Albany, California
1987
Built
Architect: Nezar AlSayyad
Professor of Arabic language at the University of California at Berkeley.
A total construction budget of $198,000 was estimated for this project, with a construction schedule of 6 months.
A typical small urban lot (35 X 100 ft) with primarily a North-South axis in a tract-like professional middle-and upper-middle class neighborhood in small but dense Albany, California. Albany is a small town in the San Francisco Bay Area with a population of about 16,000.
The entire block was zoned residential (R2). All new construction required a design review by a conservative city planning commission which mandated in most cases that new houses have to literally follow the street elevation profile of existing structures before permits of demolition and new construction were granted. Side set-backs of 3 feet were also required.
The client, a professor of Arabic language at the University of California at Berkeley, with Middle Eastern ancestry described his dream house as “a house with a courtyard, a cathedral ceiling, and lots of light... something that will remind me of the view the Dome of the Rock.” Interviews with him and his family revealed that he was describing a structure reminiscent of his childhood house in what is today the West Bank, Israel/Palestine.
Wood frame construction anchored around a central space supplemented by minor metal supports for the staircase.
Images taken using a heliodon to study the light.
Given the size of the lot, a courtyard was not feasible, but a light well with all the qualities of a courtyard could achieve the same effect. Carefully placed skylights and clerestory windows could bathe the interior in light. However, the most elusive but tantalizing goal was to recreate the experience of viewing the Dome of the Rock with its calligraphy around the hexagonal exterior, a physicality infused with symbolic meaning. By invoking a geometric display of the names of the residents of the house in their native language, the design could similarly celebrate the cultural heritage of the family.
The mullions divide up the clerestory windows into geometric patterns of colored panes which can be read by an informed observer as an Arabic script (an ancient geometric type call ‘Kufic’). Each of the windows contain the name of a member of the family who inhabits the house.
Only two times each year do all three names appear in their entirety on the wall facing the family room. It is hoped that this appearance will become a ritual event to commemorate the christening of the house, mark its anniversary, and all its inhabitants to celebrate on an abstract level, the language and culture of their ancestors.
If architecture is the art of good story telling, this then is a story told through the use of words heavy with historic meaning, through form evocative of remembered pasts, and through light and shadow.
