Homegrown Resistance: Palestinian Heritage as Sites of Future Autonomies
This thesis started from a specific place, a single home and through that began tracing the multitudes at play in current-day Palestinian society, heritage, and home. Here the home is used to ask questions about the role architecture can and might play in the unique set of circumstances and context within which the home is situated.
Through the examination and documentation of this home and its socio-political context, this thesis asks questions about the private and the public sphere in architecture, it will examine social and familial structures as they are expressed in the architectural and built environment. The starting point of this thesis looks at architecture less as an intervention that would solve or address a “problem” but as a tool of inquiry to highlight specific issues, speculate on the role of architecture within complex social, political, and historic contexts, and imagine possible futures.
The context for this project is my hometown of origin, Taybeh (Taibeh, Tayibe, Tayibeh), a Palestinian, village-like city situated in the Triangle region of what is Israel today. A definition that already gives a hint at the complex layers within which this project is operating. The home at the center of this thesis is a singular example of Palestinian heritage architecture, both in type and scale and in that it remains standing in a neighborhood where traditional buildings are rapidly being razed down in favor of modern apartment buildings. The history that this project carries with it is one of colonization, dispossession, and attempts at erasure.
The question that this thesis attempts to grapple with connects between familial shifts and the spatial changes in the house and neighborhood. First, do these changes necessarily mean a change of the home from private to public? If yes, how and what forms would that take? Second, do these architectural typologies have a place in Palestinian society today, in Taybeh specifically? Are there forms of domesticity and urbanity within which they can continue operating? Third what role can architectural heritage, specifically this home, play in rebuilding the urban social fabric of il-‘Amri and Taybeh and creating a future of self-sustaining autonomies, that do not rely on settler colonial and/or capitalist systems?
This autonomous future is imagined through five key programs: energy, Mondays, Food Forest, Library of Things and Art. In the future imaginations that this thesis proposes, the home becomes a hub through which spaces around the neighborhood are slowly transformed into spaces that sustain the people in the neighborhood. Using photographs as a site, a poster super imposed over them depicts the possible futures for each space. The messages on each poster and flyer event aim to galvanize the residents to claim these places and start the process of building their own space.
