Interview by Sandra Hiari published on JO
Whether experimenting with the traditional stone facade or building crystal towers, Jafar Tukan has been one of the driving forces in Jordanian architecture. Sandra Hiari ponders the themes of his influential career.
Jafar Tukan at home in his apartment. (Joseph Zakarian)
THERE WAS A TIME when architecture students in the Jordanian school system were taught that there were two pioneer architects in Jordan, and only two.
When instructors presented slides of “good” Jordanian architecture, it would never be of the vernacular. It would be the work of Rasem Badran, who would be described as a romanticist of the Islamic Arab city, or it would be that of Jafar Tukan, the modernist who reshaped the use of masonry in Jordan altogether.
Like the buildings shown in the classroom slides, these descriptions would be set in stone. In a report on architecture of the 1970s and 1980s in the Middle East, architect and historian Udo Kultermann identified Tukan and Badran as the “two most important Arab architects in Jordan.”
In July 2009, Abdali Investment and Development Psc., the company developing Ammanʼs “new downtown,” announced that it was presenting Tukan with a “Life Achievement Award” to recognize his exceptional work, which “reflects a combination of modern thinking with a deeply rooted historical touch.” The award was presented simultaneously with the first group of “Abdali Innovation Awards,” which the company created to recognize students and young people who came up with innovative solutions to challenges in architecture and engineering.
Tukan himself is a reserved, intellectual figure. Despite his fame, heʼs a quiet person, with a decidedly low-key attitude toward self-presentation.
Professionally, he describes his identity as built around an ideal of function and “rationality” in architecture. He says he considers himself a modernist, and among his favorite architects are famous figures of the movement such as I.M. Pei, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe.
“The whole idea of architecture was implanted in my mind during the prime era of the rational style, which followed World War II,” he says. “This was really the beginning of the ‘modern movement,ʼ where architecture gave away all the decorations and unnecessary forms to strip down architecture to its most basic functional elements.”
Modernism, he says, means to “be creative in contemporary terms and not simplistically copy the past.”
When he talks about local architects he respects, he also mentions Rasem Badran—perhaps surprisingly, given how their professional philosophies are often set up as total opposites. Badran is commonly described as choosing to extract ideas from local Islamic or Arabic motifs, while Tukan is seen as preferring to localize the international style of architecture.
Certainly the styles they look to are very different. Modernist architects have tended to create open spaces with few visual or physical barriers in them; Islamic architecture takes hierarchical differentiation and the enclosure of space as its fundamentals.
One of Tukan's recent public projects is the still-unfinished Jordan Museum, which is being built next to Amman City Hall (which was also designed by Tukan, along with Rasem Badran). (Courtesy Jafar Tukan Architects)
The Jordan Museum Project (Courtesy Jafar Tukan Architects)
For Tukan, function always came first, and tradition second. In an article he wrote in Alam Al Bena magazine in the late 1990s, about the original and the contemporary in his work, he admitted that he didn’t give much importance to studying Arabic and Islamic architectural heritage during the first 15 years of his career.
Later, he says, he did develop particularly Islamic elements in his work, but only so far as they fit his prevailing framework of rationalism.
“I would initially liberate myself from the strict restrictions of the Islamic style,” he explains, “but when I had completed the functional design and fulfilled the requirements of the projects, I would then introduce some Islamic elements in order to relate the project to the local atmosphere. These elements had to be justifiable, and with a certain function.”
But neither was Tukan looking to upset the status quo or challenge local values with his designs.
For example, women have long faced a form of spatial segregation in much Islamic architecture: not only physically separated from men, but often relegated to lower-quality spaces, basements and the back doors of mosques.
For Tukan, this was a very delicate matter, particularly when he was asked to design mosques. In several cases, he says, he placed womenʼs prayer areas on a mezzanine which overlooked a large cavity in the mosque; in other cases they were put on the same level, and segregated by a screen.
“In one other example, in Kuwait, I used a completely separate hall, and in another project in the Emirates, I designed a separate building for women,” he says. “I would say that I moved with the norm,” rather than challenging it.
TUKAN EARNED HIS BACHELOR’S degree in architecture in 1960, at the American University of Beirut. Shortly afterward he moved back to Amman, where he worked at the Ministry of Public Works, designing a spectrum of government buildings and facilities. But after only a year, he quit and moved back to Beirut.
