Amman- 1 November 2022
Graduates of the School of Architecture and the Built Environment (SABE) at the German Jordanian University (GJU), Arch. Nayrouz Ali and Arch. Kareem Msallam won first and second place in the iSUSTAIN AWARD organized by the A/E Business Council.
Eighty six projects participated in the contest in its tenth session representing universities from Jordan, Palestine, and Syria. Six projects were shortlisted, including three of the share of SABE's graduates.
Arch. Nayrouz won first place for her graduation project (the missing layer), while Arch. Kareem Msallam won second place for his graduation project to restore the Armenian neighborhood under the supervision of the industrial professor at SABE, Arch. Tha’er Qub’a.
Arch. Nayrouz indicated that her project is a memorial museum garden for the abandoned village of Saffuriyya in Palestine, as the occupation deliberately covered the crimes of ethnic cleansing by planting pine forests and building a park for the antiquities on the site.
She added that the idea is to transfer the trees to the vicinity of the project, which was formed from a circular ring working as a memorial garden displaying all the antiquities that passed through the village. The underground museum represents the missing part of the novel; the Palestinian part up to the memorial in the middle of the ring where the original village was. Columns were planted in the place of each house in the village, on which the name of the Palestinian family that lived there before 1948 was written.
In turn, Arch. Kareem stated that his project, Al-Bulbul algareeb, is to revitalize the Armenian neighborhood in Mount Ashrafieh by bringing back the artisans to live in the neighborhood and create a social/economic network between the different groups in Ashrafieh by training school students in these crafts for which the Armenians are famous, such as photography and sewing at the architectural level. on the urban level, it suggests forming five abandoned and deserted spaces that are linked together to create an integrated neighborhood with its new and existing elements, starting from the Armenian Church and ending with the Abu Darwish Mosque.
Arch. Qub’a expressed his happiness for the students’ winning for the second year in a row through projects that address sustainability issues with a deeper understanding than just adding a green layer, to discuss economic, social, and human sustainability issues, praising their excellence and their presence in local, regional and global competitions.
