The Palestinian Arab House Reconsidered Part 2: Domestic Architecture in the 19th Century / הבית הערבי הארץ-ישראלי: עיון מחודש: חלק ב: התמורות בתרבות המגורים במאה התשע-עשרה

The nineteenth century was a period of great change in the Ottoman empire, and contemporary economic, social and cultural developments in many provinces were eventually also expressed in domestic architecture. New construction in Lebanon, Palestine and other eastern provinces seemed at first to adapt the traditional Muslim motif of the iwan unit to produce the 'iwan house', a freestanding, compact and simple house for the well-to-do. Another, less common, type—the riwaq house—refined the universal theme of the gallery house, a structure with a row of rooms connected by a gallery. The new bourgeois class that emerged in the second half of the century developed a new, modern 'central house type'. This was often a palazzo-like mansion with a piano nobile consisting of a central hall symmetrically flanked by rooms and typically ending on the facade in a triple arcade. These new houses utilized imported industrialized building materials such as glass and roof tiles, boasted European furniture and accommodated an increasingly Westernized lifestyle. Since the 1870s or 1880s, this house type dominated the townscape of Lebanese towns and villages, of such Palestinian towns as Acre, Nazareth, Haifa and Jaffa, and of Syrian coastal towns. Inland cities and towns, such as Jerusalem and Bethlehem, adopted central hall arrangements but used a local archi- tectural idiom independent, to a greater or lesser degree, of the coastal or Lebanese canon. Central hall arrangements became common in many of the diverse domestic traditions of the 19th-century Ottoman empire. They represent a process of modernization of ancient Oriental motifs, such as the Levantine iwan and the Anatolian hayat, as much as they suggest the inspiration of Western, Italianate villa design. As demonstrated by this two-part survey of traditional Palestinian domestic architecture, the term 'Palestinian house' denotes an array of house types that include—in addition to the well-known village house—the less studied 'pre-industrial' urban architecture and the new house types that emerged during the 19th century. Consideration of additional types not treated in this article, such as the palatial architecture of leading urban and rural families and strongmen, agricultural mansions and summerhouses (qusur) is also necessary for a balanced account of Palestinian domestic architecture. A full understanding of this heritage necessitates, in addition to characterization of its unique Palestinian aspects, acknowled