“At that time Beirut was the hub of culture and arts,” he says. “I had gotten an offer there at a big firm [Dar Al Handasa] that was owned by one of my professors, so I immediately accepted it. …The firm was working beyond Lebanon to include Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and countries of the Gulf, so the opportunities that it had were much bigger.”
Seven years after that, Tukan opened his own practice in Beirut. In the late 1960s, he established a regional firm with George Rais, and they carried out many projects in the Gulf. But in 1973, Tukan dissolved the partnership, and three years later, after the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War, he moved back to Amman.
“Some of my colleagues from Beirut had taken off to France and Greece, but for me, Amman was a very perfect alternative,” he says. From then onward, Tukan would grant Jordan the lion’s share of his career.
“Well,” he says, in a straightforward manner, “I am Jordanian to begin with.”
Amman in the 1970s welcomed Tukan, who began adapting elements from international post-war trends that he believed were suitable for Jordanian architecture. His first contribution was probably the rejection of adornments and decorations, and the “stripping down” of architecture to basic functional elements.
This choice is functional in an economic sense, as well as an aesthetic one, he says. “Global economics have changed and there are much higher financial demands, so one has to fulfill the functions that are intended for architecture at the minimum initial cost as well as the maintenance cost.”
Like many other exceptional architects, much of Tukanʼs early work focused on private housing. In the 1980s, his work on apartment buildings and villas flourished, and though he also built many commercial projects during this time, it is his iconic residences that are best remembered.
In their monograph on Tukanʼs early work, Mario Pisani and Ali Abu Ghanimeh describe how “innovative solutions to housing problems have been its hallmark, resulting in the construction of the Villa Rizk and the Villa Salfiti.” Likewise, Kultermann cites two houses built by Badran as “of greatest significance for the development of contemporary Jordanian architecture.”
This is, perhaps, unsurprising, for in a sense, iconic architecture has almost always been an elite endeavor. In Amman, a city built under British occupation and grown through migration and refugee crises, the majority of people still build by stacking concrete boxes on hills. In this milieu, the most likely task for an architect who experimented and innovated would be to try to reinvent the villa, enabled by the existence of an upper class that could afford such services. It would be a matter of time before the new building practices introduced in these elite homes would begin to trickle down to more mundane public and private structures, built by and for other classes.
Later in his career, Tukan began to embrace more public-sphere projects, including the Amman City Hall (which he co-designed with Rasem Badran) as well as projects like the SOS Childrenʼs village in Aqaba, the Royal Automobile Museum in King Hussein Park and the National Museum in Ras Al ‘Ein.
But while a number of the famous modernists he admires thought of architecture as a tool to advance a progressive social agenda, Tukan is one of those who see the essential core of the movement in its embrace of simplicity and functionality.
“I donʼt see modernism as a social agenda for planning a city,” he says. “I see it as a natural cultural development that relates architecture to its time and place: functionally, economically and culturally.”
TUKANʼS STORY SHOWCASES THE challenges of trying to introduce Western ideographies into an Arab locale. It’s hard to determine whether the architect was witnessing a rupture between two styles—the modern and the Islamic—or whether he was trying to grasp the best of both worlds.
A close look at his buildings typically reveals two well-defined spheres. The fluid interior spaces are undefined by barriers, in contrast to the conservative outer shells, which adhere to more traditional rules of what a building is expected to look like.
“Open space, in my mind, is basically about flexibility,” Tukan says. “Flexibility can fulfill the most functional requirements, and then it can also help space to adapt to changing programmatic requirements.”
But, he adds, “Iʼm from those people who believe that architecture must blend in its context.”
So as much as his buildings draw on the modernist movement, especially in the interior sphere, Tukanʼs work has generally been contextually driven to suit the Jordanian built environment.
He is known for using stone extensively, and for much of his career has maintained a focus on applying various stone textures to buildings’ facades. Over the course of the day, the changing angle of sunlight would give the buildings a constantly shifting appearance. His villas and other early projects didnʼt challenge their surroundings, at least as far as appearances are concerned—though their interiors were often liberated from external formalities.
As Tukan advanced in his career, his relationship with the city evolved. In 2003 he merged his firm with Consolidated Consultants, a large local engineering company—a move that has become increasingly common in the local architecture scene.
