About this book
The Palestinian Museum at Birzeit won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2019, and it opened—famously—without a collection. That fact makes it an unusually productive starting point for thinking about what museums in Palestine and the wider Arab world are actually for.
Architecture of Commonality uses the museum and its terraced gardens as a framing device rather than a subject. The essays are organised around four themes—Stones, Seeds, Voices and Walks—which let the book move between the building, the landscape it sits in, and the political and historical conditions that produced both.
Key features
- Essays by scholars across disciplines and cultures, plus interviews with the designers
- Structured in four thematic sections: Stones, Seeds, Voices and Walks
- Sustained attention to the gardens and landscape as much as the building
- Around 150 illustrations, full colour
What you'll discover
- How architecture participates in memorialisation and the making of collective memory
- Curatorial strategies developed in response to conflict and occupation
- The blurred boundary between architecture, landscape and land art at Birzeit
- Why cultural institutions can plant hope even when the political ground is unstable
About the editor
Tomà Berlanda is an architect and academic whose work addresses architecture and its social role across Africa and the Middle East. Contributors include Nadi Abusaada, Amin Alsaden, Mirna Bamieh, Meisa Batayneh, Farrokh Derakhshani, Róisín Heneghan, Walter J. Hood, Alexandre Kazerouni, Adrian Lahoud, Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, Ella Neumaier, Cristina Steingräber and Lara Zureikat.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Dimensions: 170 × 245 mm
- Pages: 288
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783966800266
- Publisher: ArchiTangle
- Publication date: May 2024
Perfect for
Readers interested in museum architecture and cultural policy, landscape architects working with terrain and memory, and anyone following contemporary architecture in Palestine and the Arab world.