IJIA 2 (2) pp.

325–348 Intellect Limited 2013

International Journal of Islamic Architecture

Volume 2 Number 2
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijia.2.2.325_1

Yasir Sakr
Jordan University of Science and Technology

Analyzing City Hall, Villa and Tunnel

in Amman: The Failures of Cultural
Amalgamation at the Turn of the
Twentieth Century

Abstract Keywords
This essay narrates the ‘cultural amalgamation’ of the Greater City of Amman, the Greater Amman
capital of Jordan, undertaken by its municipality during the last two decades of the Municipality (GAM)
twentieth century. The study delineates the various dynamics, actors, agendas and cultural amalgamation
tools that defined the amalgamation process as a ‘discourse’. Deconstructing this Tunnel Bridge
discourse, this study highlights the critical role of ‘monuments’ and architects in Intersection
shaping the municipal endeavour in order to consolidate a civic identity and culture Villa
for the sprawling city of Amman. Particular emphasis is given to the peculiar inter- City Hall
action between the symbolic and the utilitarian tools of the amalgamation process, civic identity
represented by the ‘City Hall’, ‘Villa’ and ‘Tunnel/Bridge intersection’, which lead to Ras al-Ain
the problematic outcome investigated here. Culture and Utility
Services

The Genesis of the Discourse: The Municipal Identity of

Greater Amman
During the early 1990s, an unprecedented debate on ‘Amman’s identity’ took
place against the background of a dramatic expansion of the city following the
‘functionalist’ amalgamation that began a few years earlier under Amman’s
former mayor, Abdul Raouf al-Rawabdeh. Al-Rawabdeh, who served as the
mayor of Amman (1983–86) and Greater Amman (1987–89) and then prime
minister of Jordan (1999–2000) spearheaded the amalgamation process of
Greater Amman, its territorial expansion and corresponding administrative
restructuring.1

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This article explores the discourse around the city and its identity, which
the amalgamation process unleashed towards the last decade of the twen-
tieth century, as it was posited by a number of different actors at this time,
particularly al-Rawabdeh’s successor, the pioneering mayor of the Greater
Amman Municipality (GAM), Mamdouh al-Abbadi (1993–98), and the archi-
tects he employed. It also looks at the changes that were put into place to
address the crisis of identity that the city was deemed to be experiencing.
Moreover, it concludes with a critique of the municipal vision implemented
by al-Abbadi in his search for a potent national and urban symbol, which ulti-
mately failed to mobilize the kind of civic architectural monumentality and the
sociocultural effects that he had hoped for.
This debate on identity may have been formally initiated by an article in
the national daily newspaper, al-Dastur.2 Its author, Dr Jawad al-Anani, an
influential writer, politician and ex-minister, tellingly entitled his essay ‘Who
are the Ammanites?’ He began with the following observation:

If one was to ask pupils at any school in the capital city: ‘Where are you
from?’ the vast majority would reply that they are either from a town or a
village other than Amman. If you then ask them the following question:
‘Where were you born?’ The vast majority would respond, ‘Amman’.3

The irony reflects the ‘failure of Amman to consolidate a unifying identity and a
sense of belonging for its inhabitants’. Al-Anani concludes that Amman’s ‘failure
to formulate an alternative civil institution, protecting and defending its citizens’
explains why the young students chose to seek refuge in a more ‘secure and guar-
anteed identity such as the one found in a tribe or village’.4 Although he does not
mention it or explicitly name it as such, al-Anani seems to signal that Amman’s
latest urban amalgamation is a major factor in its predicament of identity.
Amalgamation was a formal policy initiated in 1985 when the various
municipalities and village councils within the metropolitan area around
Amman City were consolidated to form what became Greater Amman (GAM).
Consequently, Amman expanded phenomenally from a city of about 744,000
people in 1983 to a metropolis with a population of 1,272,000 people in 1992
when al-Anani wrote his article.5 To him, the new centralization of admin-
istration and service provision and their abrupt top-down implementation
made Amman ‘an object of greed’ to which the growing inhabitants relate
only on functionalist basis. Amman, contends al-Anani, does not represent
a final ‘habitat’ or a centre to its people but simply a ‘transit station’, which
collects passengers only to disperse them.6
Al-Anani’s argument concerning Amman’s identity crisis with its implied
blame placed on amalgamation as its primary cause was subsequently
picked up as a central theme in a number of conferences. One of the earliest
conferences, and perhaps the most important among them as it was the first
to be entirely devoted to Amman, was held in June 1995. It was sponsored
by none other than the Municipality of Greater Amman, under the auspices
of Dr Mamdouh al-Abbadi, its newly appointed mayor.7 Participants in this
conference were drawn from different fields and professional and political
institutions.8 The mere fact that the Municipality would organize such an event
is itself a far cry from a long history of municipal indifference to the issue of
Amman’s identity and its representation. Indeed, the title of the conference
signified the newly acquired sensitivity: ‘Amman, Realities and Expectations:
Issues on Culture, Environment and Building’.

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The majority of the conference speakers and authors of its proceedings

concurred that the major crisis Amman was suffering from was the lack of
a cohesive identity. Mu’enis al-Razzaz, a well-known Jordanian writer,
conducted a survey of all novels written by Jordanian writers before the 1990s,
and illustrated how Amman did not figure in any of them.9 To him, this
absence of Amman stands in contradistinction to the presence of other Arab
cities in major literary works. The Jordanian literary critic, Ibrahim Sa’afeen,
made a similar finding in his survey of Jordanian poetry in the same period:
‘In most of these poems, Amman is neither a place nor an aesthetic image
but, rather, a superficial symbol of an idea or a cause.’ Reiterating al-Anani’s
earlier view, Sa’afeen proclaimed that Amman is not ‘a producer but a host
of culture’.10
The tangible urban corollary of this cultural crisis, according to Sa’afeen,
was the demise of the centre of Amman:

