool, before exiting from a channel on the upper level.   A similar effort to find an organic form of cooling was also implemented in the design of the building. ‘A house can be seen either as an interior space or a series of roofs,’ he says, explaining that Villa Beit Ziraa adheres to the latter principle. ‘The idea was that the house would be an extension of the landscape so that there are three floors which cascade and shade each other,’ says the architect.   The highest level of the house was built simply to cast shade over the other terraces rather than to  act as a communal space. It works with the original Beit Abu Jaber residence formula where views turn away from neighbouring buildings and instead face the town square below.   Qaddumi says the wide terraces, which form the other two roof sections, were modelled to reflect the residents’ Palestinian childhood. ‘Sleeping under the stars was a very romantic thing for my mother and father when they were children so I wanted a space for this, although I don’t know if they have ever slept there yet.’    The prominent concrete beams and high ceilings are also reminiscent of traditional architecture in the area. ‘I would walk around with somebody and they would say that the house reminds them of the vaults in old Levantine houses. You don’t get vaults anymore but you do get beams, so we used this to evoke these memories. The essence of Middle Eastern architecture is keeping the DNA of something old and taking it to the next step. Modern means it is a modern interpretation of a building rather than creating something alien [to its aesthetics],’ he explains.    By sticking to this DNA, the villa expresses the original language of Beit Abu Jaber. The Greco pillars might take a more modern form but they are still there, dancing out from the structure in strict formation. The stonework still bears a resemblance to the original house in As-Salt but here it can be seen growing untamed from the earth, which Qaddumi describes as putting in a new language to a classic story.   ‘Every stone was turned to uncover [the message of] this building. All the elements, the stairs and the pillars, were brought together. In the countryside, you go to search for the truffle hidden in the ground, this house is the result of a similar search.’   Photography: Ghassan Aqel