The Dawn of the Fusionists...

So a new semester has just started at GJU... and I'll be teaching only Design and Visual Communication students... something which I consider as a bless...

And for This semester I decided to start up a social network for all my students. The name of the network is [Fusionists]!
I wanted to come up with a theme that will reflect on the experience, the spirit and the outcome of this network... So fusion as an act and with all of its derivatives seemed as a good starting point.



In this network students will upload their assignments, photos, videos and share stuff from the web as well... in this way the learning experience extends from being a one way channel between the instructor and students into something more flexible and definitely multichannel.

Again the learning experience goes beyond the class time... and in a less formal context...

This is just a prototype that I'm suggesting and will be monitoring to see how this idea can evolve into a real interactive learning experience...

I'm really excited about this idea and hope that it will prove a success...

I have to thank Ning for making it so easy to create a social network... and I'm grateful for the power of the Internet... for freeing some minds and trying to eliminate stupidity...

I wish all the best of luck in the new semester... and I wish you [Fusion]... =)

My Interior Architecture Pedagogy at PSU-KSA

I recall my students at GJU asking me to teach them Interior Design Studio. I never had doubts that I wanted to do it, but I never had the time to think about it, to plan it, and to execute it eithr until I came to PSU-KSA in September 2009.

Until then my whole Design Process for teaching Architecture Design Studios was ultimately based on transforming linguistic scenarios and verbal expressions into spatial diagram and then to spatial explorations that extrude to architecture from in-out.

When my students at GJU asked me to teach them Interior Design Studios they made me wonder why they thought so - Their answer was sharp and to the point: "you invest so much of your time teaching us how to design and express space - meaning interior space."

Here we go, at PSU I took a chance. I began my Interior Architecture Pedagogy, even though the experience was with second year students - First Design Studio, ID204. They must have had a tough experience with me, I think!!!

The outcome to me was amazing, these girls were able express, to experience, and to deliver. Sophomores at that.

Next semester, I want to develop the course and I want to make the experience even more unique. More students are wanting to sign up for this class and they were already exposed to my pedagogical techniques, so together we will be able to experiment and develop the pedagoy a step further. I can not wait to see the results.

Student - Razan Al-Sheikh -ID204

Student - Hind Al-Shamari- ID204
Student - Saloonas Hoseen - ID204
The house concept is a mix of Traditional Andalusian Design, Local Saudi need for privacy and expression of family/guests domain, and modern stylestic expressions.

Student - Noura Al-Sanei- ID204
The house concept is a mix of classical design for the whole house and tech-modern material at the work and support area (kitchens and baths).

All Photos in this post are taken by Dr. Majd Al-Homoud. 2010.

Adobe Villages Spread Over Badia Extensions North of Riyadh – AlGhat Mud Village

There,,, located the wonders of meeting power of earth and sky, where earth extends to the sky in three dimensional layouts genuinely and intelligently extend as hearths for the soul. At a first sight, while approaching the yards of the rennovated houses the soul races with the eye to discover and reveal the radiant warmth of adobe and what it ensouls.

All Photos in this post are taken by Dr. Majd Al-Homoud. 2010.

Fragments of the Delirium

Exploring the subconscious mind in the creative process through the representation of impulsive notions that materialise in the marriage between a project and a site. The outcome is a collage of visual ideas that represent architectural solutions for an imaginary project on a site as a ground for exploration.