The new suburbs which are sprawling away from the city centre not
only rendered it obsolete but also failed to reproduce it in new neigh-
bourhoods. These new affluent suburbs are fragmented, lacking
neighbourhoods with centres catalyzing cultural and social activities
through integrated markets, clubs, theatres, and coffee shops. Missing in
these suburbs are cultural institutions, which establish a viable rapport
between the individual and place and which are empowered by appro-
priate land use regulations and planning policies to provide access for
the less wealthy strata of society.11

Without using the term ‘amalgamation’ as such, it was evident to these crit-
ics that the recent swift territorial expansion, demographic proliferation and
administrative centralization of metropolitan Amman produced a city with a
schizophrenic lifestyle ‘that oscillated between one that is urban and civilized,
while the other – agitating from within – is nomadic in the negative sense of
the word’.12
These critics blamed the state for its failure to assume an active cultural
role and the exclusive focus on a political agenda in its provision of municipal
‘services’. Muna Shuqair, a prominent participant in the conference, stated,
‘The state failed to present “culture” as a public good available to all of the
communities of Amman.’13 Indeed, the Municipality’s sponsorship of the
‘Amman’ conference and the expedient publication of its proceedings seemed
to have been purposefully geared towards sharpening and, in turn, legitimat-
ing the critical discourse that these presenters articulated about Amman’s crisis
of identity; thereby compelling an immediate response by the Municipality in
the form of ‘an emergency action scheme’.

Framing the ‘Villa’ Discourse

Upon further examination of the Amman conference proceedings, one cannot
help but be intrigued by the way in which they were organized. There are
three main parts. The lengthy first part includes ‘nostalgic’ first-hand accounts
of the ‘old Amman’ that was lost, in particular its centre, the downtown.14
These accounts are followed by a section containing a series of ‘critical’ papers
examining the ‘precarious’ state of planning and architecture in contemporary
Amman.15 This section sets the ground for a specialized part containing the
aforementioned cultural critiques.

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One paper included in the architectural section, by the prominent

Jordanian architect Waddah al-Abidi, was extremely significant and should
not be underestimated. Not only does it represent an architectural vision and
interpretation of the crisis of Amman – which, for reasons outlined below, I
will term ‘the Villa Discourse’ – but, amazingly, also foretold the Municipality’s
subsequent actions.16 Citing the wretched conditions of the existing municipal
office building in the city’s downtown, al-Abidi lamented the general lack of
interest in Amman’s public buildings and spaces.17 As rare as they are, public
institutions are either located in rented residential buildings or designed in a
mediocre manner after a functionalist ‘international style’ disconnected from
the ‘rich Arab tradition’. The sad reality of Amman’s public buildings becomes
more acute, according to al-Abidi, when contrasted with the excellent archi-
tectural standards of Amman’s contemporary private residences, such as
the villa.18
Since the establishment of Amman at the beginning of the twentieth
century, the detached house, known locally as the villa, was a common
building type in the city. But it was during the late 1970s and throughout
the 1980s that the villa proliferated to single-handedly shape the sprawling
urban fabric of Amman. The oil boom in Gulf countries, which employed
most of Jordan’s manpower at the time, dramatically raised the level of
income of Jordanian households, thereby providing the capital for the prolif-
eration in villa production. The villa then became the legitimating status
symbol for the rising middle and upper middle classes. It was a heyday for
the architect, lured by the unrestrained building budget of clients seeking to
define a unique, unmistakable character for their residences and thus able
to indulge in stylistic experimentation – experiments that were for the most
part excessively formalistic. The architect believed that he could, through his
individualized villa design, construct a reference for shaping the city and the

Yasir Sakr.

Figure 1: Villa Odeh, Amman, Waddah al-Abidi, 1980.

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 Analyzing City Hall, Villa and Tunnel in Amman

Yasir Sakr.

Figure 2: Villa Rizk, Amman, Jafar Tukan, 1980.

national style of the country.19 These experiments echoed  the architectural

transformation in the international scene of the period. The leading architects
of this movement were Waddah al-Abidi, with his exuberant elementa-
rist appropriations of Wrightian and late Corbusian forms which featured
his architectural signature (literally a mass shaped after the first letter of
his first name); Jafar Tukan with his abstractions of the Mediterranean
vernacular; and finally Rasem Badran with his neo-expressionist/Brutalist
compositions which invoked the Palestinian hilly village fabrics [Figures  1
and 2].20 Towards the late 1980s, under the influence of postmodernism
and in pursuit of a more authentic identity, Jordanian architects, includ-
ing Badran and Tukan (who would eventualy become the two most inter-
nationally profiled Jordanian architects recognized by the prestigious Aga
Khan Award for Architecture), fashioned the villa as a simple cubic arrange-
ment with surfaces overlaid with abstracted borrowings from historical
Islamic architectural styles [Figure 3]. 21 Small wonder that al-Abidi, who
was a major player in this ‘villa movement’, would cite it as a precedent for
future growth.
In addition to noting the problem of municipal monuments, al-Abidi sums
up the crisis of Amman by noting the absence of an open central plaza for the
city where major cultural institutions, such as a national museum, theatre,

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Yasir Sakr.

Figure 3: Villa Khalil Talhuni, Amman, Rasem Badran, 1985.

galleries, conference halls and specifically a city hall, should be concentrated.22

Constructing this ‘monumental’ plaza would create a centre for Amman. Just
like the Empire State Building is synecdochally linked to the city of New York
or the Coliseum to Rome, Amman must have a landmark to represent it. Such
a plaza, which in the case of Amman should reflect an authentic Islamic style,
al-Abidi argues, has always been the indispensable heart or nucleus of the
city, be it Roman or Arab.23

The Municipality as a Shaper of the Identity of

Greater Amman

‘Amman is now one of the cleanest capitals of the world. But this city is
without spirit. It is my mission to bring back its soul. It is time to revive the
body of Amman.’ – Amman’s former mayor, Dr Mamdouh al-Abbadi.24
‘The “surgical” operations that the former mayor al-Rawabdeh
performed to Amman needed the subsequent “cosmetic” surgery that
Dr al-Abbadi is currently performing.’ 25

