Monday 04.03.23

Hindsight 20/20: How Listening to the Land Shapes Our Future

The Royal Academy for Nature Conservation is a showcase, award-winning project in Jordan that OHK is proud to have worked on. This innovative project has garnered significant media attention and received several award nominations. The academy is widely recognized as one of the Middle East’s most boundary-breaking projects, both conceptually and in purpose, showcasing a design aesthetic and educational ambition that prioritizes environmental sensitivity and sustainability. OHK is honored to have been part of this remarkable endeavor, which serves as a model for responsible and sustainable development in Jordan and beyond.

"Listening to the Land" is an article written by Matthew Teller and features photography by George Azar. The article was reproduced with copyright reserved to the creators and the publisher, AramcoWorld, a magazine that explores the culture of the Middle East. The article highlights the work being done by OHK in Jordan and includes additional contributions and photos from our team that are noted as such and are under OHK's copyright. The article provides insights into OHK's efforts in the areas of sustainability, environmental design, and conservation planning, showcasing the team's expertise in these fields. OHK developed the geographical, economic, and business strategy and worked with the implementation team on programming and development planning. The article serves as a testament to OHK's dedication to creating a sustainable future through responsible design and planning practices.

Deep in the forest of oak and pine that cloak the hills of Northern Jordan, down a side road off a side road, you’ll find a long, low building of pale limestone. It represents the future for a new generation of environmental conservationists and also embodies the design esthetic of a boundary-breaking Jordanian architect.

“Architecture is a sin,” says Ammar Khammash, 57. “I don’t want to be visible, and I don’t want my buildings to be visible.” Standing in the building he designed, this unconventional man—artist, designer, engineer, geologist, musician and polymath—faces a view of dark-green treetops awash in spring sunshine. The forest is silent but for birdsong and cicadas. He names two world-famous “starchitects."

“I want to be the exact opposite of them,” he explains thoughtfully. “Architecture is not that important. Buildings should not become monuments or luxury statements. They can be impressive without being expensive.”

We are meeting at the Royal Academy for Nature Conservation, built by Khammash for Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN) and officially opened in 2015. The academy stands at the entrance to an RSCN-run nature reserve established in 1987 to protect forested land beside Ajloun, a town 70 kilometers north of the Jordanian capital, Amman.

Though Khammash’s small architectural practice can claim prestigious private and government clients, he is best known for a string of RSCN commissions ranging from Dana, a remote mountain village, to the heart of Amman. His stripped-back designs, using locally sourced materials, referencing vernacular traditions and exemplifying acute environmental sensitivity, are on show in visitor reception centers, rangers’ offices and rural guest houses all around Jordan, enhancing places that many tourists visit—and that many Jordanians cherish.

Chris Johnson, a British ecologist who worked with Khammash for 20 years, speaks of the architect’s “uniquely Jordanian” style. “Ammar has an amazing ability to create new buildings that are respectful of their surroundings and Jordan’s cultural heritage,” says Johnson, whodirected conservation for the RSCN in the 1990s, and from 2005 to 2013 led its sustainable-tourism unit “Wild Jordan.”

This paragraph is an update that was not included in the original article. Chris Johnson has joined the OHK team, taking on the role of directing our sustainability efforts worldwide. With his extensive expertise, he enhances our commitment to sustainable design and planning practices across the globe. OHK continues to lead the way in creating development projects that combine design, architecture, conservation of the land, education, and collaborative funding.

Growth in outreach has been mirrored by growth in skills development. Since 1997 the RSCN has trained around 250 specialists a year, from Jordan and across the Middle East, in management of protected areas, conservation research, ecotourism and socio-economic development. Around 2005 the idea emerged to formalize training in a single, dedicated building. “We had been pioneering capacity-building in conservation throughout the region. With success came demand,” says Johnson, who initiated and managed the project to build the new academy.

For RSCN Director General Yehya Khaled, the academy pointed to a breakthrough in public education on the environment. “We wanted the academy to be a model, representing rscn values [in] conservation and community development,” he says. A site was identified inside the Ajloun Forest Reserve but, as Khammash explains, “I kept passing a quarry just outside the reserve boundary, and I said, ‘Why should we cut another wound in nature when we already have this cut? Let’s fix this and celebrate it as a human intervention.’

 “Whoever was driving the last bulldozer in the last week this quarry was operating—back in the early ’90s—never knew that he was designing the front elevation of my building for me,” Khammash continues, with typical self-effacement. “He left a cliff, and I followed it. This building is designed by chance.” Khammash had the quarry pit cleared, but instead of bringing in stone for construction, he used the rubble, which would normally have been discarded. The result is external walls of unusually small limestone rocks neatly fitted together. The impression is of a building at one with its setting, as if it has been lifted whole from the quarry and placed on the ridgetop.