“The nature of projects has changed,” Tukan explains. “They are more of public nature; they are bigger and they are more complex. The boutique type of practice cannot cope with the complexity of these projects. Working together with a wider technical base can fulfill the requirements for the present times.
“Itʼs a healthy change, and currently, the whole world is moving toward institutionalizing the practice of architecture,” he adds.
Under this new professional setup, the architect who once used a subtle play of light on the stone surfaces of his buildings, while making sure they blended in their urban context, has now designed the city’s tallest high-rise, the Jordan Gate project off the Sixth Circle.
The Jordan Gates project
The incomplete Jordan Gate Towers viewed from west Amman in August 2008
THE TWO 44-STORY TOWERS are being built on land that was designated as a park for residents of Um Uthaina—an area where buildings rarely exceed four stories in height.
Jordan Gate is a radical development by all measures, and may be the most controversial project in Amman’s history to-date. As a development, it wasn’t only the precedent of its height, but its divorce from the uniformity of the Amman’s skyline that raised objections. The Greater Amman Municipality, once a partner in the project, withdrew and created a new policy for high-rise buildings which explicitly prohibits the construction of similar structures. The municipality has cited Jordan Gate as a major reason for the new regulations.
Tukan defends the project, though in his description it seems, more than anything, like an interesting puzzle to be solved.
“The challenge has been to keep such a large project sympathetic to the dominant low rise fabric of the city,” he says. “The architectural decision [we reached] was to create a low-rise podium that is in a harmony [with] the surroundings, and upon which two towers rise high, as minimalist crystals that dissolve in the sky with their completely glazed facades.”
Itʼs debatable whether his work on a project like Jordan Gate means Tukanʼs philosophy of modernism has itself been reinvented in the latest stage of his career. Comparing the towering glass crystals with the subtle stone-faced villas of the 1980s, it seems hard to believe they are the products of the same process. Yet Tukan himself describes them in similar terms: minimalism, simplicity and rationality, giving forms meaningful functions and creating aesthetic statements from the interplay of materials and light.
Still, the change in scale from a villa to a skyscraper is not negligible, and seems to have placed Tukan in a different trajectory of modernism altogether. Take the case of Mies van der Rohe, one of the pioneering modernists Tukan admires.
Van der Rohe designed numerous high rises in New York and Chicago along minimalist lines. His work was embraced by many in the American establishment, but also earned harsh criticism.
American philosopher and political scientist Marshall Berman, in his well-known take on modernism, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, critiques Van der Rohe, “whose modular glass boxes, identical everywhere, were coming to dominate every metropolis, equally oblivious to every environment, like the giant slab that springs up in the midst of the primitive world.”
For many, the twin towers rising above West Amman are the embodiment of the money and international investment that has flown across borders with similar obliviousness to where it lands. (Jordan Gateʼs developers, Gulf Finance House, Kuwait Finance and Al Hamad, are based in Bahrain, Kuwait and Sharjah, respectively.)
Tukan does not seem especially perturbed by the criticism leveled at Jordan Gate. In an article he wrote in 2007, published in I magazine, he admitted to the project’s uniqueness as the first—and perhaps last—high-rise to occupy such a prominent location. But he also celebrated it as part of an ongoing process of modernization and transformation.
“In the last decade the city of Amman witnessed extensive social, political and economic transformations,” he wrote. Factors like rising oil prices and increasing investment from the Gulf have “created new economic realities which will…transform the city of Amman urbanistically and architecturally as well.”
So while “for the romantic Ammani’s Amman cannot and should not change…Amman cannot anymore remain the quiet, low-profile, sleepy city” that it once was, he concluded.
In Bermanʼs philosophy, the kind of modern transition that Tukan describes is the root of modern distress and discontent: a modernity that “annihilates everything that it creates…in order to create more, to go on endlessly creating the world anew.”
For Tukan, such questions seem irrelevant; his focus is on form.
“I see my architecture as an exploration of the unlimited possibilities that the philosophy of rational architecture offers,” he says. “What I am trying to prove is that rational architecture produces architecture that belongs to its time and place.”
Sandra Hiari studied urban design, and has worked as an architect for Sahel Al Hiyari & Partners and as a researcher at the Center for the Study of the Built Environment. She now works for the Amman Institute for Urban Development.