Mamdouh al-Abbadi, the newly appointed mayor of Amman in 1993, an

ophthalmologist and a former political opposition figure, seemed to share

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this critical assessment of the Municipality’s earlier amalgamation project

undertaken by his predecessor Abdul Raouf al-Rawabdeh. Indeed, prior to
the ‘Amman’ conference that he sponsored, al-Abbadi voiced similar strong
opinions about it:

[Amalgamation] transformed Amman, from a small town, into a big

city. Yet something was lost in the process of this transformation.
True the city of Amman is now cleaner, thanks to the Municipality of
Greater Amman’s (GAM) efficient handling of services. But the increas-
ing obsession and rush to offer services and infrastructure for its streets
led to the loss of the kind of spirit that once distinguished the town
of Amman.26

Amalgamation clearly fulfilled, according to Mayor al-Abbadi, its ‘function-

alist’ objective by creating a well-served and clean big city. But he felt that
the focus needed to shift to the symbolic dimension and for that reason he
embarked on a new project, one which I label ‘cultural amalgamation’, which
took shape under al-Abbadi in the 1990s and was distinct from the function-
alist model followed by his predecessor.27
Listing ‘planning’, ‘services’, ‘environment’ and ‘culture’ as the four roles
that define GAM as an institution, it is the latter that, as Mayor al-Abbadi
proclaims, would be the dominant among them during his mandate.28 Culture
(thaqafa), al-Abbadi declared, is the ‘soul’ of the city.29 Al-Abbadi added a
new Department of Culture to the existing municipal departments in 1994.
The Department of Culture was to undertake the Municipality’s newly self-
imposed role of shaping Amman’s missing identity through sponsoring cultural
events and publishing a literary journal devoted exclusively to Amman.30 Mayor
al-Abbadi envisioned two fundamental components comprising the pursued
identity. The first one was ‘festivals’, performed by local and invited Arabic
popular folkloric theatre troupes, poets and artists.31 The second component
of Amman’s identity was a public place, more precisely an arena, to shelter
these festivals. Mayor al-Abbadi identified this place as the city plaza, in other
words, Amman’s centre. This plaza would be refurbished with various cultural
institutions such as a national museum, cultural and conference centre, and
the City Hall as its ‘gem’.32
The site chosen for the plaza was the area of the historic stream of Amman
(Ras al-Ain). This site was located at the fringe of the old city of Amman and
was never historically a centre. In fact, this newly designated site did not even
correspond to the geographic centre of the modern amalgamated Amman.
It symbolically represents a divide between the two halves of the city: West
Amman, the affluent half, and East Amman, the poorer half.33 Endowed with
various buildings intended to house cultural institutions, and the City Hall in
particular, Mayor al-Abbadi believed the created plaza would serve as a real
centre for Amman both functionally and symbolically, healing the rift between
its two halves.34 Further, the distinct architectural character to be applied in
the design of the plaza and encompassing the City Hall would guarantee its
performance as a true city centre.
Jordan’s two most important architects, Tukan and Badran, whose legacies
extended far beyond the country, were commissioned to jointly design the City
Hall for Amman, with a generous budget to aid them. These financial provi-
sions differentiated this project from the earlier municipal indifference to archi-
tectural self-representation. The only constraint the architects encountered

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was the mayor’s request for an expedient design and building programme.35
Designed in 1995, the building of the City Hall was completed in 1997.
The design programme was exclusively ceremonial, dedicated for the
spacious mayoral offices and a reception hall on upper floors and galler-
ies and exhibition spaces on the lower floor. The architects incorporated
this programme within an imposing cubical building standing in the midst
of a huge plaza [Figures 4 and 5]. The bilateral symmetrical design with its
central cylindrical atrium is reminiscent of Palladio’s Villa (the Rotunda). A
further testimony to the overriding desire to establish a centre for the city
is the specific design character of the cylindrical courtyard in the middle; an
outdoor area open to gates at the four cardinal directions, especially the axis
to the east and west of Amman (the city’s two opposing social and economic
halves), allowing free public access at all times.36
One can cite the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1978–83) by the British
architect James Sterling as an inspiration for the design of the building’s open
and publicly accessible cylindrical core, which became a passage linking the
surrounding streets. The publicly open core of Amman’s city hall design may
also allude to another source of inspiration, Boston City Hall, designed by
Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles (1963–66). Though currently criticized and
stylistically different from the Amman plan, at the time the open core of the
‘Brutalist’ Boston City Hall building, which links directly to the surrounding
large plaza, presented a compelling image of symmetry between a building’s
design, local government, city centre and citizens’ participation.

Yasir Sakr.

Figure 4: Amman City Hall, Jafar Tukan and Rasem Badran, 1997 (view from the east).

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Yasir Sakr.

Figure 5: Amman City Hall, Jafar Tukan and Rasem Badran, 1997 (view from the west).

The Villa as a City Hall: A Disembodied Representation of

Amman’s identity
The final design of the City Hall and the circumstances within which it was
built raise a number of critical observations with regard to the formalist nature
of its representation of Amman’s identity.
The new municipal vision of the city and the discourse of identity it
espoused appear disembodied from the outset. The city was perceived
through a duality of ‘soul’ and ‘body’, which corresponded to other series
of dualities such as ‘form’ and ‘function’ and most importantly ‘culture’ and
‘services’ that the Municipality offers to citizens (services were understood to
include streets, transportation, planning, environment and garbage collec-
tion, food inspection, building permits and public parks). Each of the two
polar entities constituting these dualities was perceived independently from
the other. The question that preoccupied both the Municipality and its critics
(including the influential architectural society), was simply one of a choice,
which one of the two terms was to be privileged: culture (as a mere aesthetic
reality) or services (as a neutral technical performance)? As a result, the
design vision and programme of the City Hall was never about an alterna-
tive framework for understanding the city. Nor did it constitute an informed
exploration into how this duality might be superseded or rethought in terms
of their interaction, which was the question that ideally should have informed
this process. The possibility that one term in the duality might operationally
perform as a signifier of the other (that municipal technical services could

