Hard light
Sahel Al Hiyari’s ‘beautiful bunker’ is monumental in Amman
There is a moment as you approach the edge of Dabouq, a suburb on the western fringes of Amman, when you realise that you are holding your breath. Having navigated the formerly forested hilltop’s mildly depressing confusion of red-roofed, neoclassical villas and chunky, cookie-cutter limestone family apartment blocks, you stumble across a house worthy of the location.
Massive, monumental and hunkered into the hillside, the concrete behemoth, hand-sanded to an almost fleshy finish, is the work of architect, urban theorist and painter Sahel Al Hiyari. At first sight, you may find yourself wondering if it is indeed a house instead of, say, the regional HQ of some internet giant or a very aesthetic multistorey car park. The co-founder of Amman Design Week, Al Hiyari has been finding ways to make Jordanians rethink the concept of home since 1998. Barghouti House, built for one of Amman’s worldlier and better-heeled families, is the latest in a series of buildings that blends a modernist form with an appreciation for the archaic, and not through lazy recourse to postmodernism.
‘I like the idea of indeterminate identity, something that conjures up the memory not of one specific thing, but of several things at once,’ Al Hiyari says. ‘So the result is not a conceptual closed circuit.’ Inspired by what he terms Jordan’s ‘almost indecisive identity’, its millennia of cultural influences (Bedouin, Nabatean, Roman, Umayyad and Ottoman), and assorted 20th-century ‘isms’, he works with a broad palette of references, and sees a continuum between past and present.
‘A few years ago, we were all looking at parametric architecture, thinking it was amazing,’ he continues. ‘But look at [17th-century Italian architect] Francesco Borromini’s work, and you see the same ideas expressed in classical geometry. And they still hold water.’
A similarly atemporal approach imbues the Barghouti House, which is conceived as a collection of massive slabs into which
spaces have been inserted. The house evinces such a monolithic, and practically megalithic, quality that it is easy to imagine the dolmenbuilders would have come up with something like it, if they’d had knowledge of concrete. It is this invocation of antiquity and sense of sheer, suspended weight that causes the breath to catch upon first sight, for despite its brutality – Al Hiyari only (half ) jokingly calls the house his ‘beautiful bunker’ – it possesses a weightlessness, as though having alighted fully formed on the hillside, it might also at any moment depart.
The effect is amplified by the landscaping. As with her similarly brand-new-butestablished gardens at the Palestinian
Museum in Birzeit, Lara Zureikat succeeds in making the plot look as if it has never been disturbed, and full use of the planters built into the house’s massive slabs makes it feel similarly settled.
Seen from the rear, the point of entry, the building is an almost windowless layering of dynamic floating angles, solid floorplates and cantilevered sculptural massing and doesn’t initially read as domestic. Like a cascading, liveable bridge, its many levels tied together by floating staircases, it flows with the steeply sloping topography.
The descent to the main door deepens the sense of indeterminate purpose.
Vast mirrored doors reflect the landscape, so the gaze is deflected naturally upwards, through a concrete well, to the square of sky formed by the floating overhead courtyard that separates the two bedroom wings. So far, so mysterious.
Inside, the house unfolds in fragments. The warm wood panelling and spare but inviting interiors – a collaboration between Al Hiyari and Lebanese design duo David/ Nicolas (W*235) – dispel any impression of
‘home as museum’. For behind the muted façade lies a series of airy, eminently liveable spaces bathed in a soft light that filters through skylights, lightwells and the deeply recessed floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto the pool, more gardens and the panoramic views over the surrounding hills.
The relative compression – ceiling height is a modest 2.3m – picks up the building’s external dynamism and draws the gaze forwards, pulling the landscape into the house, telescoping indoors and out.
This hybrid ‘open but enclosed’ approach respects the greater Middle Eastern need for privacy – this is a region not yet fully at ease in glass boxes – by riffing on the traditional vernacular of the blind, inward-looking house, while simultaneously enabling the contemporary indoor-outdoor lifestyle with ample expanses of glass, then mitigating transparency and modulating light by locating them deep under protective overhangs.
The Barghouti House has its cake, and eats it. Contemporary without being ‘today’ (and thus avoiding the fate of eventually becoming ‘period’), it occupies multiple worlds. Built both to last and to age gracefully by surviving changing climates and social mores, it is a house destined to be enjoyed by generations to come. * sahelalhiyari.com; davidandnicolas.com
An ‘open but enclosed’ approach respects that this is a region not yet at ease in glass boxes