Late ottoman houses

1The Ottoman houses built in Hebron at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries mark a complete typological break with the ahwâsh: the houses are isolated, rarely semi-detached, and most often built in the vineyards, on the terraces of the hillsides, and also along the roads that are part of the urban expansion. They are lived in by a nuclear family and have fewer rooms than the ahwâsh; their structure and the arrangement of the floor plans do not allow, as the ahwâsh do, extensions according to the increasing number of family members. The different rooms are accessed from a central hall (‘house with a central sofa’ in the terminology of Turkish houses). The façades are composed, three-bay houses, five-bay houses, etc., and their axial layout is often indicated by the presence of a balcony or a loggia.

2The Ottoman houses, however, retain certain elements of the spatial structure of the ahwâsh rooms: rectangular or square rooms covered with cross vaults, the importance of the threshold as a place marking the passage between the interior and the exterior, and the presence of niches of different sizes in the walls. These houses also retain the stone construction of the ahwâsh as well as secondary architectural elements such as geminated windows.

Illustration 16 – Dweik Palace.

School 1, Beer Sheva street: an archetypal ottoman house

3The building is located on an east-west road that, starting from the old centre, joins the main road leading north to Jerusalem and south to Beer Sheva (Biʾr al‑Sabʿ). The road was urbanised from the end of the 19th century onwards, accommodating the new urban fabric that was characteristic of the late Ottoman period. Several large houses dating from this period are now public buildings and have become schools, dispensaries, or administrative premises.

4Set on a steeply sloping site, the building has only one floor on the street, but at the rear, on the courtyard side, it has a second floor and a basement in which there are storage rooms and annexes.

5The building consists of three bays, the central bay, the main axis of the building, being the entrance and reception area, and giving access to the two side bays. The entrance opens on to a landing on the staircase which, built at the front of the bay, serves the different floors of the house: street level, courtyard level and terrace. Going past the staircase, one comes to a vast hall measuring 4.40 m wide by 8.50 m long. It faces the courtyard and opens onto a balcony which is accessed through a glass door framed by two windows, and provides access to the rooms in the side bays. These differ: the one to the east, 4.85 m wide, contains two large rooms, while the one to the west, 4.40 m wide and comprising three rooms, is structured around a secondary axis perpendicular to the hall, in a pattern identical to that of the main design, with a central bay opening onto a balcony and side bays.

6The floorplan of the courtyard level is of the same overall structure as that of the street level, but the two side bays are identical to that of the eastern bay of the first floor. The central hall gives access to four rooms and opens onto a south-facing terrace. The façades are made of carefully dressed stone and are horizontally and vertically divided by bands and pilasters.

7The street façade is divided into three by pilasters corresponding to the bays of the floorplan. It uses a principle of symmetry, with the central bay emerging to accompany the staircase leading to the terrace. This bay is again broken down into three sections by the presence of a motif consisting of double colonnettes supporting a relief arch framing the entrance door and the two geminated windows that provide light for the stairwell. This motif is not centrally aligned and deviates from the principle of symmetry, whereas the side bays conform by having geminated windows at the centre, topped by a three-lobed oculus.

8The courtyard façade has the same three‑fold division as the street façade, but in the central bay on both floors it carries a monumental decorative composition on the scale of the courtyard and the distant landscape that the slope of the land allows. On the ground floor, it is similar to a serlienne,1 consisting of a door surmounted by a semicircular transom, framed on either side by a window surmounted by a three-lobed oculus.

9The whole is contained in a recess in the façade about 40 cm deep, occupying the width of the bay and crowned by a semicircular discharge arch. The recess in the façade allows for a bench to be installed on each side of the door. On the upper floor, the figure is similar, but the façade is not recessed, and the round arch of the glass transom unites the various elements of the composition. The bays on either side are identical on the ground floor, with geminated windows topped by a low arch, but are of two types on the first floor.

10The profusion and richness of the decorative elements accompanying the door and window frames, combining floral and geometric motifs, should also be emphasised, as should the quality of the design of the windows, whose transoms are fitted with brightly coloured glass, and the sophistication of the ironwork for the protective grilles of the windows and the railings of the stairs and balconies. This work testifies to the skill of the various trades involved in the construction of the building, stonemasons, carpenters and ironworkers.

11In the end, the building shows a great mastery of composition, both in the design of the floorplan and of the façades; nevertheless a few liberties were taken with regard to symmetry, testifying, perhaps, to a remnant of the principle of autonomy of the elements, which is characteristic of the architecture of the ahwâsh.

Figure 35a – School 1, scale 1/250.

Figure 35b – School 1, scale 1/250.

School 2

12This building is also located on Beer Sheva (Biʾr al‑Sabʿ) Street, set back slightly from the boundary wall of the plot on a sloping site that has been levelled to create a horizontal plane facilitating the building of the house.