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also be a cultural performance, for example) was never consciously contem-

plated during the initial period of self-appraisal that gave birth to the idea of
the City Hall.
The municipal divided/dualistic perception of the city and of the munic-
ipal self facilitated the assimilation of the architects’ ‘villa’ discourse that
was equally disembodied and dualistic. Thus, the municipal linguistic dual-
ity of ‘soul’ versus ‘body’ – institutionally represented as a duality of ‘culture’
versus ‘services’ – equated the architects’ own duality, ‘form’ versus ‘function/
programme’. The ongoing architects’ villa discourse not only privileged ‘form’
over ‘utilitarian programme/function’ but also was inherently biased if not
antagonistic against the latter. Unilaterally shaping the city’s urban space
during the 1970s and 1980s, the Amman villa type, so to speak, can be criti-
cized as an exhibitionist private monument. Even with its high price tag, the
preoccupation with the villa’s external sculptural image through exaggerated
manipulation of formal and spatial elements and material textures, over-
rode and often deterred the utilitarian performance, spaciousness and inner
comfort of the occupants.37 Regardless of its style, the villa was extroverted
only to sustain its raison d’être as a three-dimensional visual object of desire,
social status and public consumption through detachment from the immedi-
ate context. Wide flanking streets together with generous setbacks (allowed
by building codes) ensure the maximum visibility required by the villa.38 The
villa thus represents a condition deterring the formulation of ‘neighbourly’
fabric or ‘collective’ dwelling types like row housing formed by wall-to-wall
juxtapositions.
Given the building history of the two commissioned architects, the munic-
ipal assimilation of the villa formalist language is by no means surprising. But
this transferral equated ‘culture’ to ‘form’, thereby reducing culture or identity
to a ‘monument’.39 This was the raison d’être of the City Hall. The Municipality
shared the architect’s belief that the building form, especially if it borrowed
formal elements from the past, was guaranteed to automatically recreate a
social and cultural performance and social impact comparable to those they
were associated with in the past. In other words, the monument by its mere
physical presence could become both a ‘centre’ and an ‘identity’. The reduc-
tionist formula of the ‘monument’ for dealing with the issue of identity suited
the agenda of the mayor, whose term in office was not clearly specified. An
architectural monument like the villa is usually quick to build, and thus could
create a tangible product on the ground before the termination of the mayor’s
tenure. In this sense, investing in monuments may appear more politically
and financially feasible than sponsoring the lengthy and more obscure process
of institutional reform.40

Amman City Hall: the Proliferating Villa

The institutionalization of the ‘Villa’ by the Municipality as a ‘monumental’
language for re-forming Amman unleashed drastic outcomes, which were
unexpected by the Municipal patron and ultimately contradicted his original
intentions. These ramifications were evident from the beginning of the build-
ing process of the City Hall.
The City Hall appears as an isolated massive stone building in the middle
of an expansive field detached from the street and urban fabric on the
surrounding hills. A wide one-way highway ringed the whole site and further
isolated it from the urban fabric of the area. This highway is a segment of the

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 Analyzing City Hall, Villa and Tunnel in Amman

new network constructed to facilitate the flow and access of traffic from West
Amman. To underscore the formalist raison d’être of the City Hall, the mayor
used the following argument to justify the choice of Ras al-Ain as its site: ‘It
will take foreign dignitaries only two minutes from ‘Abdun suburb [a wealthy
villa suburb in West Amman].’41 In this sense, the City Hall does not seem to
be a real centre for the people of Amman, and perhaps it was never meant
to be one, but rather a simulacra of a centre and an object for the effortless
consumption of the elite gaze.
The site chosen for the City Hall was originally designated in Amman’s
master plan, sponsored by al-Abbadi’s predecessor al-Rawabdeh, as a
complex of terminals for public transportation and car parking intended to
solve the severe traffic congestion in the downtown area.42 This essential
‘service’ project was ironically replaced by the ‘cultural’ project of the
City Hall. A functionalist justification was used to legitimate the changed
development of the site. Building the City Hall was first explained by
Mayor al-Abbadi as a financial necessity to offset the high rents that the
Municipality used to pay annually for leasing its employees’ offices.43 Yet
the City Hall was built exclusively as a ceremonial building and mostly
devoted to galleries and the spacious quarters of the mayor’s offices.
Splitting ‘culture’ from ‘services’ and ‘monuments’ from ‘programmes’,
and favouring the former over the latter was further confirmed when it
took years to build the municipal employees’ and administrative offices.
Furthermore, these offices were built as a separate linear building, detached
from the City Hall in such a way that they came to act as its formal back-
drop [Figures  6, 7 and 8].44 Designed by the well-known Jordanian archi-
tectural team of Bilal Hammad and GDAR, the linear four-storey building
was placed fully extended at the northern side of the City Hall and thereby
blocks its view from the main street.45 Ironically, the concentric massive
building of the City Hall contradicted the fluidity of the Municipality’s own
master plan of the site which Mayor al-Abbadi had commissioned the same
team of architects to prepare two years earlier. The architectural team of
Bilal Hammad and GDAR invoked the local memory of the site by tracing
the north–south flow of the Amman stream, Ras al-Ain, that runs along
the narrow basin of the valley, creating a a fluid linear distribution of land-
scaped and architectural spaces.

Bilal Hammad.

Figure 6: Employees’ Building, Municipality of Greater Amman, Bilal Hammad and GDAR, 2000.

335
Yasir Sakr

Bilal Hammad.

Figure 7: Employees’ Building, Municipality of Greater Amman, Bilal Hammad and GDAR, 2000 (view from
the northern street).

The construction of the City Hall in Ras al-’Ain was initiated by covering
the very historic water stream that gave Amman its name and by appropriat-
ing the lands around it. Subsequently, tens of families who had lived there
for decades were dislocated.46 Their houses, shops and factories flanking the
stream had to be demolished to clear a plaza spacious enough for accom-
modating the ceremonial building programme of the City Hall and the other

Bilal Hammad.

Figure 8: Master plan of the Ras al-Ain site showing Amman City Hall and the municipal employees’ building.

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 Analyzing City Hall, Villa and Tunnel in Amman

Bilal Badran.

