Architects:Elias Khuri Architects

Area :188 m²

Year :2022

Photographs :Tom Jobim, Elias Khuri

Lead Architect :Elias Khuri

Illustrations : Cecilia Pruccoli

Photo Editing : newlandscapes.org

Country : Palestine

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The Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948 constituted the first architectural view, so to speak. They illustrate what can be termed the “Incomplete Scenes”: shards of walls, remnants of the floor, scattered piles of stones, or an open arc looking into the horizon. It is within this architectural view that the “Informal Architecture” are located; they are made up of unfinished, often un-plastered, bricks; they are under ongoing construction, enmeshed in a process of informal growth and transformation. The house exists in this fragmented context, and definitely belongs to the fragments of the current architectural view, and their planning sought to provide a solution for local architecture, while also suggesting new interpretations of the Palestinian house.

12 Trees/7 Cubes/5 Courtyards -  Located in al-Mashhad, one of the Palestinian villages that held its ground even after the establishment of Israel in 1948, the House with the Twelve Olive Trees lies in what was once an agricultural area famed for its plentiful olive trees. Only a few of these trees survived demographic and urban expansions and residential houses substituted olive trees without any prior planning. This house was built while preserving all twelve olive trees that surround it through the creation of a sustained relationship between the void and the cubic blocks, between the exterior and the interior.

The shape of the void - The “excavated” space leads back to the tectonic idea of the massiveness of Palestinian stone houses. The house is closed to the outside in order to open up to different courtyards and spaces trying to build continuous relationships between the inside and the outside. Voids of different shapes and sizes, different heights, and different borders make these spaces open to the sky in different ways, allowing to create of different movements between inside and outside and giving the possibility to pass on different roofs to create always new points of view.

In praise of light/ In praise of shadow - All the interior spaces of the house overlook more than one external space, and the rooms are distributed between courtyards, providing different degrees of light and shade throughout the day.  This distribution allows the light and the air to pass from one void to another, and the windows to frame a different olive tree each time. The walls turn into a living space inhabited by deep windows and seats that look outward and inward.

The house is built with different natural materials: stone floors from Galilee, stairs carved in stone that recall the use of Palestinian handcrafts, wooden windows, and olive-colored ceramic tiles.

The presence of trees and vegetation, shade and variation of light and color, gravity and natural materials, and the references to the historical and cultural heritage form a deep sense of belonging and identity.

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