To reach it from the road, Khammash designed what was (until he built a longer one last year) the longest masonry arch in Jordan, an elegant bridge extending 30 meters over the now-empty quarry. “This bridge has almost no foundation,” he says. “Its lateral thrust is like when you take a cane and bend it across a corridor: It can’t go anywhere, so the more load it takes the more it pushes into the quarry sides.” The bridge delivers you to the building’s public entrance, a slot in one flank that opens to … almost nothing. The lobby, like its architect, impresses by stealth. You could cross this low transitional room in four paces, but a glass wall in the opposite flank keeps the forest in view. The ambience is of spacious calm. Free of adornment, displaying a deliberately rough finish of raw concrete, it is artful. Khammash calls it simply a “void” where the building’s two functions meet. To the right a restaurant generates income to help pay for the training courses that are run in the rooms to the left.

But visuals tell only part of the story. The building, completed in 2013, deploys an array of environmentally progressive techniques, from straw-based insulation and gray-water collection to geothermal energy for heating and cooling. During this two-year, $3.9-million construction project in dense woodland, not a single tree was felled.

Johnson talks of Khammash’s “artist’s eye.” For Khammash, it’s synesthesia that underpins his creativity. “I’m into sound,” he says. “Every time I see light on geological formations, I hear music. It’s like a waterfall hitting rocks, and the light is playing a sound. There’s some strange connection in my brain. The sun plays this corridor differently according to the season and the time of day.” Once you tune into Khammash’s aural architecture, you find it everywhere. It draws the sounds of the forest—creaking of trees, whistling of wind—into the building. And it sends the sounds of the building—voices, footsteps—spiralling together in unexpected pools and pockets. 

"My dream is to teach a course of architecture for blind architects, to force architects only to use the ear, not the eye," he says. Architecture has been hijacked by the visual. What about the sound of the building, the smell of the building, the idea of earthing, experiencing architecture through our feet?” For the conference hall, located in the academy’s sloping western cantilever, the architect examined how opera houses dampen acoustic reverberation with walls of slatted wood. Adapting the science to the local context, he built walls of cinder blocks but laid them sideways so that their slatted, open cores face into the room. “This is a nice, interesting way of using these blocks. Sound stays in the holes. You don’t need a microphone for a speaker to be heard clearly at the back of the hall,” he says.

Khammash’s architecture blends here with conceptual art. “People could write notes and push them into the holes or keep pencils in there. Another idea was to bring local students to fill the upper third of the walls with branches and twigs pushed into these blocks. Wood is good for acoustics, and this could also help people feel they own the building—they could come back and say, ‘You see that branch? I put it there 10 years ago.’”

In 2016 the academy was shortlisted for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture—“a great privilege,” says Khaled, not least for international recognition of the building’s potential to deliver a new generation of conservationists. He tells me the RSCN is developing curricula for training programs that can be run here with international partners, including the University of Montana, and that it has brought local socio-economic projects developing biscuit-making and handmade-soap production into the building. Rebranding the academy as “Wild Jordan Ajloun” is next, which will help consolidate the efforts to deploy it for tourism as well as education.

Khammash watches with pride. “Architecture is problem-solving,” he says. “This is the spark for me, and every time I design, that’s in my subconscious: Can we solve the problem without the building? If I can, I will. The site is the architect, and I listen to it. Ultimately, I’m just a draftsman, a technician under the site’s command.”  Khammash warms to his theme. “Architecture is a beginning. Let others add to your work. You see this in art installations, but architecture can do it too. Buildings can change if you just give people the skeleton to start with.”

Ammar Khammash, along with OHK's Chris Johnson and Ahmed Al-Okelly, form a dynamic team that continues to collaborate on introducing timeless developments within parks and nature reserves. Their innovative approach combines design, architecture, and conservation principles to create harmonious spaces that celebrate the beauty of nature. Through their work, they seek to showcase the importance of preserving and protecting our natural world, while simultaneously providing spaces that inspire and uplift the human spirit. The team's commitment to creating sustainable and responsible developments serves as a model for others to follow worldwide and especially in the Middle East.

To access the original article published in July 2018, please follow the link provided here. For more information about Ammar Khammash's work, please visit his practice. Additionally, to learn about Chris Johnson's notable achievements in transforming conservation in parks and nature reserves, you can read about his work and his 2010 Guardian, Observer, and guardian.co.uk Ethical Travel Award win. These resources offer valuable insights into the team's commitment to creating sustainable and responsible developments that combine design, architecture, and conservation principles to showcase the beauty of nature.

To learn more about OHK’s work in sustainable strategy and innovative design for conservation, contact us.