Figure 9: Rasem Badran, design conceptual sketches, Amman City Hall.

ancillary institutions.47 The question which then poses itself is: if the City
Hall does not represent the ‘local’ identity of Amman, whose identity does it
represent?
The City Hall represents an official national memory. This contrived
memory is historicist as opposed to the temporal nature of the local oral
memories. The architects overlaid the external surfaces of the cubical mass of
the City Hall with forms that were meant to represent identity, as projected
through a teleological narrative. For instance, the lower layer was shaped by
giant round columns representing classical antiquity, the presumed point of
origin of the narrative of Jordan as a nation. The segmented arches, which the
columns carry, represent a subsequent chapter of the ‘historicist’ narrative,
signifying the Islamic past as embodied in the Umayyad desert palaces in
Jordan [Figures 9 and 10].
Mayor al-Abbadi’s intention to elevate the City Hall as the ‘new’ national
monument was pointedly revealed when he was publicly and controversially
accused of deliberately withholding funds requested to maintain and refur-
bish the aging Martyrs’ Memorial in Amman.48 This memorial had been,
since its construction in 1977, the major official national monument of Jordan.
Sponsored by the late King Hussein and designed by the Jordanian American
architect Victor Bisharat, the Martyrs’ Memorial, a white marble-clad cubi-
cal yet opaque building crowned with a band of inscriptions invoking the

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Yasir Sakr

Yasir Sakr.

Figure 10: Amman City Hall, western façade, Jafar Tukan and Rasem Badran, 1997.

Holy Ka’aba in Mecca, is a military museum that showcases the history of

Jordan, commemorating the Jordanian soldiers who had fallen during battles
for the country since its foundation after the First World War until the present
[Figure 11].49
When al-Abbadi and his architects reduced the ‘Greater City of Amman’
to an irresistible ‘monument’ of desire or ‘cultural amalgamation’, they also
compelled its institutionalization as a model for reconstructing the whole
country. Dr A. Tbeishat, the then Minister of Rural Affairs and architect of the
National Amalgamation project, was unabashed in declaring his ‘uncritical’
adoption of the Municipality of Greater Amman as a model for the admin-
istrative restructuring of the whole country, a project that operated on a
functionalist basis, with the goal of improving the administrative efficiency
of Jordanian municipalities.50 Accordingly, to Minister Tbeishat the city was
a simple formula – clean wide streets, a children’s park, a library and lastly a
‘folkloric dance group’.51 Here the debt is clear. The folkloric festival stood for
‘culture’ in the GAM’s literalist model. Although Tbeishat did not mention the
villa, it was seemingly taken for granted with the other familiar motifs of the
same scheme. One can thus argue that without the mediation or aesthetiza-
tion of its cultural amalgamation, ‘Greater Amman’ probably could not have
been adopted as the reference for the national amalgamation project. It should
not be surprising that the issue of identity representation was never raised by
either the state or its opponents when debating the project of national amal-
gamation. The ‘form’ seems to have already been taken as the ‘soul’.

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 Analyzing City Hall, Villa and Tunnel in Amman

Yasir Sakr.

Figure 11: Martyrs’ Memorial, Victor Bisharat, Amman, 1977.

Monumentalizing ‘Services’: the ‘Tunnel’ as City Hall

The ultimate predicament that seems to have emerged from the institutionali-
zation of the villa, however, was that it triggered a seemingly ceaseless cycle of
fragmentation and dismemberment of Amman’s cityscape. This was brought
about by the unexpected ‘monumentalization of utility’. Though ‘service’ was
officially banished, its aforementioned splitting of from ‘culture’ in the new
disembodied municipal discourse, caused it to circulate freely such that they
became two in one, a signifier and a signified. Just like ‘culture’, a semantic
value that became the self-referential City Hall, ‘service’ too was sublimated
as a self-referential monument.
I argue that ‘cultural amalgamation’ engendered a new phenomenon
of monumentalization, in which tunnels became a new symbol of identity,
almost outdoing the City Hall as Amman’s new architectural sites of cele-
bration and identity formation; a phenomenon which began during Mayor
al-Abbadi’s term in the 1990s and which continues to the present. The monu-
mentalization of traffic networks and intersections is evidently a phenom-
enon not unique to Amman. Indeed, other Arab cities such as Cairo and
international cities such Los Angeles, Boston and New York represent prec-
edents, albeit on larger scales.52 Indeed, one would have expected, considering
Mayor al-Abbadi’s criticism of the obsession with ‘service’ and the particular
way that  the proliferation of the highway network ravaged the character of
Amman, that ‘services’ would be kept in check during his project of urban
remaking. The opposite took place as one particular example shows.

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Yasir Sakr

Yasir Sakr.

Figure 12: Third Circle traffic tunnel and memorial shaft (to the right), 2013, Amman.

During the construction of the City Hall at Ras al-Ain, the Third Circle, a
main roundabout in Jabal Amman, underwent a major restructuring by the
Municipality. Considering the short history of Amman, the Third Circle was
truly a major historical landmark for the city and a major intersection for one of
the main neighbourhoods of West Amman. It offered a pedestrian island and
a park for Amman residents marked at the centre by what was once the only
national memorial in Amman: a triangulated shaft on which was inscribed the
names of the three components constituting Jordanian national identity: God,
King and Homeland, inscribed respectively from top to bottom [Figure 12].
Later, during Mayor al-Abbadi’s mandate, the whole area was totally exca-
vated and rebuilt to install street tunnels at two levels. The lowest tunnel was
the primary one as it channels the traffic flow to and from the City Hall area.
The tunnel seems to have been designed as a corollary of the City Hall. Yet the
elaborate design the tunnel received was a far cry from the few crude ‘service’
tunnel/bridge intersections constructed during the terms of Mayor al-Abbadi’s
predecessors.53 The circular layout of the roundabout was restored in such a way
as to frame the linear edges of the tunnel walls cutting through at the middle
[Figure 13]. The tapered memorial that once stood there was pushed aside to
the periphery of the circle. The message is unmistakable, that the ‘tunnel’ is an
alternative cultural form. In other words: a monument. Like the City Hall, it is
a surrogate monument initially purported to represent the very local culture
that it censored, while ultimately presenting itself as an end in itself.
It is interesting to note that in the monthly list of major cultural events
in Amman, published by the Municipality, which include concerts, public

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 Analyzing City Hall, Villa and Tunnel in Amman

Yasir Sakr.

