Sahel Al Hiyari is one of the region’s best kept architecture secrets. One that is slowly but surely coming to the fore and his work is challenging the way we view space, heritage and modernism. It’s not by accident that this may be the first time you’ve heard his name or seen his work though he has six projects in the pipeline and five that are completed. Jordanian-born Al Hiyari is careful and a bit too self-effacing for a man with the talent to express himself with such clarity and eloquence. “To tell you the truth,” says the 40-something architect, “my interest at the end of the day is not to arrive at a certain language of style [of architecture]. There are certain conditions to a particular place that I am intervening in and that in itself creates a language.”
He is also pretty much of a late starter to the business. It was in the midst of a degree in fine arts at the University of Miami that he decided to switch to architecture and transfer to America’s premiere design school in Providence, the Rhode Island School of Design, gaining a Bachelor Degree in Architecture and Fine Arts before moving on to Harvard’s graduate School of Design for a Master’s Degree in Urban Design. He also has a Doctorate of Research in architectural composition from the University of Venice. To his peers, he is known as academic, highly intelligent and innovative.
With such illustrious credentials, you would think that Al Hiyari would want to work in major cities, but his passion for the Middle East and his concern for the development of its cities brought him back home to Jordan. He established his practice in Amman in 1998. Known for its rolling hills, the visual landscape in the city remains bland, something that Al Hiyari attests to and actually finds challenging, “The [building regulations] we have right now produce nothing more than an urban sprawl. The more recent parts are developing as big suburbs which have no human scale whatsoever and no spatial qualities which are conducive to the modern urban experience. So the idea of tackling these regulations becomes a challenge in itself,” he says.
Though Al Hiyari has only a few projects completed, they are easily recognizable in their sense of place and purpose. Al Hiyari’s first project was the restoration of a farm house, B-House, in Jordan. The client wanted to make it more modern yet maintain its heritage resulting in an easy intermingling of different periods of time. The façade remains old as does its structure. The interior of the house has a more spatial sense of proportion. The architect felt somewhat confined, not being able to fully unleash his imagination, “The B-House was my first experience with building. And for me, it was intentionally done in a clear pathological manner to engage with the construction process in Jordan. I couldn’t propose a building that broke mores from the beginning,” he explains.
It didn’t take long for Al Hiyari to come up the goods. In 2001, he completed an outstanding project in Jabal Amman. The theme itself was unusual and very much up his alley. The Clinical Psychologist’s Workspace as he calls it in his monograph, is an exercise in experimentation. Minimalist in concept in the interior, the façade is a series of raw steel sliding shutters that act as windows, ensuring privacy and movement at the same time. “It was instrumental in taking local practices and pushing them to their limits and experimenting using recycled materials, local craft and strange concoctions in the building process,” says Al Hiyari. Following on this theme, he created a prototype for the Sand Loft Apartments in Kuwait City, a project which remains on hold pending a municipal license. With the two buildings facing each other, the architect once again uses the same shutter method, which in fact is a double façade of glass and panels. The panels are mobile so when you open them, you get filtered light, according to the architect. “It is a matter of control, like a diaphragm that opens and closes to allow different conditions within space. The image of the building is constructed by the individuals that live within and they give you a collective expression that is constantly changing,” he concludes. So outstanding was this project, that award-winning Portuguese architect and Al Hiyari’s mentor in The Rolex and Protégé Arts Initiative, Alvaro Siza, depicts it as “…a project that enlivens an urban area undergoing profound change, in which two solid towers, vibrant in their solar protection skin, define space, permeated into a ground floor complex geometry.”
But Al Hiyari’s greatest feat to date is the house in Khawlan, Yemen (30km east of San’a) that is about to be implemented. An architect who wholeheartedly believes in the assimilation of the environment as a major precept in modern architecture, A-House is nothing short of stupendous by all accounts. Located in between two mountains the house has the feeling of being a connection between the two as well as being submerged in the ground. For inspiration, he turned to the Ancient Egyptians, “People see it as futuristic, but I don’t believe it is so. I think it is a contemporary project that has its roots in Ancient history. What I tried to do is bridge the gap. The project first started off as a pyramid which then got transformed and got inserted into the landscape, becoming a connection between the two hills,” explains Al Hiyari. The breaks in the surface were created, along the way, to reflect the breaks in the landscape. For Al Hiyari context is everything, the building has to fit within the story the landscape is narrating – it has to be part of the dialectic.
As a visionary shaping the way we ought to live, he is troubled by our current state of building, especially as the Arab world is looking to create a modern urban landscape. Dubai is, surprisingly, a prime example of what Al Hiyari believes should not represent the modern Arab city. “Dubai is a bizarre phenomenon and I am not sure that it’s sustainable and the amount of energy used to create micro-climates is frightening. In an environment with such abundance of sun, why not use solar panels, for instance. I would say that there are good buildings there but not necessarily good architecture,” he explains. He points to Lebanon and Yemen as places where interesting individual architecture is being created.
So what does the modern Arab City look like? Al Hiyari won’t be cornered into answering such a question. It’s not within his approach to predict as so much of his work is about evolution. “There is a lot of cutting and pasting going on and it leaves much to be desired. To be honest, the modern Arab city has not really been investigated yet. But I am a big proponent of our culture and heritage. This region has been influence by classicism and modernism alike. And as long as we are part of this cultural exchange, we will keep our identities while evolving with new ideas.” With Al Hiyari at the helm of our modernist expression, you can be sure that the buildings of the future will retain strong Arab foundations.
Contact
Al Hiyari and Partners
Amman, Jordan
Tel +962 6 46 44 742
HYPERLINK "mailto:shp@batelco.jo" shp@batelco.jo