13The design of the plan is symmetrical and is arranged around a main north-south axis on which are positioned the entrance area and the hall, which serves four large rooms. A secondary axis, perpendicular to the first, allows access to two rooms, a former hall re-cut by partitions, which lead to loggias opening onto the courtyard. This cross-shaped composition allows the house to be reoriented to an east-west direction from the main north‑south direction given by the entrance and the hall. Indeed, the south of the building, where there are annexes that ignore the main composition of the house, abuts the retaining walls that were built to level the land, while the east-west direction opens onto the courtyards.

14This level, which is on the upper floor, is reached by a monumental staircase covered by a cross‑vaulted porch. The ground floor is autonomous, in the manner of the different rooms of the ahwâsh, but it partially replicates the structure of the first floor. On the north side there are two independent rooms and on the south side are the storerooms and annexes.

15The treatment of the façades qualifies and reinforces the autonomy of the two levels: the ground floor, made of roughly cut stone rubble, forms a rustic ensemble that contrasts with the rigorous arrangement of bush-hammered blocks on the upper floor, the corners of the building and the window surrounds of toothed quoins of cut and polished stones. This neatness in the composition of the façades does not, however, prevent the generous use of baroque ornamentation, showing in particular a pronounced taste for decoration in the design of the entrance porch and the loggias.

Figure 36a – School 2, scale 1:250.

Figure 36b – School 2, main elevation, side elevation, longitudinal elevation, scale 1:250 and axonometry, scale 1:200.

House 3

16This building is located in the northern suburb at the edge of the old town, at the end of the street running north‑west/south‑east from the ʿAlî Bakka quarter to the old centre.

17The house is set back from the street by a few metres, and has two levels above a partial basement to adapt to the slope of the land.

18The two levels are independent and each has its own access. The plan of the upper level consists of a hall, perpendicular to the street façade, which serves three rooms on one side and two rooms and the staircase on the other side. This hall is covered at both ends by vaulted ceilings, but is open to the sky in the centre, like a patio. The same layout is found on the top level of the Dweik family palace,2 a building that is emblematic of late Ottoman architecture in Hebron. The lower level could not be surveyed, but it can be assumed that its structure is similar except for the central hall which is entirely covered.

19The façades support this assumption in that there is an identical tripartite design on both floors. The access door on the first floor, flanked by two windows joined by a carved stone frame, marks the axis of the central bay, while the balcony on the second floor and the repetition of the arrangement of the bays reaffirm the axial symmetry of the façade. The façades of the side bays have geminated windows topped by a semicircular arch.

Figure 37 – House 3, scale 1:250.

House 4

20This is an ordinary house located near house 3. It consists of two levels, the lower level contains storage areas and annexes and the upper level is reserved for living quarters.

21The two levels are independent, and the first floor is reached by an external staircase. This level is organised, as in most Ottoman houses, in three bays, with the central bay giving access to four rooms, one of which is a double room. However, the particularity of this small house is that its shape is irregular and the hall is very narrow and, like a corridor, serves only as a means of access to other rooms. It should be noted that the size of the hall, a place of pomp and ceremony, is adapted to the size and wealth of the house, whereas the size of the rooms, whether small or large, varies little with the importance of the house.

22The façades are simple, with a large doorway to the hall and twin windows to light the rooms, no pilasters or bands, just a cornice crowning the building.

Figure 38 – House 4, scale 1:250.

House 5

23This building in the northern suburb of the old town has two superimposed levels of identical structure and a third partial level built on the terrace.

24Although irregular in shape, the house has a strong design theme, combining a large gallery open to the outside with a group of four rooms of different sizes and shapes. The gallery serves the rooms on the first floor and contains, on the entrance side, the various staircases that ensure access to the upper floors of the house. The first staircase leads to the terrace, the second to the two rooms on the terrace and the third to the lower floor.

25The building shows a desire to rationalise the access routes, but the complexity of the staircase layout and the lack of interest in the design of the façades persist.

26This building is not of the established Ottoman house type, but it is a departure from the traditional type of ahwâsh found in Hebron, somewhat like the houses described in Bethlehem in the chapter ‘Mixed Houses’. It is a representative example of the various attempts to create a new type that combined a rationalisation of access routes and construction with concerns for hygiene and adaptation to new uses, which took place in several Palestinian towns in the second half of the 19th century.

Figure 39a – House 5, scale 1:250.

Figure 39b – House 5, side elevation, scale 1:250 and axonometry, scale 1:200.

27The Ottoman houses were a feature of the urban growth at the beginning of the 20th century, in the northern suburb of the Old Town or along the road leading to Beer Sheva (Biʾr al‑Sabʿ). Bordering the road to Jerusalem, they also housed the new municipal institutions such as the town hall and the courthouse, precursors of the location in this area of the new contemporary centre of town.

Illustration 17 – Interior of hosh n^o 10 in Qaytoun.