Deep in the forest of oak and pine that cloak the hills of Northern Jordan, down a side road off a side road you’ll find a long, low building of pale limestone. It represents the future for a new generation of environmental conservationists, and also embodies the design esthetic of a boundary-breaking Jordanian architect.

Designed by architect Ammar Khammash, in the Ajloun Forest Reserve, the building expresses Khammash's esthetic that emphasizes being part of the environment rather than standing out from it.

“Architecture is a sin,” says Ammar Khammash, 57. “I don’t want to be visible, and I don’t want my buildings to be visible.” Standing in the building he designed, this unconventional man—artist, designer, engineer, geologist, musician and polymath—faces a view of dark-green treetops awash in spring sunshine. The forest is silent but for birdsong and cicadas. He names two world-famous “starchitects."“I want to be the exact opposite of them,” he explains thoughtfully. “Architecture is not that important. Buildings should not become monuments or luxury statements. They can be impressive without being expensive.”

We are meeting at the Royal Academy for Nature Conservation, built by Khammash for Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (rscn) and officially opened in 2015. The academy stands at the entrance to an rscn-run nature reserve established in 1987 to protect forested land beside Ajloun, a town 70 kilometers north of the Jordanian capital, Amman.

Though Khammash’s small architectural practice can claim prestigious private and government clients, he is best known for a string of rscn commissions ranging from Dana, a remote mountain village, to the heart of Amman. His stripped-back designs, using locally sourced materials, referencing vernacular traditions and exemplifying acute environmental sensitivity, are on show in visitor reception centers, rangers’ offices and rural guest houses all around Jordan, enhancing places that many tourists visit—and that many Jordanians cherish.





Extending 30 meters across the abandoned quarry, the arch supporting the entrance path to the Royal Academy for Nature Conservation is the second-longest in Jordan.

rscn

Chris Johnson, a British ecologist who worked with Khammash for 20 years, speaks of the architect’s “uniquely Jordanian” style. “Ammar has an amazing ability to create new buildings that are respectful of their surroundings and Jordan’s cultural heritage,” says Johnson, whodirected conservation for thein the 1990s, and from 2005 to 2013 led its sustainable-tourism unit “Wild Jordan.”

Growth in outreach has been mirrored by growth in skills development. Since 1997 the rscn has trained around 250 specialists a year, from Jordan and across the Middle East, in management of protected areas, conservation research, ecotourism and socio-economic development. Around 2005 the idea emerged to formalize training in a single, dedicated building. “We had been pioneering capacity-building in conservation throughout the region. With success came demand,” says Johnson, who initiated and managed the project to build the new academy.

For rscn Director General Yehya Khaled, the academy pointed to a breakthrough in public education on the environment. “We wanted the academy to be a model, representing rscn values [in] conservation and community development,” he says.

A site was identified inside the Ajloun Forest Reserve but, as Khammash explains, “I kept passing a quarry just outside the reserve boundary, and I said, ‘Why should we cut another wound in nature when we already have this cut? Let’s fix this and celebrate it as a human intervention.’

“Whoever was driving the last bulldozer in the last week this quarry was operating—back in the early ’90s—never knew that he was designing the front elevation of my building for me,” Khammash continues, with typical self-effacement. “He left a cliff, and I followed it. This building is designed by chance.”



Top: "The building hovers over the forest and barely touches it," noted the jury for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, which shortlisted the building in 2016. Using rubble that would have normally discarded, Khammash instead repurposed the stones for the constuction of the building.

Khammash had the quarry pit cleared, but instead of bringing in stone for construction, he used the rubble, which would normally have been discarded. The result is external walls of unusually small limestone rocks neatly fitted together. The impression is of a building at one with its setting, as if it has been lifted whole from the quarry and placed on the ridgetop.

To reach it from the road, Khammash designed what was (until he built a longer one last year) the longest masonry arch in Jordan, an elegant bridge extending 30 meters over the now-empty quarry. “This bridge has almost no foundation,” he says. “Its lateral thrust is like when you take a cane and bend it across a corridor: It can’t go anywhere, so the more load it takes the more it pushes into the quarry sides.”

The bridge delivers you to the building’s public entrance, a slot in one flank that opens to … almost nothing. The lobby, like its architect, impresses by stealth. You could cross this low transitional room in four paces, but a glass wall in the opposite flank keeps the forest in view. The ambience is of spacious calm. Free of adornment, displaying a deliberately rough finish of raw concrete, it is artful.

Khammash calls it simply a “void” where the building’s two functions meet. To the right a restaurant generates income to help pay for the training courses that are run in the rooms to the left.

The restaurant area draws you out through airy interiors to shaded rear balconies woven about with foliage and forest views. But the heart of this building’s beauty shows when you turn left.

Double-loaded corridors—ones that have doors opening

on both sides—tend to be dark. Here, though, sunlight moves across the rubble-stone walls: Khammash has opened a glass roof above the corridor and created an end-wall of windows facing west. In summer cool winds flow through as natural ventilation.



The architect explains how he drew inspiration for this sinuously angled passageway from Jordan’s famous ancient city of Petra, where you enter through a towering cleft between mountains lit from above by shafts of sunlight. “The light pulls you in the right direction,” he says. “And the bending is important. If you expose the whole length of the corridor, it’s too much. Also, the bend mirrors the profile line of the quarry outside.”

Underfoot, Khammash has used ceramic floor tiles that are familiar from Jordanian apartments—but with a twist. “I specified the cheapest tile in Jordan,” he says, “but here we spread them wider and filled the gaps between each one. You end up with this interesting pattern, like a carpet with pulled threads.”

This lack of pretension, eschewing the temptations of Italian marble, Scandinavian wood or even plaster for the walls, can cause confusion: Visitors seeing rough, concrete walls and gappy floor tiles ask when the building will be finished—and then tut when they hear it is.