Animation Introduction Lecture

This is for all students and instructors at SABE... Please feel free to come if you are interested in knowing more about animation and animation in Jordan...

Maysaa' Bataynah and Omar Al-Ma’eni Living Niches at Dabouq - Amman

The eye starts its first trips of wonders searching for where to enter. The concluded order the eyes get from the stimulated brain is not to stop but to continue the exploration. Hence, the first move the body makes is the will to jump to all over the different and the unlimited overlooks the site affords. This suggests that if there are many people located at this paved path of the site entry, you will find in a moments that these people will go in different directions and to the different hearths of the site.

At a first sight you hardly can recognize the house, though its there

but it speaks itself out as one of those destinations that you may want to get to in your trip of wonders throughout the place. The whole setting speaks itself as a place that tells different stories about different things that are to happen or that they already happened around and within the place. Some kind of time elapses within the spaces and the niches stitched here and there. Part of the experience is that you hardly can recognize whether the local stones the house is built from are part of that the site or the site extends as part of them. The stones are used and exposed in the vertical outside and inside layers.



You perfectly experience the place with landscapes connected to those of the past vernacular alcoves of our grandparents and great grandparents’ houses in fashionable expressions. Memories bring you to the place through the architecture and landscape, and through site and material. The point is, you can not get enough with your physical and visual wonders around the place, wither you are inside, outside, or on top of the house.

At the highest point of the site, which happens to be on top of the house, you recognize another experience of wonders, terraces of roofs and earth are expanded and displayed at your different perspective. Horizons extend through the roof texture to the blue skies if you are located at ground zero on the top terraces. Surprisingly, this same ground zero visual experience, which extends you from earth to sky, at another middle point of the site it takes you from blue (water body) to blue (sky).
Exploring the inside of the house does not feel like you have moved to another level of spatial communication. Rather, it extends through the different layers of glass planes, stone walls, skylights, and openings to the same outdoor experience, but it takes you to another dimension of time and weather envelops.

The indoor experience continuously evokes with contextual suction of the soul that elaborates meanings and connections to transformed memories through your genes that may be awakened as flashes from their unconscious state to the conscious alert state with the willing to keep exploring and to serine at the different hearths on your path of finding.

The visual continuity framed by the different transparent layers above and in front marks the above expressed experience.

All Photos in this post are taken by Dr. Majd Al-Homoud. 2004.

House Design is by Maisam Associates.

The Transparent Wall

Cultural meaning usually shapes peoples perception about the built environment in such a way that any alien element to their perceptions is introduced gets their attention and criticism. Such cultural meaning usually reflects definition of boundaries in terms of privacy and interaction. This is usually expressed in countries like Jordan through space and mass rather than space and distance. This defines that solid walls in space express needs and attitudes towards privacy more than transparent walls.

We moved to new constructed offices within Building A of German-Jordanian University at the Scientific Royal Society complex that have glass walls on the exterior and on some of the interior. Controversially, many GJU staff and students expressed to us their dissatisfaction with us projecting ourselves to the public as a showcase and their awkward feeing about our lacking of privacy.

Having our backs to this transparent back wall did not make us feel lack of privacy to a certain degree especially that we are still located within a fenced territory that belong to GJU/Scientific Society. This territorial boundary offers us a buffer zone and a transitional space between the very public “street” outside the fence and the transparent wall. Plus the aluminum shutters offers us a choice of control over when and how much we want this visual interaction.

Off course the passers by from GJU staff and students felt this visual interaction and the extroverted flow of information from the inside to the outside is a cultural shock that contracts to their definition and meaning of a wall that should closed and not intrude visually and physically the privacy of the users inside. Though we are in an institutional setting, a public kind of setting, this did not help to accept such a new definition of a wall. Mirrored glass walls seem to be more acceptable than such transparent glass wall.

All Photos in this post are taken by Fawaz Shamma, March 2009.