Figure 13: Third Circle roundabout and traffic tunnel, 2013, Amman.

lectures and art exhibitions, the inauguration ‘festival’ of a new tunnel (which
takes place almost every two months) is regularly listed among them.54 Indeed,
photos of those tunnels were featured prominently and more frequently than
any other urban symbol, in the various municipal publications as well as in
the formal media coverage of Amman during the occasion of its selection as
the Arab Capital of Culture 2002.55 The municipal appetite (if not addiction)
for constructing ‘monumental’ tunnels all over the city, and in West Amman
in particular, is unfazed by the criticism that has been voiced against many of
them: as rushed, unnecessary projects (considering the noticeable failure of
many to solve the very traffic problems for which they were constructed).56
One should thus pose the question as to what explains the municipal
proliferation of the ‘tunnel/bridge’ intersection as a new ‘symbol’ of Amman;
a phenomenon begun during Mayor al-Abbadi’s term and continuing to the
present even when there appears to be no functional justification for it. First,
the construction of a tunnel or bridge in Amman by the Municipality takes
nearly 60 days, which is a record construction time that is definitely much
shorter than that required for any major architectural monument such as
the City Hall. As such, the tunnel or bridge serves as an expedient means to
monumentality that would appeal to the unelected mayors whose office terms
may end at any moment.
But the most important attribute of the tunnel as a symbol is that it is
unmistakable – and more visible – than any other architectural monument
due to the frequency and intensity of everyday use by the whole society. It is
a proliferating and commonplace monument that spans regions rather than
being fixed in a single locality like the static monument. Its symbolism is

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Yasir Sakr

embodied and disseminated in its continuous functional mass performance.

In other words, it embodies culture and utility fused into one. Furthermore,
the tunnel is addictive: once you construct one to solve a problem of traf-
fic congestion, you have to subsequently construct more to solve the prob-
lem of congestion caused by these tunnels in adjacent areas. In other words,
unlike the City Hall and other conventional monumental symbols, ‘tunnels’
are monuments by popular request. All of which underscores their menacing
nature. Indeed, the proliferating tunnel and bridge intersections continue to
both expand and fragment Amman, physically and communally (turning its
neighbourhoods into fast-paced, drive-by areas), in such a way that deters the
formation of a stable collective mental image and identity for the city.57

Conclusions
This article delineated key shifts in the self-image of the Greater Amman
Municipality from one of a mere ‘service provider’ to a ‘shaper’ of ‘culture’
and ‘identity’ for the city as a whole and even for the larger country. Critical to
this shift was the move from utilitarian amalgamation to ‘cultural amalgama-
tion’, a term I proposed to describe the process whereby the Greater Amman
Municipality attempted to directly shape the imagination of Amman’s public
so as to legitimate its prior territorial expansion and administrative centraliza-
tion. The study underscored the increasing importance of symbolic representa-
tion as opposed to utilitarian performance in the amalgamation process, which
ended in appropriating the utility object as a cultural form. This was demon-
strated in adopting the monument as a legitimating tool for the amalgamation
process, first the city hall and subsequently the tunnel/bridge intersection. This
process testified to the influential role of presumably marginal actors, such as
architects, as municipal officials (and later the state) assimilated their formalist
‘villa discourse’ in interpreting itself and Greater Amman’s identity.
This study highlighted the unexpected drastic ramification of such disem-
bodied orientation which split ‘form’ from ‘content;’ propelling ‘form’ to circu-
late freely away from ‘content’ to ultimately subvert the very objective of the
cultural amalgamation of Amman. While the initial intent was to consolidate
a collective identity and culture for the people of Amman, the City Hall and
tunnel architecture more generally served instead to accelerate a process of
fragmentation. Thus, the disembodiment of form and content comes to repre-
sent as well the disembodiment of the city from its collectivity.

Acknowledgments
The essay is based on an unpublished study that I presented to a workshop on
‘Local governance in Jordan’, sponsored by Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches
sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain (CERMOC), Amman in October 2002. I
would like to thank my colleagues Fuad Malkawi, who chaired the workshop,
Mohammed al-Asad and Rami Daher for their positive comments throughout.
Also, I would like to thank my research assistant architect Sara Abdul-Majid
who helped collect the archival sources for the essay.

Suggested Citation
Sakr, Y. (2013). ‘Analyzing City Hall, Villa and Tunnel in Amman: The
Failures of Cultural Amalgamation at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’,
International Journal of Islamic Architecture 2:  2, pp. 325–348, doi: 10.1386/
ijia.2.2.325_1

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 Analyzing City Hall, Villa and Tunnel in Amman

Contributor Details
Professor Yasir Sakr (Ph.D.) did his architectural graduate studies at MIT
and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a teacher, practicing architect and
international consultant in architectural design, planning and development
management and has won several awards in major design competitions. One
of his recent professional roles was the management of the urban develop-
ment projects regenerating the central zone of the holy city of Mecca, which
included the grand expansion of the Holy Haram Mosque. A former visiting
scholar at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Prof. Sakr is currently teaching
Architectural design, theory, and history at Jordan University of Science and
Technology, Irbid. His forthcoming book, The Hurva Subversive Utopia: Louis
Kahn and the question of the Jewish National Memory of Jerusalem, is due to be
released by MSI press in 2013.
Contact: P.O.Box: 3030, Department of Architecture, Jordan University of
Science and Technology, Irbid 22110, Jordan.
E-mail: ysakr@alum.mit.edu

Yasir Sakr has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.

