12 Olive Trees House / Elias Khuri Architects

The Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948 constituted the first architectural view, so to speak. They illustrate what can be termed the “Incomplete Scenes”: shards of walls, remnants of the floor, scattered piles of stones, or an open arc looking into the horizon. It is within this architectural view that the “Informal Architecture” are located; they are made up of unfinished, often un-plastered, bricks; they are under ongoing construction, enmeshed in a process of informal growth and transformation. The house exists in this fragmented context, and definitely belongs to the fragments of the current architectural view, and their planning sought to provide a solution for local architecture, while also suggesting new interpretations of the Palestinian house.