The Full details are as follows:
1. Theme: Fragments of the Delirium - Experimentation through Exploration -
Exploring the subconscious mind in the creative process through the representation of impulsive notions that materialize in the marriage between a project and a site. The outcome is a collage of visual ideas that represent architectural solutions for an imaginary project on a site as a ground for exploration.
2. Time and length of the Workshop –
a. Summer Session – The workshop will be held only during summer time of each academic year.
b. Six weeks – 16 hours per week, 4 days a week, 4 hours a day = 96 hours contact hours that is equivalent to GJU Credit System (3CH) per Semester.
3. Time – Time frame is 5/7/2009-13/8/2009.
4. Suggested Schedule – Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 2:00p.m. – 6:00p.m.
5. Legibility - the following criteria is suggested for students who want to apply for the workshop:
a. From GJU - Students who finished their Second and Third years in Architecture/Interior Architecture.
b. From other universities - Jordan University of Science and Technology, Jordan University, and Al Al-Bayt University - Students who finished their Third years in Architecture.
6. Number of Enrolled Students – 15 students will be enrolled as follows:
a. From GJU – Ten
b. From outside GJU - Five
7. Fees – The following rates are to be charged by enrolled students:
a. Students from GJU 250JD
b. Students from Jordan 500JD
8. GJU-SABE Students benefits – those who are enrolled in the workshop will have the following benefits:
a. Their training in the workshop will be part of the 160 Local Internship requirements for graduation, so the 96 hours they get with Badran Workshop will be equivalent to their total requested 160 Local Internship hours because they will attend Badran Office and they will be working on their own after workshop hours.
b. They will get an official certificate.
9. Other Students benefits – those who are enrolled in the workshop will have the following benefits:
a. They will get an official certificate.
b. Jordan Excursion (Thematic Trips around Jordan).
10. Partners Participation – the following participants will be involved in conducting the workshop:
a. From Badran Group – Dr. Rasem Badran, Architect Jamal Badran, And Architect Basma Abdullah.
b. From GJU-SABE - Dr. Yasser Rajjal (Main member from Administration), Dr. Majd Al-Homoud (Part-time training), Dr. Samer Ratrout (Full-time training) and two Teaching Assistants from SABE-GJU.
11. Time Frame – the following is the Time-Frame for the workshop preparation:
a. 23rd of June 2009 – Applications’ Submission Deadline and SABE in-house exam
b. 28th of June 2009 – Interviews of short listed applicants by Badran Group and SABE at GJU
c. 30th of June 2009 – Contact of accepted applicants
d. 2nd of July 2009 – Registration of accepted applicants
e. 5th of July 2009 – Start of Workshop
f. 13th of August 2009 – End of Workshop
g. 19th of August 2009 - Workshop exhibition at SABE

The Finals

I love the finals period in any school of Architecture...
You walk around and smell the stingy odor of UHU... you avoid being knocked on your face from all the wires connecting laptops with any available electricity outlet...
models are everywhere... butter papers flying swiftly in the air...

You pass by people who are ready to eat you up if you accidentally come in contact with... just because they hadn't slept the last couple of days...
coffee cups are filling up the garbage bins and fall on the floor around...
everything is in an uproar state...
until the day of Jury... where some manage to dress up and stand and talk fancy talks with seemingly important jury members...

Our SABE... is decorated with many colorful presentation and models... it is a pleasant treat to all architecture and design passionate maniacs...

Bloom Boom!

:: Does your alarm clock tell you when to go to sleep?
:: Do you feel offended when someone offers you a BIC pen?
:: Do you know what UHU glue stick tastes like?
:: Do you CELEBRATE space?
:: Have you ever slept more than 20 hours non-stop in a single weekend?
:: Have you ever used your 1GB memory card just to photograph the sidewalk?
:: Do you have more photographs of buildings than of actual people?
:: Have you ever taken your girlfriend/boyfriend on a date to a construction site?
:: Can you live without human contact, food or daylight, but you if can't make prints, it's chaos for you?
:: Can you use Photoshop, Illustrator and make a web page, but you don't know how to use Excel?
:: Do you refer to great architects (dead or alive) by their first name, as if you knew them.... Frank, Corbu, Mies, Norman, Rem, Zaha,... ?

:: Have you ever read these notes before on the internet and found them so true and laughed so hard on them?

IF SO... Then you are an architect... and you are cordially invited to BLOOM BOOM...
Our own SABE Festival Day...



And for once we can all celebrate the madness that connects us...
There will be live performances, live play, food stalls, photography with a twist, customized T-Shirts [Yes... designed by YOU!]... DJ, Dance, Games, Quizzes, and many things that I'm sure will come up on the spot... after all... We are the Creatives... =) [ no time for losers... cuz we are the creatives... of the worrrlllldddd... ]

So... make sure to come and join us...

See you there!

The Looking Glass Room!