Endnotes

1. Another event that contributed to changing the demographic make-up

of Amman during the same period was the influx of tens of thousands of
refugees from the Gulf following the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990.
For a pioneering study of the ‘Functionalist’ amalgamation of the Greater
Amman Municipality (GAM), see Fuad K. Malkawi, Hidden Structures: An
Ethnographic Account of the Planning of Greater Amman, Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Pennsylvania, 1996; and ‘Amalgamation is a Solution in
Jordan’, The World Bank: Mediterranean Development Forum (MDF4), 2002,
accessed January 12, 2011, http://www.worldbank.org/mdf/mdf4/papers/
malkawi.pdf. Abdul Raouf al-Rawabdeh, ‘The Comprehensive Plan of
The Great City Amman and Its relation with Regional Development
June 23, 1987’, Journal of Islamic Capitals and Cities 10 (1988): 46–62.
See Mohammad al-Asad, ‘Ever-growing Amman’, Jordan Times,
June 16, 2004.

2. Jawad al-Anani, ‘Who are the Ammanites?’, al-Dustur (Jordanian Arabic

daily), October 28, 1992: 4. Unless otherwise noted, all references and
quotations from Jordanian sources were translated from the Arabic by the
Author.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Onn Winckler, Population Growth and Migration in Jordan, 1950-1994

(Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1997), 107.

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Yasir Sakr

6. Al-Anani, Ammanites.

7. The conference, which was sponsored by the Greater Municipality of

Amman under the patronage of the Crown Prince Hassan, was held on
June 27-29, 1995. The conference proceedings were published as: Hani
Hourani and Hamed Dabbas, eds., Amman: Tahadiyyat wa Tumuhat/
Amman: Realities and Expectations (Amman: Al-Urdun al-Jadid Research
Center, 1996). Simultanuously, another conference on Amman was
sponsored by the Center d’Etude et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient
Contemporain. Its proceedings were published as: Jean Hannoyer and
Seteney Shami, eds., Amman: The City and Its Society (Beirut: Cermoc,
1996).

8. The conference was attended by ministers, former mayors (such as Daif-

Allah Hemoud, Ahmed Fawzi, and Abdul Raouf al-Rawabdeh), opposi-
tion figures (such as the General Secretary of the Muslim Brotherhood
and Laith Shubeilat), leaders of professional syndicates, women activists,
economists, writers, architects, artists, etc.

9. Mu’nis Razzaz, ‘Amman in Jordanian Novels’, in Amman: Realities and

Expectations, eds. Hourani and Dabbas, 349–59.

10. Ibrahim Sa’afeen, ‘The Role of Culture in Determining the Identity of

Amman as a Modern City’, in Amman: Realities and Expectations, eds.
Hourani and Dabbas, 321–32.

11. Ibid., 332.

12. Ibid., 330.

13. Muna Shuqair, Amman: Realities and Expectations, eds. Hourani and
Dabbas, 336.

14. This section was entitled, ‘Amman in the Eyes of the Ammanites’, in
Amman: Realities and Expectations, eds. Hourani and Dabbas, 35–134.

15. Amman: Realities and Expectations, eds. Hourani and Dabbas, 229–69.

16. Waddah al-Abidi, ‘Public Buildings In Amman City’, in Amman: Realities

and Expectations, eds. Hourani and Dabbas, 229–47.

17. Ibid., 234.

18. Ibid., 241.

19. Ousama al-Sherif and Yasir Sakr, ‘Architects Lost Purpose of Their
Profession’, and ‘Jordanian Architecture Still Experimental’, The Star
(Jordanian English Weekly), August 19, 1982.

20. An early illustrated survey of the villa design trends of that period is Yasir
Sakr, Jamal Jayousi and Jan Cijka, ‘The Architectural Map of Amman’, a

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special supplement to al-Muhandis Journal (Amman: Syndicate of Jordanian

Engineers, 1982); Akram Abu Hamdan, ‘Jafar Tukan of Jordan’, Mimar 12:
Architecture in Development (Singapore: Concept Media Ltd: 1984) and
Yasir Sakr, ‘Rasim Badran’, The Dictionary of Art (London: Macmillan
Publishers, 1994).

21. James Steele, The Architecture of Rasem Badran: Narratives on People and
Place (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005).

22. Al-Abidi, ‘Public’, 242.

23. Ibid., 232.

24. Sa’ad George Hattar, interview with Mayor Mamdouh al-Abbadi, al-Rai,
July 13, 1994.

25. Ali Sa’adah, ‘Dr Mamdouh al-Abbadi: Political Portrait’, al-Dustur, March
12, 1993.

26. Tal’at Shana’ah, interview with Amman’s Mayor Mamdouh al-Abbadi,

al-Dustur, April 16, 1994.

27. Suhair Jaradat, interview with Amman’s Mayor Mamdouh al-

Abbadi, al-Rai, September 24, 1996, 15. Cultural amalgamation (al-Damj
al-Thaqafi’ in Arabic) is a term I propose in contrast to the functionally
oriented amalgamation (al-Damj al-Idari’ in Arabic), which in the context
of planning generally refers to administrative centralization and territorial
consolidation.

28. Report of a lecture by the Mayor of Amman, Dr Mamadouh al-Abbadi at

the Patriarchal Cultural Center, al-Dustur, April 22, 1994.

29. Ibid.

30. Interview with Mamdouh al-Abbadi, al-Arab al-Youm (Jordanian Daily),

September 22, 1998.

31. Report of a lecture by the Mayor of Amman, Dr. Mamadouh al-Abbadi

given at the Patriarchal Cultural Centre, al-Dustur, April 22, 1994.

32. Interview with Mamdouh al-Abbadi, al-Arab al-Youm (Jordanian Daily),

September 22, 1998.

33. West Amman, where most of the high-income families live in private
villas, has low population densities, varying 2,500–6,000 person per
square kilometre. In contrast, eastern Amman ‘has remained the habi-
tat of relatively poorer groups and as the reception areas for recent arriv-
als, particularly refugees, is characterized by low-income residences with
high population densities, which vary from 14,000 to 30,000’. See Meriam
Ababsa, ‘Social Disparities and Public Policies in Amman’, paper prepared
for the Second International Conference on Sustainable Architecture and

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Urban Development (Amman: CSAAR, MPWH, University of Dundee,

July 2010), 212.

