Most recently, the designers mounted the installation, All Purpose, at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. The work introduces a new stonecutting technique in response to the dearth of experimental stone architecture in the region. The fact that local municipalities mandate stone cladding (legislation that dates back to a 1918 master plan created during the British Mandate) has resulted in systematic and undifferentiated approaches to construction.
“Every building is made the exact same way. There’s only one construction technique, and that creates a boring city. The idea with this project was to speak about a new way of living with a structure made out of stone not only in a local context, but also to inscribe the use of stone approach in a more global context, an that has more to do with contemporary architecture,” Yousef said.
Celebrating Crafts and Artisanship
In 2016, AAU Anastas collaborated with local artisans to develop a method of shaping olive wood—commonly used for fabricating religious souvenirs in Bethlehem—into 552 six-pointed modules, which were then fastened into a self-supporting structure. Each module was crafted from small branches to avoid having to uproot slow-growth olive trees. The resulting structure, Mass Imperfections, was fabricated using a machine engineered to make deviations unique to each batch, mirroring the nuances of master carvers’ processes.
“Celebrating crafts and artisanship is a different perspective, which makes use of the contemporary skills of artisans for the production of design and architecture in a modern context,” Yousef said.
In 2018, AAU Anastas participated in an architecture competition that tasked participants to design a tourism-driven village in an area surrounding Bethlehem that could replicate the atmosphere of the historic city. Dismissing the brief as overly nostalgic, the designers came up with a counterproposal, Folklore or You Die. It features four buildings, each of which represents a different typology of generic local urban space at a magnified scale. Rather than romanticizing the past with iconic structures, AAU Anastas everyday architecture types, which can be proposed easily for any future scenario.
“Heritage, and in particular, architectural heritage, has become a Western contemporary appreciation of local cultures. It freezes [architecture into] a state of museum-ified objects with illusional qualities, and gives it de facto folkloric value,” Elias said.
Navigating Local Challenges
AAU Anastas has designed two public buildings in the region: Hebron Courts Complex and Toulkarem Courthouse in Tulkarm. As is the case with most local public building competitions today, both projects were funded by international aid and implemented by the United Nations. In Hebron, the 172,000-square-foot building was planned so that local construction companies and contractors would have sufficient expertise to build it, even though buildings that scale are uncommon there. In Tulkarm, the courthouse required infrastructural improvements beyond the building itself.
“The electrical capacity of the city wasn’t enough for the building to function properly so it was updated,” Yousef said.
Following their presentation—which also included a meditative installation that traveled to London and Dubai before settling in the Cremisan Valley: a community-building radio station, a maker network, and a cultural hub—Jamaleddine commended AAU Anastas’s ability to circumvent challenges, and asked them to elaborate on the impetus behind their ever-expanding range of project types.
“You’re working with this idea of movement as an operating concept in spite of or in a place where movement is limited, if not always restricted,” Jamaleddine said. “Despite these constraints, the work is never fixed in one place and only responding to that.”
“Lots of architects are facing complex situations due to layers of agendas that link to other political or economic contexts; developing autonomous initiatives is a way to maintain equilibrium in the practice,” Elias said.
Shannon Werle is the digital editor in the GSAPP Communications office.