Inspired by Alice's conversation with her Kitten about the Looking Glass house... I gave my interior architecture students a chance to become Alice...
I gave my students three famous living rooms; one in Villa Savoye by Le Courbsier, another in Vanna Venturi House by Robert Venturi and the last in Budenburgh Haus by Foster and Partners.
After analyzing the given room and the general house where it is located, each student became Alice and had to walk through the Looking Glass into the adjacent room to the one given.
The function, size and character of the room was to be designed according to a story that students had to come about the current client of the house. Students had to be fantastical in their approach by means of exaggeration, apposing statements, or augmentation of reality.

As presentation means I asked my students to learn and apply water coloring techniques... and to make it a bit easy on them I didn't ask for a model.

The results were pretty good in general... the concepts were a bit direct, though some students did embrace the project completely...
As for the application, students showed a deeper level of maturity as interior architects. They paid more attention to details.
I didn't ask them to design their furniture but if they picked a piece of furniture they had to explain why...
One point that were given to me by the Jurors was why students didn't think of how their new imposed rooms would've changed the overall character of the existing houses. [Thanks to Arch. Hazem Turk and Arch. Lana Tahboub from CC for being great jurors]

And here are the students works:
= Villa Savoye
:: Mudaffar Ma'aitah
In his room, Muddafar had a man and his wife with two hobbies; fencing and dancing. He created a space that is cut into two halves with two different characters. Masculine vs Feminine... These two sports depend highly on footwork so Mudaffar made the union between the man and woman be in a one unified flooring. His concept is strong. But his implementation lacked the extra step that would have made it a real bold statement.




= Vanna Venturi House
:: The Black Hole | Amina Sh. Hassan
Amina said that Mrs. Venturi is kleptomaniac. So behind her innocent look she had a secrete life. So Amina designed a normal looking living room that works perfectly with the rest of the house but behind or inside the room there are secret nooks where Mrs. Venturi hides her stolen stuff. Amina played it smart by creating a safe design with this tiny twist to everything. Amina had the best water color presentation among her group. I still think that Amina could've gone wilder in implementing the two opposing sides of the room.





:: Vintage Modernism | Ridab Soudani
Ridab had the most challenging concept. She was playing around the concept of post modernism as rejecting modernism and accepting historical references and modernism rejecting history and accepting functionalism. To apply that she picked famous modern furniture and imposed history on them by using old rustic materials and in some cases stripping them from their functionality. Ridab's implementation didn't take its full extent to produce a mature end result. Though the project hold high potentials for example in the giant art piece that featured Mies Van der Rohe's chair in rusted cooper.. The room lacked a good functional layout with furniture lacking to complete the identity of the room.





:: Sara Khatib
Sara had the story of Mrs. Venturi being an illusionist. Sara started playing well with the idea of creating illusions out of her space but as she went into the details somethings were out of tune.
Sara chose to build her room on top of an existing room and create a hidden stairs that take the client up to that room. The geometry of the room was trapezoidal. Sara picked some interesting pieces of furniture but in general the room lacked the functional appeal in terms of furniture layout.




= Budenberg Haus
:: The Chamber| Dalia Muslih
Dalia created a room on top of the existing room as well. But the function was different. She created a workshop studio for her ship maker client. But the client wanted a bathtub next to his working area where he can relax and have a view at the canal in front of the complex. Dalia had a smooth design development though still her design didn't reach its climax.




:: The Poseidon Room | Ruba Yaghmour
Ruba chose to design a bedroom. Her focus point in the bedroom was a hanging aquarium that was partly inside the room and partly outside it. Ruba played around the relations between in-in and in-out. She created a narrative that starts with a sliding door that connects the bedroom with the living room and then the hanging aquarium which is a reminder of the canal outside and then the window wall that connects the inside intimacy of the room with the outside scenery.
Ruba had a simple but a concise concept and that served her well in implementing it.





:: Shadia Jaber
Shadia also designed a bedroom. But driven by the apple trees she played around notions of seduction, temptation and intimacy. She created a narrative corridor that led to her room. She used mirrors to create the illusion of unfolding the space gradually as you walk to the room. She had an idea of designing an apple tree chandelier but she didn't manage to design a visually appealing one.
Her design is bold in concept but still shows timidity in application.





:: Interior Architecture First Project

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.