King Faisal Square in 1958. From Getty Images: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/3378711/Hulton-Archive
Does the Amman Municipality and do Ammanis want that Amman’s downtown is turned into a a cheap-looking touristic area? Because that’s EXACTLY what is happening at an alarming speed.

I had breakfast at Hashem, the famous Hummous and Fuul restaurant yesterday and then went for a quick walk [...]

The Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Jabal Luweibdeh will host the exhibition “Open City: Refuge Urbanism” which is part of the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2009-10 (IABR), opening today Sunday 18 July 2010, at 6 pm.

Refuge Urbanism (Part of the Diwan Collaborative Research Network, directed by Philipp Misselwitz & [...]

When the self proclaimed “Sheikh of Amman” comes walking through the door at the SYNTAX offices, its not an ordinary day, especially when he comes unannounced.

It’s now over 21 years that I’ve met Ali Maher for the first time, on my first day of being an Architecture student at the University in Jordan, sometime around [...]

Photo: Dina Haddadin

House 28 on the corner of Rainbow Street is in a state of flux.

The old landlady and her old, bed-ridden husband have passed away. It seems like yesterday she was showing Ahmad Sabbagh and me through the apartment under the main house. That apartment became what I called the “SYNTAX house”. A succession [...]

I really love my fellow Ammani bloggers and tweeps. I really think that they are one of the best things that happened to us in the last ten years. I love that many of them have give a voice to Amman’s urban issues and urban activism. But sometimes they have me shaking my head with [...]

Zaha Hadid was officially announced as the final winner of the long standing competition to design the King Abdullah II House for Art and culture in Amman. Mayor Omar Maani made the announcement in a special ceremony held a couple of days ago where he hosted Hadid and a group of dignitaries, cultural officials and [...]

This might sound like the the first line of a joke waiting for a punch line. But this Lebanese man is not the star of a funny joke but the writer Hazem Amin, who one evening found himself as “Amman’s only pedestrian, stumbling over its sidewalks“. That’s the title of his article in Al-Ghad today [...]