MONUMENTAL MASS

Sahel Al Hiyari’s Barghouti House softly integrates into the landscape while remaining impressively monolithic

- AIDAN IMANOVA

Set on an undulating landscape of hills that were once covered in abundance by native oak trees, Barghouti House appears to have independently landed onto the site. At first glance, the monumental structure seems less like a residence and more like a civic or cultural building. Upon closer inspection of its many nuances – its sensitive embrace of the surrounding landscape, the gaps in the structure that result in interplays of light and shadow, the hand-sanded delicacy of the façade and the floor-to-ceiling windows that reveal a rich interior – one is immediately taken by the warmth against its brutal structure.

“The quality of materiality plays an important role in the general ‘style’ of the house, where its hand-sanded concrete surfaces undulate to create an imperfect, vibrating body that allows the structure a softer tactile feel, which is not really commonly sought in reinforced concrete buildings of this type,” says Jordanian architect Sahel Al Hiyari.

The house is located in Dabbouq, a residential district set to the west of Amman – an area that has seen mass development, resulting in environmental damage to one of the few forested areas in the Jordanian capital. For this reason, Hiyari’s sensitive approach has been to navigate the building around the existing landscape so as not to cause further damage to the area. Instead, the single-family villa – which is located on a rectangular lot of land – is skewed in relation to the existing topography, aligning it with the direction of the sharp diagonal slope that extends from one corner of the site to the other.