Compound Houses
p. 230-245
Texte intégral
House 8
1This is a small house in Wâd Maʾâli Street, of which only the old part dating from the beginning of the 20th century has been preserved. It is aligned with the street, and is a detached building, separate from the neighbouring houses. The steep slope of the land allowed light into the two basement rooms from the valley side, before a recent extension altered this arrangement. This level, independent of the upper levels, is accessible from an external staircase running along one of the gables of the house. On the ground floor, a living room is built over one of the basement rooms, and a hallway, a small utility room and the staircase leading to the first floor are built above the other room in the basement. This layout reveals a typological break, abandoning the addition of independent rooms in favour of an overall plan composed of a through hallway, providing access to the two rooms and the staircase. On the upper floor, the change in construction method –a metal beam structure for the ceiling instead of the cross vaults of the lower levels– frees the construction from the need for interior load-bearing walls by shifting the loads onto the outer walls, and allows an interior partitioning, a corridor and three rooms, independent of the structure. The façade reveals the difference in construction methods between the ground floor and the first floor: on the ground floor, the openings reflect the asymmetrical organisation of the interior layout, with the door centred on the hall, a window centred in the living room and a small window offset laterally and vertically on the staircase landing; on the first floor, the windows of the three rooms are symmetrically arranged, concealing the presence of the staircase leading to the terrace. The differentiated treatment of the secondary architectural elements –doors and windows surmounted by pointed arches on the ground floor and segmental arches on the first floor– reinforces the independence of the composition of the two levels.
2This example illustrates a break in the conception of the Bethlehem houses, abandoning the system of addition of rooms in favour of a planned whole, while preserving certain characteristics of the hosh: independent access from the basement and autonomy of composition of the two upper levels. In the ahwâsh, the unit is the room and here it is the floor, but it is not yet the building.
Figure 34 – House 8, scale 1:250.

House 9
3The house on Star Street is located beyond the qantara known as the Damascus Gate. However, this gate has no defensive character but is simply defined by the building that overhangs the street, marking a stage in the urban growth that accompanied the progressive alignment of the street. The topography of the site determined the vertical arrangement of this house, which has two levels above the street, the ground floor and the first floor, and two levels below the street, the upper basement and an independent lower basement accessible from the garden; the upper basement is connected to the garden by an external staircase. The floor plan of the house is organised in three bays, a central bay and two side bays, each of which has a partition between the front and the back to form two rooms in each bay. On the ground floor, the central bay contains, on the street side, the hall and the access to the other floors and, on the valley side, a large loggia open onto the landscape. The side bays are reserved for workshops and shops. The basement, partly raised, repeats the floor-plan of the ground floor. On the first floor, the living quarters face the street, and on the valley side the three bays are joined to form a gallery open to the landscape. The floor plan represents a modified version of this structure, the bays of the gallery having been closed to create large loggias linked to the rooms facing the street.
4The design of the façades shows the three-bay structure of the plan in a centred and symmetrical composition. On the street, a band and a cornice emphasise the ground floor and first floor. The door and window frames are given a refined architectural treatment. Forgetting the simple and structural decorative features that are characteristic of the ahwâsh, a new sophisticated decorative style came into being and appeared on the façades of the houses. On the valley side, the façade is structured by the superimposition of large loggias on three levels. They end with the gallery on the first floor, which extends over the entire width of the building. The grand scale expressed by the treatment of the façade is in tune with the scale of the valley landscape, while the façade on the street is content to stay with the urban scale.
5This example illustrates a new step in the evolution of housing: the unit is no longer the room as in the ahwâsh nor the floor (see house 8), but the building in its entirety, thought out and designed in plan, section and elevation. It is a finished, complete composition, to which any extension can only be added by design. Tinkering, such as the creation of the two rooms in the upstairs gallery, where small windows have been added above the entrance door to light a storeroom on the landing of the staircase leading to the first floor, is not welcome.
Figure 35a – House 9, Street elevation, plans and courtyard elevation, scale 1:250.

Figure 35b – Axonometry of house 9, scale 1:200.

Illustration 16 – Typical architectural figure of the large Bethel houses of the late Ottoman period, located north of Paul VI Street.