34. Mohammed Salameh Awwad, interview with Mayor Mamdouh al-

Abbadi, ‘The Municipality of Greater Amman and Marketplace’, al-Dustur,
October 9, 1993. Key state figures like Crown Prince Hassan, shared the
mayor’s belief, al-Dustur, December 2, 1993.

35. Lecture by architect Jafar Tukan, at Diwan M’imar, Amman, 2000.

36. For an assessment of Boston City Hall, see Stephen Carr, Mark Francis,
Leanne G. Rivlin, and Andrew M. Stone, Public Space (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 87–89. For a critical analysis of public
monuments including Boston City Hall see Harvard Architectural Review
IV: Monumentality and the City, Volume 5 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press
Spring 1984), 75.

37. See Jafar Tukan, ‘Architectural Nature of the City of Amman’, Amman:
Realities and Expectations, 261–62, and Ihsan Fethi and Kamel Mahadin,
‘Villa Architecture in Amman: The Current Spectrum of Styles’, Amman:
The City and its Society, 171–82.

38. Zoning regulations and Jordanian building codes designate the entire
West and North Amman as zones for villa categories A and B (with no
provision for row or attached residences). There, residential plots are each
between 700–900 square metres; and minimum setbacks 4–5 metres from
the street, 4–5 metres from the sides, 6–7 metres from the back; and a land
coverage ratio of 39–45 per cent which will maximize the outdoor land-
scape area around the house. ‘In category A and B lands, residential taxes
are higher, and urban services such as street cleaning and water supply are
more regular than elsewhere’, Robert B. Potter, Khadija Darmame, Nasim
Barham, Stephen Nortcliff, ‘An Introduction to the Urban Geography
of Amman, Jordan’, Geographical Paper 182 (University of Reading,
Department of Geography, June 2007): 13.

39. For a relevant study of the significant role of monuments in construct-

ing modern national identities see Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 2006).

40. On Amman’s lack of municipal reforms see Mohammad al-Assad, Urban

Crossroads: ‘Amman Charter’, February 25, 2012 and ‘Local Governance’,
August 15, 2012, (Amman: CSBE), accessed September 5, 2012, http://
www.csbe.org/e-publications-resources/urban-crossroads.

41. Mohammed Salameh Awwad, interview with the mayor of Amman,

Dr Mamdouh al-Abbadi, ‘The Municipality of Greater Amman and
Marketplace’, al-Dustur, October 9, 1993.

42. Joint Technical Team, Greater Amman Comprehensive Development Plan:

Report 5, Final Report (Amman: Greater Amman Municipality, 1988).

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43. Interview with the Mayor Mamdouh al-Abbadi by Nidal Mansour, Shihan
(Jordanian weekly), October 7, 1993.

44. The Municipality’s employees’ building was designed by a team of

Jordanian architects, Bilal Hammad and GDAR office, 2000.

45. Two main floors had been added to the employees’ building in a recent
extension, which accentuated its vertical scale thus precipitating a clash of
proportions with the City Hall.

46. Amjad Ma’la, ‘The Aftermath of the Destruction of the Marketplace in Ras
al-’Ain’, al-Dustur, December 15, 1993 and December 27, 1993. Also Musa
Hawamdeh, ‘Five Hundred Families and the Looming Homelessness’,
al-Dustur, December 15, 1993.

47. Ibid.

48. Musa Hawamdeh, interview with Dr Mamdouh al-Abbadi, al-Arab

al-Youm (Jordanian Daily), September 22, 1998.

49. For a comprehensive account of the design of the Martyrs’ Memorial

see Raed al-Tal, ‘Structures of Authority: A Sociopolitical Account of
Architectural and Urban Programs in Amman, Jordan (1953–1999)’,
Ph.D. dissertation (State University of New York at Binghamton, 2006),
114–37.

50. Khalid Dalal, ‘Planning Ministry Allocates JD 2 million for Municipal

Development’, The Jordan Times, June 24, 2002. See also Khalid Dalal,
‘Opponents Reject Amman Municipal System as a Model for Other Cities’,
The Jordan Times, June 24, 2002.

51. Minister Abdur-Razaq Tbeishat expressed his views during a meeting

with a team of researchers, which included the author, at the Ministry of
Municipalities and Rural Affairs, June 2002.

52. See Jeffry M. Diefendorf, ‘Motor Vehicles and the Inner City’, in Urban
Planning in a Changing World: The Twentieth Century Experience, ed. Robert
Freestone (New York: Routledge, 2000), 175–93.

53. Musa Hawamdeh, ‘Interview with Dr Mamdouh al-Abbadi’, al-Arab

al-Youm (Jordanian Daily), September 22, 1998.

54. Municipal Monthly List of Amman’s Cultural Events (Amman: The

Municipality of Greater Amman, May 2002).

55. See The Cultural Program of the Municipality of Greater Amman: Amman,
The Arab Cultural Capital, 2002 (Amman: The Municipality of Greater
Amman, 2002); also see Injazat Amanat Amman al-Kubrah (Achievements
of the Municipality of Greater Amman during the reign of King Abdullah
Bin Hussein), (Amman: Municipality of Greater Amman, 1999).

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Yasir Sakr

56. Interview with the Mayor of Greater Amman Nidal al-Hadid, The Jordanian
News Agency (Petra), 2002. See Jumana Heresh, ‘Abdoun Bridge Projected
to Ease Traffic Congestion and Save Time’, The Jordan Times (Jordanian
English Daily), August 21, 2002. Also ‘Hadid Discusses Infrastructure
Challenges’, The Jordan Times, August 9, 2002 and ‘Sidesteps’, The Jordan
Times, January 14, 1999.

57. Further fracturing the public self-image of the city, the Municipality of
Amman uses the construction of the tunnel/bridge intersection, which
replaces the older roundabout, to rename the streets extending from it.
Reporting on subsequent complaints by the public about the arbitrariness
with which established local names were replaced by new names of figures
and events which are unfamiliar and confusing to Amman’s ‘citizens’ is
Oula al Farawati, ‘Citizens Persist in Using Unofficial Names for Amman
Streets’, The Jordan Times, September 23, 2001.

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