Architecture and the City: Ramallah's Changing Identities
Open Access
- Author:
- Yaser, Dima Jaser
- Graduate Program:
- Architecture
- Degree:
- Master of Architecture
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- May 11, 2009
- Committee Members:
- Ute Poershke, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Ute Poerschke, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- Colonialism/Post-Colonialism
Architecture
Urban Artifacts
Collective Memory
locus solus
Identity - Abstract:
- Architecture goes beyond its visible image to the city’s construction and symbolic meanings representing the development of the city over time. Architecture is continuously remodeled so that it accommodates the transformations and alterations that a city and its society undergo. This study investigates how architecture defines the identity of the city by adapting Aldo Rossi’s framework of deconstructing the city into urban artifacts. It defines the identity of a city as formed by the accumulation of the expressions and history of the city and its society, including its architecture and structure. Many cities have undergone drastic changes on their structures and have thus acquired complex and highly differentiated identities. The architecture of the city shares the memories, and communicates the past and present to its users. The question of identity regenerates the controversy of what architecture is and how it narrates the identity of the city and its inhabitants. This study attempts at investigating how architecture defines the identity of a city through the exemplary case of the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Ramallah city exemplifies changing architectural and urban identities across Ottoman, British, Israeli and now Palestinian eras of control and the consequences of these transformations on the whole being of the city are assessed. Two major artifacts of the city - Al-Manara Square and the Palestinian Headquarters - are investigated in order to trace and (re)define the multiple identities that Ramallah has acquired through its existence.