House 10
6The house is located on Salesien Street, which is bordered along its western side by the large Salesian complex containing a church, a convent and a school. The ground floor of the house is raised by a few steps to allow light into a half-buried basement. This arrangement is due to the shallow slope of the land at this point. It is a three-bay building, the central bay of which, the entrance bay, forms a vast through hall. On one side it serves two large rooms and on the other two smaller rooms, a utility room and an enclosed staircase leading to the basement and the terrace. This bay can also be accessed through a secondary entrance located in the residual space between the house and the boundary of the plot in which it stands. The street façade reflects the spatial structure. The corner pilasters, and those placed on either side of the entrance door, divide the façade according to the bays of the floor plan. The composition is not completely symmetrical, the staircase bay being narrower than the other side bay. The façade rests on a plinth set at the base of the pilasters, and ends with a cornice at the height of the capitals. The windows, surmounted by a four-centred arch, are not evenly distributed across the façade, but are joined together in pairs to form a whole and perhaps to perpetuate the memory of the geminated windows of the ahwâsh. The central mullion of the geminated windows has become a wall, but it is interrupted at the top by the decorative element linking the two windows.
7The entrance sequence of the house is particularly well designed in a succession of frames: the first defined by the pilasters inside which are the few steps necessary to reach the ground floor, the second by a four-centred arch resting on columns set in a recess in the wall.
8The side façade, that of the secondary entrance, takes up the compositional elements of the street façade, but here the treatment is purely decorative, as the pilasters do not match up with the bay structure of the floor plan. However, the composition highlights or signals the presence of the staircase, which stands out as a significant element of the building. The terrace served by the staircase is not used by the inhabitants, but is a floor awaiting a future storey of the house.
Figure 36 – House 10, scale 1:250.

House 11
9This house, which faces Najâjra Street, is bordered on both sides by public staircases and opens onto a garden at the rear. The ground floor groups together four sets of rooms, separated by a system of access routes organised along two perpendicular axes. The first system, perpendicular to the street, constitutes the main entrance hall of the building. It passes through the middle of a row of shops, and continues into a large hall opening onto the garden and the valley, and serving two rooms on either side. The other system, parallel to the street, is located between the shops and the rooms served by the hall. It has a secondary entrance and a staircase giving access to both the basement and the first floor, and allows rear access to the shops.
10The first floor is partial, faithfully reproducing the ground floor plan, the rooms above the shops being living quarters and the access routes remaining identical. The situation becomes more complicated in the basement, as the vertical alignment between the geometry of the ground floor rooms and that of the vaulted rooms forming the infrastructure for the upper levels is rather haphazard. This discrepancy in the superimposition can be explained if one supposes that certain rooms, notably the two on the garden side and the three on the street side, were built before the construction of the upper floors. This hypothesis is based on the difference in the thickness of the walls, the type and location of the openings, and the different levels at which these rooms were built (see cross-section).
11The street façade is symmetrical and centred around the entrance. The different levels of the house are emphasised by the presence of a plinth into which the access steps to the ground floor are cut, a band delimiting the two levels of the building, and a cornice marking the top of the façade wall and its relationship to the sky. The width of the façade is divided into three parts by pilasters. The ornamental work of the central bay is rich, with pilasters, a door framed by columns and topped by a corbelled balcony, and contrasts with the simple rigour of the frames of the shop doors and the windows on the first floor. The side elevations continue the horizontal division of the main façade, but without pilasters. The windows simply allow light into the rooms, and their arrangement no longer follows the rigorous composition of the façade. The garden elevation simply marks the central distribution bay by opening widely onto the valley. The particularity of this house lies in the structure of its layout; it is yet another, different way of associating elements, after the addition of rooms of the ahwâsh, the composition of bays creating a unity of plan, the building thought out and built as a complete unit, here the perfectly controlled unity of design is achieved by the articulation of sets that link the rooms to their access routes.
Figure 37a – House 11, scale 1:250.

Figure 37b – House 11, floor plan, street elevation, side elevation, scale 1:250.

Figure 37c – House 11, courtyard elevation, longitudinal section, scale 1:250, and axonometry, scale 1:200.

Figure 38 – Conceptual models: the access routes of the ahwâsh.

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